Gloria Steinem, 91 Today, Still Fighting

"Gloria Steinem and JFK were different kinds of Democrats. But they were both formed by their backgrounds. By how past generations of their families were treated. By their roots."

By Michael Golden

Gloria Steinem was born 91 years ago today in Toledo, Ohio, to a Presbyterian mother and a Jewish father. How could either of them have known that day what a massive difference their daughter would have on the world.

Ironically, though Steinem had been baptized, it was her non-Jewish mother Ruth who ingrained in her the history and responsibility that come with being Jewish. When Steinem was eight years old, her mom encouraged her to listen to a radio dramatization of the torture that the Jews were suffering at the hands of the Nazis. The story was about a mother who could not procure enough food for her little girl. Ruth Steinem said:

“This is going on in the world. And we must know about it.”

Ruth Steinem taught her daughter that being Jewish carried with it a proud heritage. Gloria Steinem took the “outsider” sensibility of being Jewish and became a historic force for the “Second Wave” of the American Feminism Movement (after Suffrage). Her resume is one of the longer Wikipedia pages you’ll come across, but suffice it to say, she literally changed the way women were viewed and treated by American law and society. The phrase “reproductive freedom” — Steinem coined it more than 50 years ago.

When I came across that “outsider” motivation for Steinem’s political agenda, it reminded me of when I was an undergraduate at Indiana University. Though I grew up as a Reform Jew and was bar-mitzvahed, it was not a driving force in my life. It was an identity, but that is not the same thing.

However, when I took courses in Jewish History while at IU, and learned more thoroughly about the Holocaust, I remember how incomprehensible it seemed — and I remember being viscerally infuriated. I was changed forever.

I’m no Gloria Steinem (few on this earth are), but knowing that I was alive after so many had died inspired me to interview survivors and report on race hatred, work for the Anti-Defamation League, and raise money for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

It also inspired my politics once I had been a journalist for several years. I saw inequality up close, almost on a daily basis, and it pushed me toward the party that I thought cared more actively about it.

Last November, a newer friend of mine from Texas approached me in the parking lot of the golf club we play at. He knew I was Jewish, a writer, and opposed Donald Trump. He sheepishly asked me if it was okay to me a ask a political question: “Why do most Jews support the Democrats?”

The predicate of his question was correct: Pew Research consistently reports that the overwhelming percentage of Jewish Americans vote for Democrats. I told him that it’s a complicated answer which would be hard to really cover in quick exchange in a parking lot. People are complicated and everyone has a slightly different decision-making calculus. This includes what each person’s views and long-term vision are for what is best for Israel. That’s an entirely different column, and the historic work of AIPAC supersedes much of the partisanship on that issue.

But I did tell him that for me, Democrats generally want to use the law to increase the rights for groups in America that have historically been denied them. We want progress in the best sense of the word, not the cartoonish memes that “progressivism” or “wokism” have been associated with on mindless social media. John F. Kennedy expressed this far more eloquently in Profiles in Courage:

“If by a ‘liberal’ they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people — their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights and their civil liberties — someone who believes we can break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad, if that is what they mean by a ‘liberal,’ then I'm proud to say I'm a ‘liberal.’”

Though both Democrats, JFK and Gloria Steinem certainly did not sit at the same point on the political spectrum. But they were both formed by their backgrounds. By how past generations of their families were treated. By their roots.

Gloria Steinem’s birthday falls just a couple weeks before Passover. And though she isn’t an observant Jew generally, I loved learning about her special tradition on this holiday. As the Jewish Women’s Archive describes it:

Every Passover for over twenty years, she has joined a small group of “seder-sisters” — Jewish women in New York City who plan and perform a women’s seder, usually on the third night of Passover. The founding premise of this seder is that women matter, that women must be acknowledged for their roles in the Exodus story and their current struggle for equality in Jewish life. Using traditional ritual objects and a non-traditionalist Haggadah.”

We all take the customs and traditions that are important to us and carry them forward in our own ways. At 91, Gloria Steinem isn’t done yet — but her contributions are already immortal.

MICHAEL GOLDEN is the Editor-In-Chief of JEWDICIOUS and founder of The Golden Mean.

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