Gloria Steinem, a mother of Second Wave feminism and a shaper of American culture, died Wednesday in her home on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. She was 92.
The longtime political agitator, activist and founder was known for her forceful activism and speeches on behalf of women’s equality.
She was a co-founder of Ms. magazine and author of essay collections, including “Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions” (1983) and a book about Marilyn Monroe in 1997. She also penned “My Life on the Road,” a memoir, in 2015.
Steinem co-founded the National Women’s Political Caucus and, through Ms. 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.”
‘Socially drawn to Jewish warmth’
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,’” Hebrew for Miriam the prophet, “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 God, Steinem said, per Pogrebin’s entry. “I do feel socially drawn to Jewish warmth, sensuality, expressiveness.”
Ruth Messinger was at the famous feminist Seder with Steinem for several years, the former Manhattan borough president and longtime political organizer told JNS.
“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 told JNS. 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.”
In 2019, when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu barred Reps. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) and Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) from visiting Israel, Steinem publicly called him a “bully” and pledged not to visit while he was in power.
Nancy Wartick 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, Wartick told JNS. She also found “a constant presence of older women” at the home.
Wartick later became a writer and editor at the New York Times.
Steinem “was an inspiring example,” Wartick told JNS. “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 Wartick was at Ms., but she told JNS that Steinem “was an exemplification of what Jews ought to be.”
