How Gloria Steinem connected to a Jewish heritage

Gloria Steinem, a mother of Second Wave feminism and a shaper of American culture, who connected with her Jewish lineage later in life died last Wednesday in her home on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. She was 92 years old.

The longtime political agitator, activist and prolific writer who created Ms. Magazine was known for her forceful activism and speeches on behalf of women’s equality.

Steinem co-founded the National Women’s Political Caucus and, through her magazine and her other writings, brought then-taboo subjects and women’s experiences, including abortion and rape, into American mainstream conversation.

She was famous, and instantly recognizable, for her streaked, straight hair and aviator glasses. 

Less well-known was her Jewish heritage and connection to it. Her father, Leo Steinem, was Jewish, but the future feminist lived with her mother, who was Protestant, after her parents divorced when she was 10. 

Religion of any kind was not much part of Steinem’s life until later, when through her relationships with co-founders of Ms. magazine, including Letty Cottin Pogrebin, she began participating in an annual feminist Seder.

Steinem famously said, “Never in my life have I identified myself as a Christian, but whenever there is antisemitism, I identify as a Jew.”

Her paternal grandmother, Pauline Steinem, was an influence on her, although she died when Steinem was young. Her grandmother kept kosher, was a notable suffragist and helped rescue family members from Europe during the rise of the Nazis. 

She learned the extent of her grandmother’s activism when she had lunch with Judith Rosenbaum, who at the time was curating an exhibit on feminism and Jewish women, in 2005. Rosenbaum now serves as CEO of the Jewish Women’s Archive.

“It was meaningful for her to learn that she wasn’t the first in her family to be a feminist activist, but in fact it was part of her legacy,” Rosenbaum told JNS. “It was very moving to her. It was the piece ultimately that connected Gloria to her own Jewishness.”

Another major connection for Steinem was the feminist Passover Seders in which she participated for more than 20 years.

Each year, usually on the third night of Passover, a small group of “Seder sisters” gathered to elevate the role of Biblical women in the Exodus story and apply the lessons to contemporary women’s challenges, wrote Pogrebin in the “Encyclopedia of Jewish Women,” published by Jewish Women’s Archive. They also applied those lessons to “their current struggle for equality in Jewish life.”

“Over the years, Steinem sang ‘Dayenu’ and ‘Miriam ha-nevi’ah’,” “shared in discussions of the ‘Ten Plagues of Women’ and the ‘Four Questions of Women’ and helped to make modern midrash about our Jewish foremothers,” wrote Pogrebin, of her close friend. 

“When I feel most drawn to Judaism it’s not the law part that attracts me, it’s the mystical part, the Kabbalah, the shechinah,” seen by many as a female aspect of G-d, Steinem said, per Pogrebin’s entry.“I do feel socially drawn to Jewish warmth, sensuality, expressiveness.”

Ruth Messinger, the former Manhattan borough president and longtime political organizer, participated in feminist Seder with Steinem for several years.

“Gloria was iconic,” said Messinger, who after her political career went on to become president of the American Jewish World Service, a nonprofit that benefits women and others in the global South. 

“This is a sad day for women,” Messinger said. She said that she knew Steinem “forever.”

“I was there at the famous 40th birthday press conference when someone from the media said, ‘You don’t look 40,’ and she said, ‘This is what 40 looks like’,” Messinger said.

“She really cared about the future for women at a time when that was a novelty,” she said. “She had a huge impact.”

Nancy Wartik worked at Ms. magazine as a researcher in the mid-1980s. As soon as she heard that Steinem had died, she and a friend who had also worked there went to lay flowers on the doorstep of Steinem’s home. There were already flowers laid, Wartik said. She also found “a constant presence of older women” at the home. 

Wartik later became a writer and editor at the New York Times.

Steinem “was an inspiring example,” Wartik said. “She changed my life. Young women today mostly have no idea what they owe her.”

The subject of her being Jewish didn’t come up while Wartik was at Ms., but she said that Steinem “was an exemplification of what Jews ought to be.” —JNS