Jewish Radical Feminism: Voices from the Women's Liberation Movement

Joyce Antler's Jewish Radical Feminism successfully presents the theoretical and historical complexities of the experience of Jewish radical feminist pioneers that shaped women's liberation. The book's insights come alive through Antler's innovative approach to historical narratives—deepened by side-by-side biographical portraits of over forty social activists, based on extensive interviews and apparently painstaking archival research. “Writing history in sets of multiple biographies” (rather than representative “types”), replete with “thick descriptions”—influences, motivations, turning points, struggles, lives in motion—lends credence to Antler's assumption that no single prototype exists outside its commonalities with others. Thus, as articulated in her conclusion, such distinguishing categories as outsider-insider, behavioral style, and “values” (which she deems amorphous) are shaped when imbued with an underlying belief in social justice, subject to the influence of history. The concept of “collectives” is the second organizational principle of the book, its chapters focused on women's liberation collectives such as the West Side Group in Chicago, Bread and Roses and the Boston Women's Health Center in Boston, and Ezrat Nashim in New York an Di Vilde Chayes (the wild beasts), a lesbian Jewish feminist collective. The collective approach highlights two groups—women's liberationists, who largely ignored or repressed their Jewishness, and Jewish feminists, who explicitly identified as Jews and challenged Jewish patriarchy. Antler insists that to understand the nature of radical Jewish feminism, the two groups must be analyzed together.