Gender and Jews for Jesus in the 1970S
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1 Liberated Woman, Fulfilled Jew: Gender and Jews for Jesus in the 1970s Ivy Johnson Advisor: Kimberly Sims, History University Honors in History Spring 2013 2 Abstract The evangelical organization Jews for Jesus began in 1970 and grew parallel to the feminist movement. My research examines how the women of Jews for Jesus did and did not benefit from the gains of the feminist movement, due to the influences of evangelical Christianity and traditional Judaism that underline this syncretic movement. This research relies on Jews for Jesus literature from the 1970s and interviews with two founding members. Overall, I argue that the women of the organization during the 1970s had opportunities for leadership and freedom in their personal lives that was unusual for a conservative religious organization at the time, but they did so not under the name of feminism but rather out of practicality, for they were solely focused on the goal of evangelism. Acknowledgements My research couldn’t have been completed without the cooperation of Alicia Murphy and Susan Perlman at the Jews for Jesus headquarters who offered me access to their archives. In addition, this paper would fall flat if Susan and Lyn Bond had not graciously agreed to share their experiences and insights with me. Finally, a big thank you to my advisor, Professor Sims, for guiding me through all 20 different incarnations of this thesis and calmly answering all my panicky emails. 3 Do you feel there should be more to a woman’s life than the drudgery of dishes and dirt and diapers, pounding a typewriter, dull sales jobs, waiting tables for grouchy customers, being looked upon as a brainless sex object? Do you think women are overworked, unappreciated, underpaid, and physically exploited? You could burn your bra, burn your typewriter ribbon, stuff your marriage license down the drain…Then you could find something meaningful, exciting, well paid to do—like becoming a famous doctor, building bridges, or flying a plane.... You might be successful, appreciated, acclaimed, even rich, but you still wouldn’t be really free—because everyone (man or woman) is a slave to [sin]… Jesus suffered the judgment and punishment for all our shortcomings that we might be set free. The woman who has given her life to God through Jesus is free from worrying that her role in life is unimportant; is free to enjoy being herself whether her job is feeding the baby or making a speech at the UN; is free to enjoy the loving protection of a husband or stay single and independent; is free and liberated in the truest sense of the word. Ask Jesus to liberate you and God will give you his strength and the power to live a new, different and better life. Then you will be free to be your very best self.1 This 1972 evangelistic broadside distributed by Jews for Jesus is entitled “The Liberated Woman”. The message here is that the women’s liberation movement, although not inherently wrong or inconsistent with the author’s religious views, is meaningless without God. This perspective, while telling, is obviously simplified to fit the constraints of the broadside format: a quick, pithy, attention-grabbing pamphlet to be passed out en masse on the street. Far from a firm declaration of the organization’s stand on women’s rights, for the purposes of this broadside, feminism was little more than the latest pop culture fad used to grab readers’ attention the way similar broadsides used King Kong, Star Wars, or Jesus Christ Superstar. There is, however, much more to the story of women and Jews for Jesus, and my research seeks to shed light on this largely overlooked intersection of religion and gender. Jews for Jesus is an evangelical organization which seeks to “make the Messiahship of Jesus an unavoidable issue to Jewish people worldwide”.2 Armed with this unapologetic mission, the group has known controversy since its inception. (Elie Wiesel’s characterization of the Jews for Jesus as “hypocrites” who “don't even have the courage to declare frankly that they have 1Ceil Rosen, “The Liberated Woman” (Hineni Ministries, 1972). 2 Lyn Bond, interview by author, telephone, 7 March 2013. 4 decided to repudiate their people and its memories” is but one voice in the protests of the Jewish community.3) But before it reached such fame—and notoriety—Jews for Jesus began in 1970 as the San Francisco branch of the American Board of Missions to the Jews, a Hebrew Christian mission organization. The branch split from its parent in 1973 as its leader Moishe Rosen and his young, mostly Jewish staff took a more radical approach to evangelism that emphasized confrontation, visibility, and creativity and was designed to appeal to young people, in contrast with the ABMJ’s concern with maintaining a respectable reputation and treading lightly around the Jewish community and the Protestant churches on which it relied for financial support. The independent and controversial direction of the San Francisco branch, combined with