Gloria Steinem died this week at 92, leaving behind a feminist legacy that reaches into places she might not immediately be associated with, including the Orthodox Jewish community.
I did not learn feminism only from Gloria Steinem. I learned it from the dedicated Orthodox Jewish women who demanded a place in the beit midrash, from women who refused to remain silent when religious institutions failed them, and from generations of Orthodox feminists who insisted that commitment to halakha and commitment to women’s equality did not have to be opposing forces. I learned it from, among others, Blu Greenberg, Norma Joseph and my own mother, Lea Lazar, z”l, whose lives and leadership showed me what it means to pursue change with courage, conviction and love for the Jewish community.
Steinem’s legacy also has an intriguing Jewish thread. She was not Jewish according to Jewish law, which determines Jewish status through the mother, but she had Jewish ancestry through her father and identified with that heritage. Her paternal grandmother, Pauline Perlmutter Steinem, was the daughter of a cantor, kept a kosher home and became a prominent suffragist. There is a striking symmetry here: generations later, Orthodox Jewish feminists would ask how tradition and equality could coexist without surrendering either. Steinem’s feminism was not born in the beit midrash, but some of the questions she taught women to ask inevitably found their way there.
