THREE GROUNDBREAKING JEWISH FEMINISTS

A comparative study of three activist Jewish women.

Leder, an associate professor emerita of English, women’s studies, and Jewish studies at Nassau Community College, offers a biography of three different but similar Jewish feminists. Two of them were European-born Holocaust survivors: the late historian Gerda Lerner and surrealist artist Susana Wald. The third, Ruth Messinger, the former head of American Jewish World Service, was American-born and shaped by the postwar civil rights movement and 1960s activism. In surveys of each of these women’s careers, the author explores the dialectic between these women’s Jewish identities and their wide-ranging activism. Messinger may be the most familiar figure to contemporary American readers, and Wald the least; Lerner was a pioneering American women’s historian who only belatedly wrote about Jewish women, and she didn’t talk very much about her own Jewish identity. Leder injects a bit too much of herself into the narrative at some points, which can be distracting, but with each woman’s story, she presents some interesting problems and sometimes-troubling conclusions. She does a good job of identifying the trauma of Lerner’s and Wald’s lived experience as a factor in their initial downplaying of their Jewish identities. However, she does little to challenge the premise that the universalism that each figure promotes frequently allows for the particularity of every group except Jews, or the idea that Jewish particularity is necessarily in tension with universalism. The book also incorrectly notes that the age of maturity for girls in Judaism is 14, rather than 12 or 13, depending on one’s denomination. Despite these flaws, though, Leder delivers an engaging study of three women whose names and careers should be more widely known.

A valuable, if uneven, work that illustrates the tension between Jewish particularism and universalism.