Engendering Judaism
Deborah, Golda, and Me.
by Letty Cottin Pogrebin.
Crown. 377 pp. $22.00.
Jewish women, observes Letty Cottin Pogrebin in her new book, Deborah, Golda, and Me, “often are asked to choose between two movements that represent both aspects of my double identity—Judaism and feminism. Pressured to declare a priority, I feel like a child who is given the impossible task of selecting a preferred parent, or like a prisoner allowed food and water but not both.” This book, then, part autobiography and part tract, is an account of Mrs. Pogrebin’s struggle to bring the two sides of her identity together. As its title suggests, she claims at last to have come to a rich synthesis, wholly Jewish and wholly feminist, and has moved to a higher doubleness, the biblical Deborah being the model for her spiritual ambitions and Israel’s Golda Meir, for her political.
Letty Cottin, as she then was, grew up in a religiously observant home in Queens, a bright and ambitious girl, classically striving for the attention and approval of a father who was both a learned Jew and a passionate Zionist. She was educated until the age of fifteen in a Jewish day school. That she should nevertheless be capable of referring to Judaism as a “movement” is a reminder of how deep and abiding an influence on its adherents is the founding dictum of the women’s movement that “the personal is political.”
Young Letty turned away from the faith at the age of fifteen, when her mother died and she was brutally made to understand that, not being male, she was not qualified to serve in the minyan saying kaddish .(Though it left her desolated, she speculates now that her mother’s death may have been a kind of blessing in disguise, because had her mother lived, she, Letty, would probably have gone to college in the neighborhood, married right after graduation, and settled into her mother’s kind of stifling and stifled life. Thus has a prominent feminist made apparently unwitting comment on her own independence of mind and will.)
When a number of years later both her resentment and her ambition were offered expression in what was in fact a movement, women’s liberation, Mrs. Pogrebin was not unmindful of the irony that it was the footsteps of her selfish and indifferent, but ardently activist, father, rather than those of her solicitous and loving mother, in which she was following. In any event, she not only joined that movement but became one of its leading lights—among other things a founding editor of Ms .magazine, and a highly visible advocate of “gender-free” child-rearing. (She herself is the mother of twin girls and a boy, all now grown to adulthood.)
Mrs. Pogrebin’s subsequent “return” to Judaism—the event that confronted her with the draconian choice cited above—was rather more a case of the political becoming the personal. In 1975 and 1980 there were two UN-sponsored international conferences celebrating the Decade of the Woman, the first in Mexico City and the second in Copenhagen. Over the course of those five years, Mrs. Pogrebin was dragged into recognizing that some sisterhoods were more powerful than others: when third-world women shouted imprecations against Jews at those conferences, it was impossible to mobilize any real protest among Western, including American, feminist activists. For the women’s movement had turned out to belong not so much to the history of feminism as to the history of radical leftism, and radical leftism had long since become not only anti-American but in large part unabashedly anti-Semitic.
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For Mrs. Pogrebin the discovery of leftist anti-Semitism was a kind of transforming trauma. Was this alone responsible for the ardor with which she set about attempting to find some new ground on which to stake her claim of connection to the Jewish community? On the basis of what she reveals in this book, it is hard to say, but the fact is that she instantly found herself among a company of other Jewish leftists, male as well as female, trying to do the same thing. For example, in the beach community at Fire Island where she and her family had been summering for years, a makeshift, barefoot, High Holiday service slapped together among a handful of friends—Mrs. Pogrebin herself being the only one present capable of chanting a few remembered prayers—grew within a short time into a full-blown congregation.
But what was even more significant for Mrs. Pogrebin was the emergence of a Jewish subcommunity made up exclusively of women. Of course the complaints of feminists against the alleged male chauvinism of Judaism were nothing new, but a female-centered Judaism, a sort of mirror image of the complained-against tradition, was an entirely novel confection.
This enclave by now embraces some women who, like Mrs. Pogrebin, have a grounding in Jewish tradition, even a genuine scholar or two, some rabbis, and a much larger cohort who, like her Fire Island neighbors, are pleased to make up the tradition as they go along.
As with so many attempts to tamper seriously with Jewish ritual, this one seems to have begun with the Passover Haggadah. Since 1976, there has been an annual third seder, attended faithfully by Mrs. Pogrebin and twenty to thirty other women, based on a Haggadah written by Esther Broner, an American, and Naomi Nimrod, who runs a parallel seder in Israel. The women sit on the floor with a cloth spread out before them. The Four Questions are directed to women instead of children; the Four Sons become Four Daughters; and Elijah’s cup is set aside for the prophetess Miriam.
This, however, was only the beginning. In addition to a special seder for women, there came into being special celebrations of the new moon, women’s peace rituals, a special blessing to be said after undergoing an abortion, and much more along the same lines.
