Stars of David (41 page)

Gloria Steinem

GLORIA STEINEM PHOTOGRAPHED IN 1971 BY JILL KREMENTZ

I'VE KNOWN GLORIA STEINEM most of my life. My mother, Letty Cottin Pogrebin, and she were among the five women who created
Ms.
magazine in 1972, and their desks were next to each other in the
Ms.
offices in midtown Manhattan. My childhood memories of Gloria are of a willowy woman in bell bottoms and big glasses who always had her hair hanging like thick curtains on either side of her face. She always greeted me warmly and tap-danced at our Hanukkah parties (my mother asked guests to bring some form of entertainment and Gloria resuscitated a childhood talent). But I never felt as if I knew her. She was always just the World's Most Famous Feminist—the face of the Women's Movement—and I was proud to have some link to her.

I never knew she was half-Jewish on her father's side. (Steinem's mother was an unenthusiastic Episcopalian.) Even when she started coming to the annual feminist seders, of which my mother was one of the founders and which my sister and I attended every year starting when we were ten, I didn't really connect that she had any link to my heritage. Those seders were kind of radical because they reinvented the ritual in order to honor and include the women who were left out of the Passover story and were traditionally tethered to the kitchen during the seder. In this feminist adaptation, men were not invited, and each participant brought something for the supper and a pillow to sit on around a tablecloth on the floor. Women passed a bowl of water and a towel to wash each other's hands, and there was an orange on the seder plate to challenge some rabbi's comment years ago that “A woman belongs on the bimah [the synagogue podium] like an orange belongs on the seder plate.”

I remember being aware of how special this evening felt, the eloquence of the women present. When Gloria attended, it was only validation of the importance of the event: In a room full of accomplished women, she was the celebrity—along with Bella Abzug in her signature brimmed hat—and it made an impression on me that Gloria thought Judaism was worth four hours sitting cross-legged on the floor.

“The whole idea of remaking religious ceremonies to include women I found very magnetic.” Steinem has just made us tea in delicate china and settled herself in a green velvet armchair in her New York City living room with a garden out back. She has damp hair from a shower and is wearing a black shirt, black pants, and white Nike socks. “Religion in general did make me feel excluded. But it was only through the seder that I came to realize that the ceremony in and of itself was less hierarchical than Christian ceremonies; everybody read and participated. I came to appreciate the democracy of it, the cyclical nature of it, the lack of emphasis on an afterlife. The feminist seder gave me whatever Jewish education I have.”

I ask if, in light of her scant Jewish upbringing, she felt comfortable at the seder. “Absolutely,” she answers. “I was really moved by it and I felt that I belonged there. I didn't know the songs because I wasn't raised with them, but I felt like this was my family. A couple of times after that, I went to a regular seder and I was quite surprised: It was so much less interesting.”

Even twenty-five years later, the feminist seders continue today, and Steinem is still stirred by the custom that begins each service: Every woman introduces herself by her matrilineage—i.e.: “I am Abigail, daughter of Letty, daughter of Ceil, daughter of Jenny . . . etc.” “I never get over being moved by people saying the female lines of their families,” says Steinem. “‘I am Gloria, daughter of Ruth, daughter of Pauline' . . . and of course, in my case, that's not the Jewish side of my family, but it doesn't matter; the truth is the same: It's for all the women who were sad over generations because they could prepare the feast but not take part in the ceremony, all the women who had no names.” She also appreciates the fact that every year there's a topic chosen for its relevance to current events and the Exodus story. “There's always a theme that's earnestly discussed in terms of our life now and in terms of the tradition,” she explains.

Steinem's father, whom she describes as a “gypsy” who moved his family from one trailer park to another selling antiques, was “somewhat embarrassed by the idea of any religion.” He never talked about his Jewishness. Her mother, on the contrary, extolled it. “What's ironic,” Steinem remarks, “is that it was the non-Jewish parent who valued it, not my father.” Her mother, Ruth Steinem, presented Judaism “as a wonderful heritage and gift and great tradition of social justice and culture. And my mother also used to tell me—against all logic when it came to my father—that Jewish men made better husbands.” Steinem laughs. “I mean, I don't know how she could say that, given her situation.” (Steinem says her father was a ne'erdo-well, at best.) “But she still felt—my father to the contrary—that Jewish men in general were more ‘family-minded.'”

Steinem's mother also made a young Gloria conscious of the Holocaust. “I remember once, when I was very little during World War II—we were still living in Michigan—that she and I together listened to a radio show about the concentration camps. I was very young, so it was quite risky, I suppose, for her to do that—but she did it in a way that didn't frighten me but impressed me with its seriousness. She said, ‘You should know that this is going on in the world.'

“I remember listening to a story of a woman trying to soften a crust of bread in a concentration camp in order for her child to be able to eat it.” Steinem didn't connect, however, that these were her people. “I knew from my mother that we had distant cousins who were in concentration camps—or maybe I learned that later. I just kept imagining the children; but not as connected to me.”

