Antler, Joyce

OUR SYNOPSIS: Joyce Antler locates Jewish women at the center of radical feminism from the late 1960s to through the 1980s but emphasizes that many did not discuss their Jewish identities in this work. Partly as a result of this, their roles are not emphasized in prior histories. By addressing this, she builds “a deeper understanding of the complexities of feminist activism” rooted in “the interactive and dynamic influences of Jewishness and Judaism on women’s liberationists.” (2, 6) She brings together individual and collective struggle, placing personal narratives in conversation with historical movements. For each person featured, she highlights how that specific person conceived of their own identities by foregrounding their own words and experiences. While focusing on Chicago, Boston, and New York, she makes clear that these stories also apply and resonate across the United States and internationally. For feminists who joined Jewish-identified collectives she shows that they made great progress in bringing greater gender equality to explicitly Jewish institutions, contributions made possible by their overt Jewish identification. She also stresses how each identity strand was an avenue to greater understanding of a person’s other identities. For example, “Just as feminism had become a portal into religious Judaism for previously unidentified Jewish feminists, lesbianism became another channel into a deepening Jewishness for women alienated from their Jewish identities and interested in exploring woman-woman relationships.” (278)