Although she herself tends to approach such new ceremonies “tentatively, convinced that I’m not the touchy-feely, crunchy-granola type,” Mrs. Pogrebin admits that inevitably she gets seduced “by the sweetness of sisterhood.” If, however, the sweetness gets her, cuteness, she says, does not. She does not approve of innovations like pink prayer shawls, lace skull caps, or beribboned phylacteries. Actually, prayer shawls, skull caps, and phylacteries of any kind are still too “gendered” for her, too much associated with her father and other men. And while professing to be happy that there are Orthodox women engaged in assigning new feminist meanings to their monthly post-menstrual ritual baths, she finds the mikvah unacceptable for herself.
Still, if she cannot quite get into the swing of every single innovation, her general inclination is to smile on all group expressions of the “new spirituality.” She tells approvingly of two feminist Jewish congregations in Los Angeles, and names three feminist “retreats” where those who gather “discuss spirituality and social activism in the context of class, race, sexuality, ethics, and ethnicity.” And in Philadelphia, she is glad to report, there is “a new progressive yeshiva that appeals especially to nontraditional students,” i.e., “women, lesbians, and gay men.”
Then there are the scholars: female historians engaged in placing women at the center of a reconstructed Jewish past, female Bible students who, while accepting the authority of the Bible, “redefine authority as partnership,” and female theologians who are “creating new midrashim.” All of these women are in one way or another acting, says Mrs. Pogrebin, on the prescription of Paula Hyman, professor of Jewish history at Yale: “The study of the woman question in Judaism is as important as the study of the Jewish question in general history.”
Mrs. Pogrebin is especially enthusiastic about Judith Plaskow, who argues that beyond revolutionizing history, Jewish feminist scholars are “claiming to amplify Torah, and thus questioning the finality of the Torah we have.” For instance, Professor Plaskow, recognizing that the image of God as a Father is bound to evoke feelings about one’s own earthly father, believes that women must find “God-language” that uses gentle, non-gendered words like “lover,” “friend,” “companion,” and “co-creator,” this last rooted in an understanding that “God and humanity are partners in sustaining creation.”
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If the “Deborah” side of Mrs. Pogrebin’s Jewish ambitions involves amending God’s purposes in the sex department, the “Golda” side more modestly involves only bringing peace to Israel through the spread of feminist values and “justice” to the Palestinians.
The mind boggles at this appropriation by a radical feminist of the figure of Golda Meir. To begin with, the real Golda never actually understood the American Left to which Mrs. Pogrebin belongs, particularly its hostility to the security needs—indeed, in many cases the very existence—of her country. And even less did she understand women’s liberation. There is an account in this book of a meeting between Golda and a group from the United States that included such luminaries as Mary Anne Krupsak, then Lieutenant Governor of the state of New York, and Bella Abzug. Of this meeting it cannot even be said that she and they were ships that passed in the dark—they were simply not sailing the same waters.
Indeed, the real Golda Meir is undoubtedly tossing in her grave over the use of her name to symbolize a commitment based on what Mrs. Pogrebin calls “the ‘P’ words”—Peace and Palestinians. For the real Golda, in contrast to Mrs. Pogrebin, was quite firmly of the opinion that the obstacle to peace was not Israel but its Arab neighbors. And as for the Palestinians, the real Golda did not even believe that they were a separate people.
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All the stuff celebrated in Mrs. Pogrebin’s book, from abortion blessings to forming human chains with Palestinians, could in a better world be greeted with the laughter it so richly deserves. Alas, this is not such a world, especially not for the state of Israel. All too many Israelis, particularly educated ones, have come to be fatally attracted to things American that their society can ill afford. I am referring not to expensive consumer goods, which cost only money, but rather to political fads and fashions that undermine a country’s capacity to defend itself.
Such fashions seem to persist in Western democratic societies despite the repeated negative verdicts of elections, and they ensure their own longevity by infiltrating the public vocabulary. Prominent among them is the requirement that one regard one’s own government as the enemy. This has at moments come dangerously close to doing serious damage even to so rich and protected and powerful a country as the United States. But for Israel, mindless oppositionism can literally be lethal. So can the unconsidered and unmodulated pressures for peacemaking that inevitably come bound up with women’s liberation. (Mrs. Pogrebin’s idea of how to make peace can be gauged by the fact that, but for a family priority, she would have been in Stockholm for the famous meeting between Yasir Arafat and a group of so-called “Jewish leaders.”)
Nor is this the only danger that feminist ministrations pose for Israel. No doubt Israeli women have their special problems. No doubt the political grip of the Orthodox parties casts a certain shadow on the freedoms of nonreligious women—though less than is sometimes luridly supposed, as the beaches of Tel Aviv on a Sabbath afternoon amply testify. No doubt there are wife-beaters and abusers and dead-beats among the husbands of Israel. But whatever it is that Israeli women lack, the very last thing on earth they need is a movement bent on unmanning, or to use Mrs. Pogrebin’s favored euphemism, “ungendering,” their men.
One might almost imagine that the anti-Semitic women who drove Mrs. Pogrebin and her like-minded sisters back to the Jewish “movement”—and especially to an active preoccupation with Israel—knew exactly what they were doing.
