Kesher Talk

Hey, guys - mommies can work too! Eve Tushnet rediscovers Betty-Friedan-era feminism. (Must .... not .... be .... condescending .....) On the one hand, I love the way Eve gathers up a bunch of viewpoints on an issue and analyzes it into the ground. I do. I'm a very analytical person - I enjoy watching her mind work. On the other hand, must women reinvent the wheel every generation? Can't we figure something out and have it stay figured out, without everybody misinterpreting it, stereotyping it, rebelling against it, burying it, and then painfully digging it up again?

The new era of leftist anti-semitism is the same way. Read Letty Cotten Pogrebin or Melanie Kaye-Kantrowitz on anti-semitism in the women's movement of the 70s and 80s, for example. (You will learn more about international women's NGOs than you ever wanted to know.) I recently bought a used paperback that was published in 1973, an anthology of 60s political writing called Jewish Radicalism. Every single issue being thrashed out today on college campuses and in the antiwar movement is in this book: the demonization of Israel, Jews told to feel ashamed of their Jewishness while other groups are urged to own their ethnic identities, Blacks and Jews pitted against each other . . . .

What's really sobering is when you read the feminism of the 1920s: they figured out everything we did, and then - it all got submerged somehow until the 60s.

My new maxim of political life: nothing stays figured out. That's how we'll know when moshiach comes - everything we've figured out will stay figured out.

posted by Judith @ 1/29/2003 11:44:34 PM