My Life as a Radical Jewish Woman

My Life as a Radical Jewish Woman PDF Author: Puah Rakovsky
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253215641
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 221

Get Book Here

Book Description
Autobiography of Puah Rakovsky, who broke from traditional upbringng to become a professional educator, Zionist activist, and feminist leader in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century Poland.

My Life as a Radical Jewish Woman

My Life as a Radical Jewish Woman PDF Author: Puah Rakovsky
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253215641
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 221

Get Book Here

Book Description
Autobiography of Puah Rakovsky, who broke from traditional upbringng to become a professional educator, Zionist activist, and feminist leader in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century Poland.

Jewish Radical Feminism

Jewish Radical Feminism PDF Author: Joyce Antler
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479802549
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 462

Get Book Here

Book Description
Finalist, 2019 PROSE Award in Biography, given by the Association of American Publishers Fifty years after the start of the women’s liberation movement, a book that at last illuminates the profound impact Jewishness and second-wave feminism had on each other Jewish women were undeniably instrumental in shaping the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. Yet historians and participants themselves have overlooked their contributions as Jews. This has left many vital questions unasked and unanswered—until now. Delving into archival sources and conducting extensive interviews with these fierce pioneers, Joyce Antler has at last broken the silence about the confluence of feminism and Jewish identity. Antler’s exhilarating new book features dozens of compelling biographical narratives that reveal the struggles and achievements of Jewish radical feminists in Chicago, New York and Boston, as well as those who participated in the later, self-consciously identified Jewish feminist movement that fought gender inequities in Jewish religious and secular life. Disproportionately represented in the movement, Jewish women’s liberationists helped to provide theories and models for radical action that were used throughout the United States and abroad. Their articles and books became classics of the movement and led to new initiatives in academia, politics, and grassroots organizing. Other Jewish-identified feminists brought the women’s movement to the Jewish mainstream and Jewish feminism to the Left. For many of these women, feminism in fact served as a “portal” into Judaism. Recovering this deeply hidden history, Jewish Radical Feminism places Jewish women’s activism at the center of feminist and Jewish narratives. The stories of over forty women’s liberationists and identified Jewish feminists—from Shulamith Firestone and Susan Brownmiller to Rabbis Laura Geller and Rebecca Alpert—illustrate how women’s liberation and Jewish feminism unfolded over the course of the lives of an extraordinary cohort of women, profoundly influencing the social, political, and religious revolutions of our era.

Meir Kahane

Meir Kahane PDF Author: Shaul Magid
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 069121266X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 296

Get Book Here

Book Description
The life and politics of an American Jewish activist who preached radical and violent means to Jewish survival Meir Kahane came of age amid the radical politics of the counterculture, becoming a militant voice of protest against Jewish liberalism. Kahane founded the Jewish Defense League in 1968, declaring that Jews must protect themselves by any means necessary. He immigrated to Israel in 1971, where he founded KACH, an ultranationalist and racist political party. He would die by assassination in 1990. Shaul Magid provides an in-depth look at this controversial figure, showing how the postwar American experience shaped his life and political thought. Magid sheds new light on Kahane’s radical political views, his critique of liberalism, and his use of the “grammar of race” as a tool to promote Jewish pride. He discusses Kahane’s theory of violence as a mechanism to assure Jewish safety, and traces how his Zionism evolved from a fervent support of Israel to a belief that the Zionist project had failed. Magid examines how tradition and classical Jewish texts profoundly influenced Kahane’s thought later in life, and argues that Kahane’s enduring legacy lies not in his Israeli career but in the challenge he posed to the liberalism and assimilatory project of the postwar American Jewish establishment. This incisive book shows how Kahane was a quintessentially American figure, one who adopted the radicalism of the militant Left as a tenet of Jewish survival.

Becoming Eve

Becoming Eve PDF Author: Abby Stein
Publisher: Seal Press
ISBN: 1580059171
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 208

Get Book Here

Book Description
The powerful coming-of-age story of an ultra-Orthodox child who was born to become a rabbinic leader and instead became a woman Abby Stein was raised in a Hasidic Jewish community in Brooklyn, isolated in a culture that lives according to the laws and practices of eighteenth-century Eastern Europe, speaking only Yiddish and Hebrew and shunning modern life. Stein was born as the first son in a dynastic rabbinical family, poised to become a leader of the next generation of Hasidic Jews. But Abby felt certain at a young age that she was a girl. She suppressed her desire for a new body while looking for answers wherever she could find them, from forbidden religious texts to smuggled secular examinations of faith. Finally, she orchestrated a personal exodus from ultra-Orthodox manhood to mainstream femininity-a radical choice that forced her to leave her home, her family, her way of life. Powerful in the truths it reveals about biology, culture, faith, and identity, Becoming Eve poses the enduring question: How far will you go to become the person you were meant to be?

A Woman of Uncertain Character

A Woman of Uncertain Character PDF Author: Clancy Sigal
Publisher: Da Capo Press
ISBN: 9780786719952
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 308

Get Book Here

Book Description
A poignant and raucous memoir of a mother — feminist, fighter against injustice, and unbridled lover — and her madcap son.

Letters to an American Jewish Friend

Letters to an American Jewish Friend PDF Author: Hillel Halkin
Publisher:
ISBN: 9789652296306
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 246

Get Book Here

Book Description
This passionate polemic addresses itself to the ultimate questions of Jewish destiny and proclaims the primacy of Israel as the locus of the Jewish future. Hillel Halkin is an American-born Jew who has cast his personal and historical lot with Israel. Corresponding with an imaginary “American Jewish friend” who upholds the possibility of a viable Jewish life outside Israel, Halkin forcefully argues his case: Jewish history and Israeli history are two lines in the process of converging; and any Jew who chooses, in the absence of extenuating circumstances, not to live in Israel is removing himself to the peripheries of the struggle for Jewish survival and away from the center of Jewish destiny.

