Who Is A Radical Feminist?

The radical feminists were giggling at the images of their younger selves on screen: holding signs that demanded equality and pay, the youthful leaders projected at the front of the auditorium exuded power and hope.

Decades later, these same women were onstage and in the audience, celebrating the release of Joyce Antler’s book, Jewish Radical Feminism: Voices From the Women’s Liberation Movement. The book itself, referred to by Antler as “an excavation” of Jewish women’s history, reads as much as a vital encyclopedia as it does a narrative history. It tells the stories of the dozens of Jewish women whose “participation in [the women’s liberation] movement has been hidden for several decades.”    

In the front row, the Jewish women who ushered the women’s liberation movement into the future—Blu Greenberg, Judith Plaskow, Letty Cottin Pogrebin and others—sat in the audience and made comments on their past glories. From behind them, the feeling of friendship was palpable: these women, in the business of pursuing freedom for decades, and found solace and camaraderie with each other. They asked about grandchildren and reminisced about the protest lines.