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(RNS) — When people chanted “globalize the intifada,” I used to think they meant the violent kind, exported. I’ve revised that theory.<\/p>\n
What’s actually globalized is a whole ecosystem of genteel intifadas.<\/p>\n
There’s the bookstore intifada, where managers will place the latest anti-Israel books on the front table — which I’ve seen over and over in different cities. There’s the entertainment intifada, where A-list performers slip “Free Palestine” into award speeches<\/a>. There’s the therapeutic intifada<\/a>, where clinicians reportedly now screen out Zionist patients before they screen for insurance. <\/p>\n Last month gave us a new entry: the caffeine intifada, when a Brooklyn chain called Poetica<\/a> Coffee served U.S. Rep.<\/span> Dan Goldman his coffee, let his 7-year-old use the bathroom, and then, once he’d left, posted online that they’d refunded his $9.82 because his money “probably” came from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee<\/span>. <\/p>\n It turns out that every corner of progressive culture has a price of admission, and Jews are finding it progressively more difficult to pick up that tab.<\/p>\n Add feminism to the list. That’s the case Kara Jesella makes in her new book, “Feminist Antisemitism: An Intellectual History<\/a>,” which I discussed with her on my podcast.<\/p>\n Jesella majored in women’s studies at Vassar College, where her real education in Jewish feminism came from her college rabbi, she told me. She spent years as a journalist before going back to school for a Ph.D. in performance studies at New York University. She finished that doctorate in 2021 — the same day that she watched former classmates post infographics calling Jews colonizers. And Oct. 7, 2023, she says, is when she stopped being patient about any of it.<\/p>\n In her book, Jesella takes us back to the 1970 Women’s Strike for Equality, when Frances Beal — aligned with radical Black feminism — clashed publicly with Betty Friedan’s NOW-style feminism. Black feminists weren’t wrong to point out what that framework left out: the housekeepers, the nannies and all the women whose labor made other women’s liberation possible.<\/p>\n But somewhere in that necessary critique, “white feminism” quietly became “Jewish feminism,” with Friedan as its avatar. By the early 1980s, high-profile feminists like Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich were sorting Jewish women into the “white” column and out of the center. Activist and journalist Letty Cottin Pogrebin pushed back in Ms. magazine in 1982. So did scholar Evelyn Torton Beck’s anthology “Nice Jewish Girls: A Lesbian Anthology<\/a>.”<\/p>\n Then, the 1982 Lebanon War hit, feminist conferences got busy criticizing Israel and Jewish feminists found themselves increasingly uncomfortable. <\/p>\n The figure Jesella keeps circling back to is feminist scholar Judith Butler. Her 1990 book “Gender Trouble” argued gender wasn’t a fact but a performance. The framework was contagious. By the early 2000s, Butler, who is Jewish, applied the same move to Jewish identity, arguing that since not all Jews are Zionists, antizionism can’t really be antisemitism.<\/p>\n Jesella and I also talked about the 1975 World Conference on Women in Mexico City and its “Zionism is racism” resolution; about the World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa, in 2001, with its antisemitic and anti-Israel themes; and about how those conferences planted seeds that are now blooming in national politics. We talked about the #MeToo (unless you’re a Jew) problem, and how a movement built on believing women suddenly developed a stutter when the women were Israeli and the date was Oct. 7, 2023.<\/p>\n Jesella expects push back, but she wants people to read her entire book before they deliver it. Her proposal isn’t subtle: Teach young Jews the actual intellectual history of contemporary feminism, so that “Zionism is racism” starts sounding like what it is — a slogan with footnotes, most of them laughable. <\/p>\n I don’t know that feminism is a word Jewish women still fully own, but I know it’s worth fighting to keep. Kara Jesella shows how that can actually happen.<\/p>\n
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