Memoirs of an Ex–Prom Queen

Memoirs of an Ex–Prom Queen PDF Author: Alix Kates Shulman
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1453238344
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 205

Get Book Here

Book Description
Now with a new preface: The “furious, fiercely funny, provocative” novel about female rebellion written decades before the #MeToo movement (Dani Shapiro, author of Inheritance). Sasha Davis, smart and pretty, was once an all-American teenage beauty queen. Full of potential, she was the only student at her Midwestern high school to attend college on the East Coast. But soon her promise begins to falter. After starting graduate school in New York, Sasha gets married and drops out to take a clerical job. Consigned to the role of trophy wife, and already feeling old at twenty-four, she lives in fear of turning thirty—the year, in her mind, when her beauty will fade and life as she knows it will end. Only after a lot of sexual adventures—as well as a second marriage and motherhood—will she finally begin to figure out what’s gone wrong . . . Poignant and breathtakingly honest, Memoirs of an Ex–Prom Queen remains a feminist landmark—a unique blend of “fun” (Jezebel) and “devastating” (The Boston Globe). “This story, told with astringent wit, explores every facet and cliché of what it means to grow up female and beautiful.” —San Francisco Chronicle “A vivid reminder of just how much―and sometimes, how little―has changed for women . . . Typing prowess and wedding-night virginity may no longer be expected, but Shulman’s tale of Sasha Davis’s struggle to find herself amid conflicting cultural messages about beauty, brains, and sex will be resonant for many more years to come.” ―Andi Zeisler, author of We Were Feminists Once “An extraordinary novel.” ―Newsweek

Immigrant Girl, Radical Woman

Immigrant Girl, Radical Woman PDF Author: Matilda Rabinowitz
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501712128
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 406

Get Book Here

Book Description
Matilda Rabinowitz’s illustrated memoir challenges assumptions about the lives of early twentieth-century women. In Immigrant Girl, Radical Woman, Rabinowitz describes the ways in which she and her contemporaries rejected the intellectual and social restrictions imposed on women as they sought political and economic equality in the first half of the twentieth century. Rabinowitz devoted her labor and commitment to the notion that women should feel entitled to independence, equal rights, equal pay, and sexual and personal autonomy. Rabinowitz (1887–1963) immigrated to the United States from Ukraine at the age of thirteen. Radicalized by her experience in sweatshops, she became an organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World from 1912 to 1917 before choosing single motherhood in 1918. "Big Bill" Haywood once wrote, "a book could be written about Matilda," but her memoir was intended as a private story for her grandchildren, Robbin Légère Henderson among them. Henderson’s black-and white-scratchboard drawings illustrate Rabinowitz’s life in the Pale of Settlement, the journey to America, political awakening and work as an organizer for the IWW, a turbulent romance, and her struggle to support herself and her child.

Women Remaking American Judaism

Women Remaking American Judaism PDF Author: Riv-Ellen Prell
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
ISBN: 0814335683
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 345

Get Book Here

Book Description
The rise of Jewish feminism, a branch of both second-wave feminism and the American counterculture, in the late 1960s had an extraordinary impact on the leadership, practice, and beliefs of American Jews. Women Remaking American Judaism is the first book to fully examine the changes in American Judaism as women fought to practice their religion fully and to ensure that its rituals, texts, and liturgies reflected their lives. In addition to identifying the changes that took place, this volume aims to understand the process of change in ritual, theology, and clergy across the denominations. The essays in Women Remaking American Judaism offer a paradoxical understanding of Jewish feminism as both radical, in the transformational sense, and accomodationist, in the sense that it was thoroughly compatible with liberal Judaism. Essays in the first section, Reenvisioning Judaism, investigate the feminist challenges to traditional understanding of Jewish law, texts, and theology. In Redefining Judaism, the second section, contributors recognize that the changes in American Judaism were ultimately put into place by each denomination, their law committees, seminaries, rabbinic courts, rabbis, and synagogues, and examine the distinct evolution of women’s issues in the Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, and Reconstructionist movements. Finally, in the third section, Re-Framing Judaism, essays address feminist innovations that, in some cases, took place outside of the synagogue. An introduction by Riv-Ellen Prell situates the essays in both American and modern Jewish history and offers an analysis of why Jewish feminism was revolutionary. Women Remaking American Judaism raises provocative questions about the changes to Judaism following the feminist movement, at every turn asking what change means in Judaism and other American religions and how the fight for equality between men and women parallels and differs from other changes in Judaism. Women Remaking American Judaism will be of interest to both scholars of Jewish history and women’s studies.

A Jewish Feminine Mystique?

A Jewish Feminine Mystique? PDF Author: Hasia Diner
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 0813550300
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 282

Get Book Here

Book Description
In The Feminine Mystique, Jewish-raised Betty Friedan struck out against a postwar American culture that pressured women to play the role of subservient housewives. However, Friedan never acknowledged that many American women refused to retreat from public life during these years. Now, A Jewish Feminine Mystique? examines how Jewish women sought opportunities and created images that defied the stereotypes and prescriptive ideology of the "feminine mystique." As workers with or without pay, social justice activists, community builders, entertainers, and businesswomen, most Jewish women championed responsibilities outside their homes. Jewishness played a role in shaping their choices, shattering Friedan's assumptions about how middle-class women lived in the postwar years. Focusing on ordinary Jewish women as well as prominent figures such as Judy Holliday, Jennie Grossinger, and Herman Wouk's fictional Marjorie Morningstar, leading scholars explore the wide canvas upon which American Jewish women made their mark after the Second World War.