What Gloria Steinem taught this Orthodox feminist

Gloria Steinem died this week at 92, leaving behind a feminist legacy that reaches into places she might not immediately be associated with, including the Orthodox Jewish community.

I did not learn feminism only from Gloria Steinem. I learned it from the dedicated Orthodox Jewish women who demanded a place in the beit midrash, from women who refused to remain silent when religious institutions failed them, and from generations of Orthodox feminists who insisted that commitment to halakha and commitment to women’s equality did not have to be opposing forces. I learned it from, among others, Blu Greenberg, Norma Joseph and my own mother, Lea Lazar, z”l, whose lives and leadership showed me what it means to pursue change with courage, conviction and love for the Jewish community.

Steinem’s legacy also has an intriguing Jewish thread. She was not Jewish according to Jewish law, which determines Jewish status through the mother, but she had Jewish ancestry through her father and identified with that heritage. Her paternal grandmother, Pauline Perlmutter Steinem, was the daughter of a cantor, kept a kosher home and became a prominent suffragist. There is a striking symmetry here: generations later, Orthodox Jewish feminists would ask how tradition and equality could coexist without surrendering either. Steinem’s feminism was not born in the beit midrash, but some of the questions she taught women to ask inevitably found their way there.

Steinem gave generations of women a vocabulary for understanding power: who has it, who doesn’t, whose experiences are treated as universal, and whose are considered peripheral. As an Orthodox Jewish feminist, I have discovered how remarkably well some of those questions resonate inside the world of Torah and Jewish communal life.

For seven years, I served as the executive director of JOFA (Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance), helping to build and strengthen a movement committed to expanding women’s participation, leadership and learning within Orthodox Jewish life. I am also a graduate of Yeshivat Maharat, and I remain an active lay leader in my own community. Those experiences have taught me that change happens not only through scholarship and advocacy, but also through the daily work of building institutions, serving communities and showing up as a committed participant in the life of the community one hopes to transform.

As I reflect on Steinem’s legacy, here are six lessons I carry with me, some all the way into the beit midrash.

1. If you don’t see yourself in the room, the room needs to change.

Representation is not cosmetic. It determines whose experiences matter and whose authority is recognized.

For Orthodox women, that question has followed us everywhere: Who is teaching Torah? Who is interpreting it? Who stands at the front of the room? Who sits on the board? Who makes decisions about women’s religious lives? And perhaps most importantly, whose voice is considered authoritative?

There was a time not so long ago when women learning Gemara at an advanced level was still sufficiently unusual to be considered noteworthy. Women serving as Orthodox clergy seemed unimaginable in most communities. Today, I am an ordained Orthodox rabbi.

That didn’t happen because women waited patiently to be invited into rooms. It happened because women built institutions, created opportunities, mastered texts, challenged assumptions and, yes, sometimes insisted that the room itself had to change.

2. The personal is only rarely personal.

One of feminism’s most important insights was that experiences dismissed as “private” often reveal structural problems. Orthodox feminism has learned this lesson repeatedly.

A woman whose husband refuses to give her a get is experiencing an intensely personal tragedy. But get refusal is also a communal and systemic problem. A woman being told she cannot deliver a dvar Torah, recite Kaddish, learn a particular set of texts or assume a leadership role may experience that moment individually, but the assumptions producing that exclusion extend far beyond her.

The same is true when women’s images disappear from publications, advertisements and communal materials, or when their names and titles are omitted or minimized. Each individual decision may be explained away as a matter of policy, modesty or communal sensitivity. But taken together, they send a powerful message about whose presence is considered normative and whose must be hidden.

3. Equality does not require sameness.

Steinem spent decades challenging the assumption that biology should determine destiny. Orthodox feminism asks a related, though distinctly Jewish, question: Which differences are actually demanded by halakha, and which have simply acquired the authority of tradition because they have been practiced that way for generations?

