By Abraham Cooper and Harold Brackman:
Betty Friedan was a twentieth-century American revolutionary who, in word and deed helped empower women everywhere. She was author of The Feminine Mystique (1963), founded the National Organization of Women (NOW), and “mother” of Second Wave Feminism that transformed the U.S.
What would have this feminist leader thought of the recent 653 to 80 vote by the National Women’s Studies Association to join the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement? The resolution condemned Israel for “injustice and violence, including sexual and gender-based violence, perpetrated against Palestinians and other Arabs in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, within Israel and in the Golan Heights.”
The resolution contained nary a word about the Palestinians’ current “stabbing Intifada,” most of whose victims have been Jewish women and children. Nor was there a single whereas about last summer’s unprovoked massive rocket onslaught launched from Gaza’s Hamastan using or about terror tunnels burrowed into Israel proper. Not a syllable about Palestinian curriculum and media, including cartoon anti-Semitism, venerating suicide bombers and enlisting youngsters into a culture of death.
What would Betty Friedan, that spunky Jewish housewife and mother who devoted her book and life to fighting what she called in the 1950s “the problem without a name,” have thought about American feminists who “include out” Israeli women targeted by terrorists from their movement?
Gil Troy’s book, Moynihan’s Moment—about how then U.S Ambassador, Daniel Patrick Moynihan spearheaded the fight against the adoption of the infamous 1975 UN “Zionism Equals Racism” resolution—contains a chapter focusing on Friedan’s realization that her fight for the feminist cause and commitment to Zionism were “indivisible.”
She was not an outspoken Zionist until 1975 when she attended the International Women’s Year World Congress in Mexico City, where she was shocked by the unholy trinity of “anti-Americanism, anti-Semitism, and anti-Zionism” among the delegates. In her article, “Scary Times in Mexico City,” Friedan recounted how dissenting voices among American delegates had their microphones turned off and their speeches shouted down. Israeli prime minister’s wife, Leah Rabin, was booed and boycotted, as the “Declaration on the Equality of Women” became one of the first international documents to label Zionism as a form of racism. For those of us who later experienced the same tactics at the UN’s Anti-Racism Conference in Durban in 2001, just days before 9/11, Friedan’s account reads like a piece of our own history.
Friedan declared that there a “larger never-ending battle for human freedom and evolution. Women as Jews, Jews as women, have learned in their gut, ‘if I am not for myself, who will be for me (and who can I truly be for). If I am only for myself, who am I?’” Back in New York, she formed an Ad Hoc Committee of Women for Human Rights in which Margaret Mead, Nora Ephron, Lauren Bacall, Beverly Sills, and Gloria Steinem, among others, joined her battle against the the odious “Zionism Equals Racism” resolution which the UN finally repealed in 1991.
The anti-Israel, anti-Jewish forces prevailed again at the 1980 International Women’s Conference in Copenhagen—where delegates met in a hall festooned with a larger-than-life portrait of Ayatollah Khomeini! —but at Nairobi in 1985 Friedan and her allies succeeded in ensuring “every reference to Zionism was gone.”
Later as the head of delegation of American Jewish women who participated in a US/Israel dialogue, entitled “Women as Jews, Jews as Women,” organized by the American Jewish Congress, Friedan inspired the founding of the Israel Women’s Network.
