Dedicated to Our Mothers: Jewish Feminist Literature of the Second Wave

My project explores the creation and importance of Jewish feminist literature during the second-wave feminist movement. Such literature is diverse in form, content, author, and audience, and hails from a long-standing Jewish literary tradition. Thus, examining the feminist reclamation of Jewish literature is an important channel through which to understand feminist Judaism. This project analyzes three Jewish feminist periodicals, published between the 1970s-1980s, to seek a wholistic understanding of what these writers believed feminist Judaism should be. Additionally, I examine two sources from Jewish feminist academic collections, both of which aimed to promote a justice-oriented Judaism and solidify women’s equality in a religion built by and for men. The close relationship between Jewish feminist academia and magazines reveals that Jewish feminism is certainly grounded in the written word.