Gloria Steinem, the journalist and organizer who became the most recognizable face of America’s modern women’s movement, died Wednesday at her New York City home. She was 92.

For more than half a century, Steinem pushed American women to imagine lives beyond the limits society had set for them. She co-founded Ms. magazine, helped establish the National Women’s Political Caucus and turned phrases like “sexual harassment” from unnamed experiences into subjects of national debate.

Steinem was the daughter of a Jewish father, Leo Steinem, and a Protestant mother, Ruth Nuneviller. She was raised without much religion and generally described herself as secular, but she was unequivocal about where she stood when Jews were targeted: “Never in my life have I identified as a Christian,” she said, “but wherever there is antisemitism, I identify as a Jew.”

Her mother taught her to value her Jewish roots. Steinem told the Forward in 2015 that her father rarely discussed his heritage; it was her non-Jewish mother who presented Judaism to her as something positive — “She also told me Jewish men made better husbands” — and taught her about her paternal grandmother.

That grandmother was a feminist pioneer in her own right. Pauline Steinem, who kept kosher, was an educator, suffragist, delegate to the 1908 International Council of Women and the first woman elected to Toledo’s school board — and during the Nazi’s rise in the mid-1930s, she worked to rescue members of her family from Europe.

A feminist Seder became her strongest connection to Jewish ritual. Steinem participated for decades in an annual women’s Seder, calling it the first spiritually centered experience of her feminist life. What drew her to Judaism, she said, wasn’t the law — it was “the mystical part, the Kabbalah, the Shechinah.

She recognized how antisemitism and misogyny fed each other. In her memoir, Steinem recalled a cabdriver telling her that feminism was a Jewish plot to destroy the Christian family. Her response to such hatred was not to distance herself from Jews, but to identify with them more strongly.

That identification outlasted her. Gloria and her sister, Susanne, donated a catalog of jewelry seized from Nazi victims to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum — in honor of their grandmother.

Steinem continued writing and advocating for equality into her 90s. Her final book, An Unexpected Life, is scheduled to publish later this month.

 

The post When Gloria Steinem identified as a Jew most appeared first on The Forward.

(JTA) — The new British government plans to announce in the coming weeks a comprehensive package of economic sanctions and other measures designed to prevent the Israeli expansion of West Bank settlements.

Overall the U.K. needs “a comprehensive reset of our policy” when it comes to the West Bank, British Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband told the House of Commons on Tuesday. He spoke during his first question and answer session with lawmakers since he and the government he represents were sworn into office in July.

Miliband added that the new measures would include a ban on goods produced in the settlements and targeted sanctions on British institutions and individuals.

“We are looking, indeed, at our wider economic relationship with the occupied territories, and the different tools we have to tackle it,” Miliband explained. “We do not want British companies financing, constructing, or advertising new settlements. The work we are now undertaking is how we can stop that.”

Israel’s Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar warned Tuesday that if the U.K. acted against his country, the Jewish state would take retaliatory steps against Great Britain.

“We are prepared and I hope they will not make the mistake of doing this. If they do, there will be a reaction,” Sa’ar said in a podcast interview with the Hebrew news website Ynet.

Tensions between Israel and the U.K. have been escalating in light of Israeli military actions in Gaza and the West Bank following the Hamas-led October 7, 2023 attack.

The U.K.’s decision under the last government to recognize Palestinian statehood in 2025 inflamed the situation, which is expected to get worse should Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu win the October 27 election in Israel.

Any government that Netanyahu forms is expected to be right-wing and to continue the policies of the existing government, just as the U.K. under Miliband and the new Labour prime minister, Andy Burnham, are more willing than their predecessors to go head-to-head with Israel on the issue

Miliband already floated the idea of targeted sanctions after Israel’s  Lands Authority opened bids for 1,234 homes in the largely underdeveloped E1 section of the West Bank settlement of Ma’aleh Adumim in August, a move that he said would undermine any two-state solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict.

Miliband went further on Tuesday when fielding a number of questions from lawmakers frustrated about the lack of U.K. response to Israeli actions in the West Bank, such as terror activity by Israelis against Palestinian civilians and continued settler building. This includes the opening of E1 bids last month.

The foreign secretary explained that his words reflected the policies Burnham had considered even before he entered Downing Street in July, such as a ban on trade for goods produced in the settlements. “We are obviously working across government and with our allies on these measures,” Miliband said.

Israel has said that it has a right to build settler homes in Area C of the West Bank, which is under Israeli military and civilian control and where all the settlements are located. Under the Oslo Accords, the West Bank was divided into three areas, with sections A and B, under the auspices of the Palestinian Authority.

The International Court of Justice in 2024 issued an advisory opinion explaining that such construction in Area C is illegal, affirming a long-held stance of the U.N. and many nations, including the U.K.

Concern has been particularly high with regard to the E1 project, which would add 3,400 homes to the municipal boundaries of the city of Ma’aleh Adumim by building on an underdeveloped hilltop. The Palestinian Authority and the international community, including past U.S. administrations, have warned that the project would block contiguous Palestinian development in that area and thus make a Palestinian state untenable.

Miliband referenced that viewpoint when speaking to the House of Commons on Tuesday, explaining that E1 development had long been considered a “red line,” because the project “cuts through the heart of the West Bank and risks making a Palestinian state unviable.”