internal politics, led the ABMJ to terminate Rosen’s position in August 1973. The staff stayed on, and Jews for Jesus officially formed as an independent corporation.4 The majority of these first members were women.5,6,7 I argue that due to a combination of factors, including its pragmatic approach, a lack of prescribed doctrine, and the youth of the founding members, the women of Jews for Jesus were highly involved in every aspect of the group from the very beginning. The syncretic nature of the group’s values and practices allowed it to embrace the spiritual limitations on women’s liberation (as articulated by the aforementioned broadside) without being as constrained by the practical limitations seen in many branches of Christianity, Judaism, and the Jesus Movement. However, while the organization’s practices in many ways transcended gender-based restrictions, it did so within the boundaries of a socially conservative worldview and not out of any interest in the 3 Ariel Yaakov, Evangelizing the Chosen People: Missions to the Jews in America, 1880-2000 (University of North Carolina Press, 2000): 249-50. 4 For a balanced, concise history of the organization’s formation, see Yaakov, 233-44. 5Moishe Rosen and William Proctor, Jews for Jesus (Revell, 1974): 77-80. 6 Yaakov, 244. 7 Juliene G. Lipson, Jews for Jesus: An Anthropological Study, Revised (Ams Pr Inc, 1990): 28. 5 women’s liberation movement. Considering the body of scholarship addressing the historical relationship between feminism and religion, I seek to complicate this understanding with a descriptive analysis of the way Jews for Jesus exercised relatively progressive roles for women without embracing an ideologically feminist mindset. In the course of my research, I mined Jews for Jesus literature (including historical accounts), contemporary broadsides, newsletters, and newspaper and magazine articles for notes about the women members during the early days. I also conducted interviews with two founding members, Susan Perlman and Lyn Bond, who shared their recollections and impressions as women at the center of the movement. In the end, I found that the various sets of values and traditions that Jews for Jesus members brought to the table created a far more complex relationship than the majority of historiographical literature on religion and feminism would predict. In 1968, radical feminist Mary Daly published The Church and the Second Sex, which proposed reforms to Catholicism to address the contradictions she described between the subjugated role of women in the Church and the Christian teachings on equality and dignity for all. Religion and feminism were at odds but, she suggested, not permanently so. Over the next few years, however, Daly grew disenchanted with the church and in 1973 published Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation in which she abandoned hope for reforming Christianity; the male-centered teachings, she argued, were too central to be eradicated, and the patriarchal tradition could only be dismissed as inherently oppressive.8 This extreme perspective on feminism and religion, argues American religious history scholar Ann Braude, has come to be viewed as the norm in scholarship about second-wave feminism. The predominant historical narratives rarely mention religion except to emphasize a feminist rejection of religion and a religious rejection of feminism. However, Braude suggests, 8Ann Braude, Jon Butler, and Harry S. Stout, Women and American Religion (Oxford University Press, 2000): 112-5. 6 this understanding is the product of a polarized atmosphere in which “many leaders (and future historians) of women’s liberation emerged out of a youthful avant-garde of the New Left who often saw religion as part of the established order they hoped to overturn” and overlooks a significant historical relationship between feminism and religion. Examining the intersection of these two enormously important—and often divisive—cultural forces, she hopes, can help “dispel the idea that faith and feminism are necessarily antithetical”.9 I seek to add to the conversation that Braude calls for, but avoid the trap of oversimplifying the issue by creating two camps: religious communities that embraced feminism, and religious communities that opposed feminism. Instead, I hope to emphasize the complexities of this relationship by examining the role of women in a group that occupied a very specific niche in the religious community, the evangelical organization Jews for Jesus. In order to create a clear portrait of the factors influencing how the members of Jews for Jesus viewed gender, we must first understand Messianic Judaism, Hebrew Christianity, and how Jewish believers in Christ have historically fit into Christianity and Judaism. Dan Sherbok-Cohn, a Reform Rabbi and theologian, traces this history in great detail and finds that up until the birth of the Hebrew Christian movement in the early 19th century in Great Britain, Jews who professed faith in Christ generally assimilated and were considered Christian converts.