Views
essay
The Women’s March
It fi
nally might be ready to take Jewish women seriously.
F
or the first time in a while,
I am cautiously hopeful
that the Women’
s March
may be turning a corner.
I am not talking about the
dramatic changing of the guard,
though it is
certainly a big
deal that three
of the march’
s
four prominent
co-chairs — Bob
Bland, Tamika
Mallory and Linda
Sarsour — have
stepped down after the organi-
zation’
s leadership was plagued
with controversy, including
praising notorious anti-Semites
like Louis Farrakhan and alle-
gations they pushed a Jewish
woman out of leadership
because of her religion.
For me, the bigger news is
that one of the 17 new board
members has already been
removed for rhetoric that
many found to be anti-Semitic
,
including demonizing the Anti-
Defamation League, chastising
Muslims who are willing to join
interfaith efforts and calling
Israel a “racist” state that
“engages in terrorism.
”
Just days after Zahra Billoo
was announced as part of the
new board, the Women’
s March
took the outpouring of concern
from Jewish organizations seri-
ously and actually did some-
thing. The organization that in
February 2018 took a staggering
nine days just to say Louis
Farrakhan did not “align” with
its values managed to actually
fire someone over anti-Semitism
concerns.
This is a marked difference,
indeed, from where the organi-
zation began.
In 2017, shortly after the first
Women’
s March rocked not only
Washington, D.C., but the entire
world as a unifying feminist
storm, I found myself reluctantly
questioning whether I was wel-
comed in this supposedly inclu-
sive wave of feminist activism as
a Jewish woman and a Zionist.
I very much would have pre-
ferred to pull the pink pussy hat
over my eyes and ignore the fact
that there was a singular hostility
toward Israel in the movement
and then a growing tolerance
for anti-Semitism. It felt whiny,
if not traitorous, to question
and raise concerns when I was a
proud feminist who agreed with
so many of the overarching goals
and objectives of the movement.
I should take the good with the
bad, I thought.
But I couldn’
t. It felt dishonest
and hypocritical, especially in
a movement that proclaimed
to value intersectionality and
encouraging people — especially
women — to speak their truth
and be the ones to name and call
out discrimination and hate.
I was prompted to write
“Does feminism have room for
Zionists?” after the International
Women’
s Strike — distinct from
the Women’
s March — present-
ed a platform that singled out
Israel as the only country other
than the U.S. for condemnation,
demanded the “decolonization
of Palestine” and proudly touted
Rasmea Odeh as an organizer.
Odeh had been convicted for her
involvement in a bombing that
killed two Hebrew University
students.
The response I received from
the most prominent and loudest
voices of the modern feminist
and progressive movements was
a resounding no — both implic-
itly in their hyper-hostility to
anything that could be mistaken
as acknowledging the legitimacy
of Jewish statehood and explicit-
ly from Sarsour.
Anti-Zionism seemed like rel-
atively small potatoes against my
new looming question: “Does
feminism have too much room
for anti-Semitism?”
It wasn’
t just that Sarsour had
said that “nothing is creepier
than Zionism,
” but that she had
unabashedly and unapolo-
getically minimized its harm,
saying, “I want to make the
distinction that while anti-Sem-
itism is something that impacts
Jewish Americans, it’
s differ-
ent from anti-black racism or
Islamophobia because it’
s not
systemic.
”
But a year can make a dif-
ference. With fresh blood and
a willingness to listen and take
action, there is finally some hope
that Jewish women’
s concerns
will be heard and taken seriously.
This doesn’
t mean that there
isn’
t more room for improve-
ment. For one, it was disappoint-
Emily Shire
JTA
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