Why Is There A Prolific Jewish Presence In The American Feminist Movement?

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Why Is There A Prolific Jewish Presence In The American Feminist Movement?

October 31st, 2015

Awake Goy

In the 1970’s, a movement known as “Jewish feminism” started in the American Jewish community. It was a movement that originally sought to make Jewish woman ~~superior to~~ equal to Jewish men. One of the first major issues tackled by these feminists was the power to ~~optimize hypergamy~~ initiate divorces.

Perhaps these Jewish ladies were becoming jealous of the growing “liberation” of non-Jewish women in United States. Perhaps Jewish women, for cultural reasons, are more naturally attracted to the ideologies of feminism. Jewish writer Marjorie Ingall describes how Jewish women are receptive to feminism by quoting Jewish feminist Naomi Wolf:

We have a political history going back to the socialist and labor movements, where women were organizers and rabble-rousers.

Or perhaps many Jewish women truly were being unfairly oppressed in certain areas of life and wanted to take action.

Third-Wave feminist Naomi Wolf

A quick Wikipedia search for “list of Jewish feminists” brings up an admittedly incomplete list of 114 names. Most of the women listed were born in the 20th century. The Jewish Women’s Archive website is a comprehensive website dedicated to key Jewish feminists, containing 1,193 profiles.

If one simply searches for “list of feminists” on Wikipedia, the page you’re directed to contains 770 names dating all the way back to the 13th century. The most comprehensive database when searching google for “list of feminists” seems to be Wikipedia.

Let’s be as fair as possible here and assume that the Wikipedia list of 770 feminists contains no Jewish feminists. So let’s add the 114 Jewish feminists to this list to get a total of 884 Wikipedia worthy feminists. We then take 114 divided by 884 and multiply by 100. The percentage of Wikipedia reported feminists of Jewish descent comes to 12.9%.

However, this quick calculation doesn’t take into account the Jewish Women’s Archive of 1,193 noteworthy feminists of Jewish descent and assumes that none of the feminists on the Wikipedia list of 770 are Jewish (when in fact many are). Also, the list of 770 feminists dates back several hundred years, whereas the list of 114 Wikipedia Jewish feminists is mostly 20th century and beyond.

Jews make up 1.7-2.6% of the American population. As such, to have adequate proportional representation in the feminist movement, there would only have to be two or three Jews at most for every 100 American feminist leaders. This doesn’t seem to be the case though, at least according to a simple internet search.

On a related note, we also need to keep in mind that disproportionate Jewish representation is also present in the US Congress – 8.4%, the Supreme Court – 33% or 3/9 Justices, the Federal Reserve Board of Governors – confirmed 40% or 2/5 current members (Janet Yellen and Stanley Fischer are Jewish and are also the Chair and Vice-Chair of Federal Reserve Board of Governors), and higher level academia.

Ginsburg, Kagan, and Breyer are the three Jewish Supreme Court Justices

The “Jewish feminism” that started within the Jewish community seems to have become part of the bigger feminist movement taking place in America. Thus, the very small demographic of Jewish women in this country (roughly 1% of the population) seems to have a ridiculously large representation within the overall feminist movement.

Let’s explore only a few of these very influential feminists of Jewish descent:

Prominent Feminists of Jewish Descent:

The Key Players, Radicals, And Movement Leaders:

Judy Blume: Born 1938. Blume is an American writer with a target audience of children and young adults, with book sales over 80 million. She has written novels about racism, menstruation, divorce (It’s Not the End of the World, Just As Long As We’re Together), bullying, and masturbation.

Judith Butler: Born 1956. Butler is a “gender theorist” and a philosopher. She teaches at the University of California, Berkeley. Butler has written a book called Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity that was published in 1990. This book is considered the cream of the crop by many feminists when it comes to “queer theory” and “postmodern poststructural feminism” (whatever that means).

Andrea Dworkin: 1946-2005. Many of you guys have probably heard of Dworkin. She was a radical feminist. Dworkin, among other things, was vehemently anti-porn because she said it has links to rape. This is somewhat ironic, considering there is heavy Jewish influence in the pornography industry.

Radical feminist Andrea Dworkin

Shulamith Firestone: 1945-2012. Firestone was apparently schizophrenic (according to a commemorative piece in The New Yorker published after her death) and was also a key player in the formation of radical feminist ideals. She was the author of The Dialectic of Sex: The Case For Feminist Revolution which was published in 1970. This book has essentially been labeled as the boldest and clearest book ever written on radical feminism. Or, according to Naomi Wolf (another Jewish Feminist):

No one can understand how feminism has evolved without reading this radical, inflammatory second-wave landmark.

I certainly hope Naomi Wolf didn’t know that Firestone was schizophrenic…

Betty Friedan: 1921-2006. Friedan is a very big name in feminist circles. She was a leading figure of the women’s movement. She was a writer, an actor, and an ardent feminist. Friedan wrote The Feminine Mystique, published in 1963, a book which many argue helped to spark second-wave American feminism. By the year 2000, the book had sold over 3 million copies.

Brenda Howard: 1946-2005. Howard was an important figure in setting the tone for the present day LGBT rights movement, especially when it came to organizing SJW rallies. She was a sex-positive feminist and a bisexual rights activist.

Manosphere readers will appreciate a quip made on July 27th, 2005 by Tom Limoncelli (a bi-sexual rights advocate):

The next time someone asks you why LGBT Pride marches exist or why Gay Pride Month is June tell them ‘A bisexual woman named Brenda Howard thought it should be.’

If Limoncelli wasn’t clear enough as to just how much influence this woman had, how about this statement made by Brenda Howard’s partner Larry Nelson and published on June 17th, 2014 in a piece called Remembering Brenda: An Ode To the ‘Mother of Pride’:

You needed some kind of help organizing some type of protest or something in social justice? All you had to do was call her and she’ll just say when and where.

Erica Jong: Born 1942. Jong was a teacher and an author. She has been divorced three times but is now married again (this seems to be a common theme among these women). She wrote a sexually controversial book published in 1973 called Fear of Flying that played a big role in second-wave feminism. The book has sold over 20 million copies worldwide.

Gloria Steinem: Born 1934. Steinem’s mother was apparently not Jewish, but even so her name pops up on the Jewish Women’s Archive website if you search for it. Steinem was the leader and spokesperson for the late 60’s-early-70’s feminist movement. Interestingly, Steinem admitted having ties to the Central Intelligence Agency on camera (yea, the CIA of all people), but she supposedly broke her CIA ties before she became a feminist leader. You’ll have to travel further down the “rabbit hole” if you want more answers on this one.