One day last spring, I got a call from a woman I didn’t know, asking if I objected—as she did—to a work of mine being included in The New Jewish Canon: Ideas and Debates 1980-2015 along with works by men identified as notable abusers by the #MeToo movement.
Moment columnist since 1991, Letty Cottin Pogrebin, is a powerful voice for feminism in the Jewish world and beyond. Pogrebin, in conversation with Moment opinion and books editor, Amy Schwartz, discusses the state of feminism today and her dismay at how the miniseries Mrs. America portrayed her friend Gloria Steinem and represented the world of second wave feminism.
She was the go-to lawyer for whistleblower and sexual discrimination claims long before #MeToo got its name.
“It galls me when Mrs. America keeps underscoring the friction among feminists rather than grappling with the complexity of our challenges.”
In Never a Native, Alice Shalvi, a founding mother of Israeli feminism, has written a book that is both inspiring and painful.
Rebecca Traister is angry. She is angry, and every day strangers criticize her rage, or tell her she sounds like a fool, or that attractive women should not get angry.
In the year since the Harvey Weinstein case hit the headlines and the #MeToo movement exploded in every direction, I’ve felt increasingly distressed by the number of prominent Jewish men among the accused. Aside from the obvious names—from Senator Al Franken to conductor James Levine, from actors and journalists to Judge Alex Kozinski—one that particularly troubles me is scholar-macher Steven M. Cohen, the sociologist whose in-depth surveys have helped American Jews understand ourselves better, and who happens to be my long-term acquaintance.
Forty-six years after the first American woman rabbi was ordained, Judaism is transformed.
