ABSTRACT
Like all the Jewish women I know, my own history has a heavy hand in the articulation of what both being Jewish and female have meant for me. Let me begin the story with my girlhood as a Jewish New Yorker. My mother's extended family was made up of both immigrant and native-bom Americans, all Orthodox Jews, except her renegade mother, a Labor Zionist, who emigrated to Palestine before I was born. My father's parents were Polish/Russian immigrants; his father, a Socialist intellectual by choice and house painter by trade; his mother a balebusteh, and when economic necessity demanded, a highly capable shopkeeper. My own parents brought me and my sisters up so secularly that until adulthood, I had never heard of, much less heard, a Haggadah. Nonetheless, my parents identified themselves emphatically as Jewish, which seemed to me to be more or less synonymous with progressive. When they, as they frequently did, asked the classic question, “Is it, whatever it might be, good or bad for the Jews?”, this query seemed to be meant both in earnest and with an ironic twist, and yet a third mysterious dialectical incarnation as encompassing these two apparently opposing poles.