The work of Orthodox feminism is to ask that question honestly. Orthodox feminism does not require pretending that men and women are identical. Nor does it require erasing Jewish legal categories. It asks us instead to examine those categories with rigor and care.

Is this halakha? Is it custom? Is it communal convention? Is it simply what we are accustomed to seeing? Those are not rebellious questions. They are profoundly Jewish ones.

Difference does not automatically require hierarchy. And reverence for tradition should not prevent us from distinguishing between what Judaism actually demands and what Jewish communities have simply become accustomed to.

4. Change happens in more than one way.

Lasting change rarely follows a single path. Sometimes it requires challenging existing institutions; sometimes it requires building new ones. Sometimes it comes through scholarship, advocacy or protest. And sometimes it comes from the persistent work of people who remain deeply rooted in a community while asking that community to change. Orthodox feminism has required all of these approaches. 

We have needed scholars willing to reopen texts everyone assumed had already been settled. We have needed women to build new spaces for prayer, learning and leadership. We have needed advocates willing to challenge institutions and assumptions.

And sometimes change has come because a woman kept showing up at the same synagogue, school, beit midrash or communal organization and asking the uncomfortable question one more time. Staying can itself be a form of activism.

5. Growth means the next generation doesn’t have to start over.

Every movement celebrates its pioneers, and rightly so. Orthodox feminism has accumulated an extraordinary collection of “firsts”: first women to study particular texts, hold particular positions, receive particular forms of ordination or assume particular communal roles.

But eventually, success has to mean that we stop counting. Progress has to become infrastructure.

I don’t want the next generation of Orthodox girls merely to hear inspiring stories about the women who fought to learn Gemara, become clergy, lead communities, read Megillah or have their Torah taken seriously. I want them to inherit communities in which those possibilities are ordinary.

A girl should be able to look around her Orthodox community and see women who are scholars, teachers, clergy, communal leaders and halakhic authorities without anyone needing to explain why their presence is remarkable.

The ultimate measure of progress may be the point at which what once seemed groundbreaking becomes ordinary.

6. You do not have to choose between identities other people assume are incompatible.

This may be the lesson that has mattered most to me.

There have always been people who assume that “Orthodox” and “feminist” cannot comfortably inhabit the same sentence. If you are sufficiently committed to feminism, they assume, eventually you will have to abandon Orthodoxy. And if you are genuinely committed to halakha, surely there must be some point at which you leave feminism at the door.

I reject that choice. I have always been Orthodox. I am also a feminist. Neither identity is decorative, and neither is something I am willing to surrender to make other people more comfortable.

That doesn’t mean there are no tensions. There are. Sometimes halakha places boundaries around what I might otherwise want. Sometimes feminism forces me to look more critically at practices I have inherited and ask whether they truly reflect halakha, historical circumstance or structures of power.

But tension is not failure. Judaism has never been afraid of argument. The beit midrash itself is built on disagreement, with voices across generations challenging, refining and sometimes overturning one another’s assumptions. Perhaps that is why I have never experienced Orthodox feminism as an attempt to import something foreign into Judaism.

At its best, Orthodox feminism asks deeply Jewish questions: Who has a voice? Who has authority? Whose suffering demands a response? Which practices are sacred and static, and which merely feel inevitable because they are familiar? What obligations do we have to those whose experiences have been ignored?

Gloria Steinem did not teach me how to be an Orthodox Jew. But she helped teach me to notice who wasn’t in the room, and to ask why.

In a 1972 interview with The New York Times, Steinem invoked the metaphor of a torch passed from one generation of feminists to the next. I think about that image often. There is something deeply Jewish about that idea. Rabbi Tarfon taught, “It is not your duty to finish the work, but neither are you at liberty to neglect it” (Pirkei Avot 2:16). We inherit work that others began. We carry it forward. And if we have done our job well, the next generation will begin a little further down the road than we did.

Perhaps that is what I have learned from both Gloria Steinem and Torah: We do not have to finish the work. But we do have to make the path wider for those who come after us.