The religious amalgam she was exposed to included her Jewish father's mother, who embraced Theosophy—translated to mean “Divine Wisdom”—which comprises a melding of religion, philosophy, and science. “Though my grandmother was culturally Jewish and belonged to Jewish women's organizations,” says Steinem, “in a spiritual sense, she kind of crossed over into the more mystical part of Judaism and then into Theosophy. She died when I was five, but she influenced me through my mother, who loved her—utterly
loved
her. The only reason I ever knew that in the Bible, when Ruth says, ‘Whither thou goest, I shall go, and thy people shall be my people'—that it was a woman saying it to another woman—was because my mother used to say it about her mother-in-law.”

Steinem says that as a kid she went through a “fundamentalist” phase, where she was drawn to the Presbyterian church because she was afraid of the boys in her neighborhood and “it seemed that the church was the only thing that could make men peaceful.” But she was quickly disillusioned: “It became apparent to me that it was a place where people seemed to be nice to each other only because Jesus told them to.”

Despite her churchgoing stint, she says, religious buildings alienate her today. “There's some part of me, when I'm in any religious institution, that makes me want to lie down and take off all my clothes. Just because I think I'm not supposed to be there somehow. It doesn't really include women.

“You know this wonderful thing about how the religious institutions are built to resemble the body of a woman? Years ago, when I was at the Smithsonian, I read some author on religious architecture who casually mentioned that, of course, in patriarchal religions, the building is usually built to resemble the body of a woman. That's because the central ceremony is one in which men take over women's power of giving birth. In a Christian church, it's especially obvious because you have an outer entrance, an inner entrance, a vestibule, a vaginal aisle, two curved ovarian structures on either side, and then the altar in the center, which is the womb where the miracle takes place, where guys dressed in skirts say, in effect, ‘You were born of woman and therefore you were born in sin. But if you're good and obey the rules of the patriarchy, you can be reborn through man. We will sprinkle imitation birth fluid over your head, give you a new name, and promise you rebirth and everlasting life.' It just all pisses me off so much that I want to defile the altar at any opportunity by reasserting women's bodies, the reality of women's power to give birth.”

The notion of Jewish comradeship was a foreign concept to Steinem until college. “I became aware that there was a Jewish community when I went to Smith because there was a cultural difference between me and the other young Jewish women in the dorm. They were very close to their families and would call their mothers every Sunday to discuss who they'd gone out with and what they were wearing.” Steinem, whose mother had become mentally ill and dysfunctional by that time, began to associate Jewish women with supportive, involved parents. “It was fascinating, and seemed warm and enviable, but also alien.

“While I was a freshman, I was going out with a young man in Washington who was Jewish, and that, I think, was my first real understanding, because he was very much a part of the Jewish community. I actually went to a temple once with him; it was one of the High Holy Days and they had
sold tickets
, which I just found completely mind-boggling—it was like getting tickets to a movie. And also everyone was so talkative and noisy in the congregation—I was used to these very Protestant, silent ceremonies. So I was quite shocked. That was not the best introduction.”

Steinem got a warmer view of Judaism in her twenties when she started dating Blair Chotzinoff, who became her fiancé, until she broke off their engagement. “He had a wonderful, accomplished family,” she says. “His father had been the accompanist for Jascha Heifetz and had married Heifetz's sister. They didn't have a lot of money and they lived in a little apartment across from Carnegie Hall in New York. Leonard Bernstein was this young, awestruck guy coming by to visit, sitting at their table; it was a very seductive, creative, exciting community. I think Blair's family was mildly upset by the engagement because they considered me not Jewish, but they didn't care that much.”

Nevertheless, she felt out of place in their orbit. “Blair was so handsome and sexy and interesting and creative, that I was desperately grabbing at little straws to keep my own identity in the middle of this accomplished family.” Finally too uncomfortable, she played the half-Jewish card to extricate herself. “I was trying desperately not to get married because I knew that it would be a terrible error,” she says guiltily. “So I think that I—I hate to say this, it shows you how desperate I was—I think I once said to them that I wanted to get married in a church. Just because I was trying so hard not to get married. And they said, ‘Fine, you can do that, but we're not coming.' Which was a reasonable attitude.”

Steinem's brushes with Judaism—mostly via boyfriends—didn't take hold. “The stage of my identity today is that I feel like if there's trouble for the Jews, I should be there,” she says. “But if there's not trouble, I feel like I don't have to worry about it. Which is a different level of identity. Because when I see Jews doing well, I don't necessarily kvell in the same way that I do when I see women doing well. But I feel endangered when Jews are endangered; it's like I'm a foul-weather friend.”

When it comes to Israel, she's a critical friend. “I have an instinct for it that I don't argue or defend: It just always seemed to me that nationalism wasn't safe. I don't know why that was—maybe because people used to say, ‘If they get us all in one spot, then they'll really kill us.' Some of it was that I didn't believe in nationalism altogether. I've always had an unexplained feeling that the strength of Judaism was not to be tied to national boundaries. It was to be everywhere—to be a culture and a spirituality. Not to be a nation-state.”