May Her Memory Be A Glorious Blessing

By Rabbi Lauren Ben-Shoshan

Before I left for college, each of my grandmothers gave me a seminal work of Second Wave feminist thought. Years later, as I neared the end of college, those books—and the women who had placed them in my hands—inspired me to write my senior honors thesis on the impact of Second Wave feminism upon Reform Judaism. That work became part of the path that led me to rabbinical school and, ultimately, to the rabbinate.

The First Wave of American feminism, which stretched from the 19th century into the early decades of the 20th, fought most visibly for women’s suffrage and political equality. It gave us leaders such as Hannah Greenebaum Solomon (1858–1942), who founded the National Council of Jewish Women and mobilized thousands of Jewish women in the work of civic reform and education, and Clara Lemlich (1886–1982), whose fiery leadership helped ignite the 1909 uprising of garment workers in New York. These women did not take the first steps toward women’s equality—women had been struggling toward freedom for generations—but they secured transformative legal and political gains upon which later generations could build.

Second Wave feminism carried that work more deeply into the educational, professional, economic, familial, and intimate realms of women’s lives. It helped shape the world into which I entered as a young woman. Because of the work of Second Wave feminists, doors once closed to women opened wider. Women gained stronger protections against discrimination in education, employment, and credit. We asserted a legally recognized—if still fiercely contested—claim to bodily autonomy. Within Reform Judaism, the movement helped communities reconsider inherited assumptions about who could study Torah, exercise religious authority, and serve as clergy.

Second Wave feminism did not single-handedly make my education or rabbinate possible. But its advocates challenged many of the barriers that might once have kept someone like me from imagining either. We may now speak of third- and fourth-wave feminism, but we continue to inhabit a world built upon the courage, sacrifice, organizing, and insight of the Second Wave.

That is why the death of Gloria Steinem this past week affected me so deeply—and why her loss is being felt by so many, including throughout the Jewish community.

Steinem’s story, too, was a story of inheritance. As an adult, she discovered that her activism had roots in a family history she had never fully been taught. Her paternal grandmother, Pauline Perlmutter Steinem, had been a Jewish suffragist, an advocate for vocational education, and the first woman elected to Toledo’s Board of Education. Gloria later recalled that she had been told that Pauline kept a kosher home and raised four sons—but not that she had addressed Congress or campaigned alongside socialists and anarchists.

What an extraordinary illustration of the ways women’s stories are lost. Gloria knew that her grandmother had cared for a household; she had not been told that her grandmother had worked to change the world.

For Steinem, this discovery revealed that her life’s work was not hers alone. She was continuing a path another woman in her family had already begun. I find that especially moving. My grandmothers deliberately placed the work of feminist foremothers into my hands. Steinem had to discover that inheritance for herself. In both cases, however, one generation’s courage made another generation’s work possible.

Steinem’s connection to Jewish life found particularly meaningful expression at the Passover table. For more than twenty years, she joined a circle of Jewish feminist “Seder sisters” who reclaimed the women of the Exodus and connected their ancient courage to the continuing struggle for equality. Together they sang of Miriam the prophet, asked new questions, named the “Ten Plagues of Women,” and created modern midrash. Their premise was simple, yet revolutionary: women matter—in our sacred stories, in Jewish life, and in the still-unfolding work of liberation.

Gloria Steinem’s life embodied that conviction. She asked questions that could not be unasked. She named injustices that could no longer be dismissed as ordinary or private. And although she became an icon, she reminded others that movements are not made by icons alone. They are built in circles, through listening and organizing, by ordinary people who discover that they are neither alone nor powerless.

Her life also reminds us that progress is neither inevitable nor irreversible. Steinem lived long enough to witness victories for which she had struggled—and to see some of them endangered or undone. Still, she continued working for equality until the end of her life. She understood that the pursuit of justice does not belong to one leader or one generation. It is an inheritance passed from hand to hand: from Pauline to Gloria, from my grandmothers to me, from Gloria to millions of women and allies—and now, from all of them to us.

May Gloria Steinem’s memory be for a blessing. May her courage live in every person who refuses to accept inequality as inevitable. May her questions continue to unsettle us, her vision continue to enlarge us, and her life remind us that freedom is not simply something we inherit. It is also something we must preserve, expand, and pass forward.