ROSH HASHANAH 5787 SECTION D, PAGE 20
Gloria Steinem, the feminist who turbocharged the women’s rights movement and cast the liberation of women as part of the broader project of eliminating other bigotries, died at 92.
Steinem was born in Toledo, Ohio, in 1934 to a Jewish father, Leo Steinem, and a Protestant mother, Ruth Nuneviller.
“Never in my life have I identified myself as a Christian, but wherever there is anti-Semitism, I identify as a Jew,” her friend and fellow co-founder of the magazine, Ms., Letty Cottin Pogrebin, quoted Steinem as saying.
Steinem’s fathe left the family when Steinem was 10 years old and Steinem — whose older sister was away at college — became primarily responsible for caring for her mentally fragile mother.
“Steinem remembered that when she was eight or so, her mother encouraged her to listen to a radio dramatization of Jewish torment under the Nazis and the story of a mother who could not get enough food for her little girl,” Cottin Pogrebin wrote.
In 1981, speaking at Cornell University, she said:
“We know, when we look at women and blacks in this country, or at women and Jews in Nazi Germany, or in South Africa, we understand that these two caste systems are interdependent and truly can only be fought together.”
Her advocacy helped poison her relationship with an early ally, Betty Friedan, the Jewish feminist who launched feminism with her 1963 book, The Feminine Mystique.
Friedan believed the movement should remain focused on women’s liberation and dismissed Steinem as a grandstander.
“The media tried to make her a celebrity,” Friedan said of Steinem in 1972, “but no one would mistake her for a leader.”
In 1975, Steinem’s signed a letter decrying the UN General Assembly resolution equating Zionism with racism.
“We are appalled at the ‘racist’ label applied solely to the national self-determination movement of the Jewish people,” said the letter – spearheaded, as it happened, by Steinem’s erstwhile rival Friedan.
“We decry this implicit denial of Israeli statehood and this incitement to world wide anti-Semitism.”
It was signed by 60 women, including Bella Abzug, the New York congresswoman; Joan Ganz Cooney, the co-creator of “Sesame Street”; Nora Ephron, the essayist and filmmaker; and Beverly Sills, the opera diva.
Steinem later joined in advocacy to release Ida Nudel, the Soviet Jewish refusenik.
In 2019, she swore not to visit Israel while Benjamin Netanyahu was prime minister after he came under pressure from President Donald Trump and banned entry to two Muslim congresswomen, Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar.
“I had a Jewish suffragist grandmother, Pauline Perlmutter Steinem, who died when I was about five,” Steinem wrote for the Jewish Women’s Archive.
“She had addressed Congress, but nobody told me about that” or that “she was also the first woman to be elected to a Board of Education in the state of Ohio, as a suffragist on the same ticket with the socialists and the anarchists.”
Steinem did not marry until she was 66, when she wed David Bale, a South African activist who died three years later of cancer.
Steinem was a lightning rod for the right wing, in part because she would not eschew glamour.
Steinem began her career as a journalist. She brought an unstinting seriousness to her career as an advocate, which began in 1969 after she attended, on assignment, a gathering of women who described their illegal abortions.
She was a political columnist for New York Magazine. Her next essay was, “After Black Power, Women’s Liberation.” She never looked back.
Steinem weathered controversies, including her defense of Bill Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky scandal. “If the president had behaved with comparable insensitivity toward environmentalists, and at the same time remained their most crucial champion and bulwark against an anti-environmental Congress, would they be expected to desert him?” she wrote in The New York Times. “I don’t think so.” More recently, she indicated she regretted the essay.
Steinem lived long enough to see many of the successes she helped bring reversed — including the 2022 overturning of Roe v. Wade, the 1972 Supreme Court decision identifying the right to an abortion.
Her credo, Steinem said in a joint 2015 New York Times interview with an old friend and Jewish feminist Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the late Supreme Court justice, was kindness.
“Kindness matters enormously. And empathy. Finding some point of connection,” Steinem said then.
She also advised never standing down. “The great thing about obstacles is that they cause you to identify with other groups of people who are facing obstacles.”