He affirmed the U.K.’s commitment to a two-state resolution, explaining that his government would not stand idly by while that vision was being destroyed by Israeli actions on the ground in the West Bank.

In a harshly worded attack on the U.K. and Miliband in August, Sa’ar on X warned that UK’s statements on Israel were fueling antisemitism in Great Britain and emphasized that the Jewish people had a right to build anywhere in their ancestral homeland.

This article originally appeared on JTA.org.

The post UK to ‘reset policy’ on West Bank settlements, Miliband tells parliament appeared first on The Forward.

How did the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research find a new home in the United States after the Holocaust? Kalman Weiser (York University, Toronto) narrates this dramatic story in a new book, Yiddish Scholarship Comes to America.

Initially, YIVO’s success wasn’t a sure thing. It was “hardly clear to YIVO’s staff and supporters in the 1940s that an organization dedicated to serving the intellectual and cultural needs of a global, Yiddish-speaking Jewish nation could take root in the radically different circumstances of postwar America,” Weiser writes.

Before the war, YIVO already had an American branch in New York but its main goal was raising money for the institute in Vilna. Several YIVO activists also focused on researching Yiddish culture and history — but again, mainly in Eastern Europe.

The truth was, most American Jews had little interest in Yiddish and didn’t think highly of Jewish studies at all.

After the Holocaust, YIVO stood at a crossroads: It could either become an archive dedicated to Yiddish life destroyed in Eastern Europe, or it could further develop Yiddish scholarship to give Yiddish a new lease on life in America.

Weiser guides the reader through the fierce debates among YIVO’s associates over the direction the institute should take. Yudel Mark maintained that YIVO should focus primarily on Holocaust research, while former Bundists argued that it should study the conditions of the Jewish masses in America.

Max Weinreich, YIVO’s intellectual godfather, had an altogether different vision. He believed that American Jewry could actually play the leading role in the Jewish world after the Holocaust. At the same time, though, he didn’t think they were ready to assume this responsibility. They needed the Yiddish-speaking refugees and immigrants, such as himself and other East European intellectuals, to guide them.

According to Weinreich, YIVO should concern itself not only with visnshaft (scholarship), but with visn vos shaft (“knowledge that creates”). In other words, Yiddish scholarship needed to  enable American Jews to preserve their Jewishness and secure the continuity of Yiddish.

The success of this monumental undertaking depended on the Yiddish language itself. Yiddish needed to serve as a bridge between generations of Jews, a spiritual and intellectual connection between the old country and the new.

For this reason, Weinreich held that the American Jewish intellectual leaders needed to be “de-assimilated,” and the prestige of Yiddish needed to be raised in American academia.

But despite Weinreich’s efforts, YIVO remained on the margins of the Jewish mainstream and received limited support from major Jewish philanthropic organizations. Relations between YIVO and the American Yiddish literati were also strained.

The normative, standard Yiddish that YIVO wanted to promote drew criticism from some American Yiddish writers and journalists. They argued that “YIVO Yiddish” differed considerably from the authentic, natural Yiddish they were raised with.

In his articles in the Forward, Isaac Bashevis Singer ridiculed neologisms as kadmen-yidish (proto-Yiddish) and breyshes-yidish (old Yiddish), linguistic concepts that Weinreich had invented to describe different historical phases in the development of the Yiddish language.

At the heart of the conflict between YIVO and Yiddish writers, Weiser explains, was the question: “To whom does Yiddish belong?” YIVO’s goal was to create a normative language that could be taught like other foreign languages. In this way, the future of Yiddish could be secured even if a living community of Yiddish speakers no longer existed.

The tensest chapters in YIVO’s history revolved around the struggle to recover the materials that formerly belonged to the institute in Vilna.

The Nazis sent some of the books and documents to Germany for the archives of the museum the Nazis were planning, “Institute for Research on the Jewish Question.” After the war these materials fell into the hands of the American military administration in Germany.

Recovering these materials was an incredible feat on the part of Weinreich and his colleagues, among them Lucy Schildkret (better known by her married name, Dawidowicz), who later made her name as a Holocaust scholar. Legally, the American military administration was obligated to return the plundered materials to Poland or the Soviet Union. The Hebrew University in Jerusalem was a claimant as well.

Weinreich worked his contacts among the American elite, and in 1947, YIVO recovered the archives. He also succeeded in presenting YIVO as the heir to other cultural institutions in Vilna. As a result, YIVO received the collections of the renowned Strashun Library and the S. Ansky Historical and Ethnographic Society.

The second chapter of YIVO’s history occurred after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s. A significant collection of YIVO materials was discovered in Lithuania, thanks to a Lithuanian librarian who had hidden it in the warehouse of the national book chamber.

This time, YIVO had to negotiate with the government of the Lithuanian Republic, which had recently become independent. Ultimately, a compromise was reached, and these materials can now be accessed digitally.

Weiser’s history of YIVO is an engaging, well-researched book. Max Weinreich was far from the only European Jewish refugee to find a new home in America and build a successful career there. But he may be the only one who single-handedly rebuilt an important European Jewish scholarly institute that remains active till the present day.

 

The post How the Yiddish project took root in the U.S. after the Holocaust appeared first on The Forward.