Jewish Women and Intersectional Feminism: The Case of Bertha Pappenheim

Abstract

Jewish Women and Intersectional FeminismThe Case of Bertha Pappenheim Elizabeth Loentz (bio) This essay addresses the thorny question of whether Jewish women fit into the framework of intersectionality and what we gain when we read the work of early-twentieth-century German-Jewish feminists through the lens of a theoretical model developed by Black feminists in the United States in the late twentieth century. The essay situates the social activist and writer Bertha Pappenheim in a long tradition of international intersectional feminist thought: she recognized over a century ago that Jewish women had different concerns and a different experience of patriarchy than Christian women, as well as a different experience of antisemitism than Jewish men—not to mention that Christian feminists were not immune to antisemitism. Recognizing the marginalization of Jewish women within both the male-dominated Jewish community and the German feminist movement, Pappenheim founded a German-Jewish feminist movement that was distinct from yet integrated into the German feminist movement, and which sought to unite diverse German-Jewish women. The Jewish Women Empowerment Summit, held in Frankfurt, Germany, in September 2021, opened with the panel "Can Jewish Perspectives Be Considered in Intersectional Spaces?" (El).1 In their introduction to this special issue, Sonia Gollance and Kerry Wallach answer this question in the affirmative, arguing that it is not only possible but imperative—particularly within the context of German studies—for feminist scholars who research and write about different forms of oppression to find a way to include antisemitism and Jewish perspectives. Yet Jewish feminists working in Germany today, such as Ina Holev and Miriam Yosef, founders of the educational initiative Jüdisch & Intersektional (Jewish & Intersectional), report that they have felt excluded from intersectional feminist groups and that antisemitism is often tolerated or even reproduced in these settings ("Über Uns"). [End Page 24] In the following pages I consider what we gain when we read the experiences and work of early-twentieth-century German-Jewish feminists through the lens of a theoretical model developed by Black feminists in the United States in the late twentieth century. I focus especially on the work of the social activist and writer Bertha Pappenheim (1859–1936), the founder and leader of the Jüdischer Frauenbund (JFB; League of Jewish Women). Audre Lorde emphasized in her work with the nascent Afro-German women's movement in the 1980s and 1990s the vital importance of researching their history in order to better understand and articulate their place as women and feminists of color and Germans. I propose that an exploration of how an earlier generation of German-Jewish feminists grappled with the categories of gender, Jewishness, and Germanness (among others) and their intersections would, on the one hand, be generative to understand the broader intellectual tradition of intersectional thought, and on the other, would provide a feminist lineage for a new generation of German-Jewish women who are struggling to situate themselves and their work within contemporary intersectional thinking and activism. Like Lorde, Pappenheim understood the value of looking backward to move forward: her translations of her ancestor Glikl's memoirs from Yiddish to German and of Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Women from English to German can be read as a search for role models or an attempt to establish a German-Jewish and feminist lineage. I resist calling Pappenheim a "vanguard" of intersectional feminism, in part because I am aware of the problem of co-opting a late-twentieth-century theoretical model developed by Black feminists in the specifically American context to frame the experience and activism of white Jewish women of Pappenheim's time and place. Although Pappenheim would be considered white today, Jews were generally viewed as racially Other in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Germany.2 Yet her insights regarding the intersections of Jewishness and gender bear a striking affinity to the insights of the African American feminists who developed the analytical framework and concept of intersectionality in the last third of the twentieth century. It is important to note here that the category of Jewishness was, in early-twentieth-century Germany, not a purely religious one but an uneasy amalgam of religion and ethnicity...