Judged by the liberal civic values inculcated in American Jews, such a system could be regarded only as unjust. As Amer ican citizens and good liberals, Jewish women were taught that all people were entitled to equal rights; that communities should be structured democratically, with no one excluded from participation; and that privileges ought to be awarded fairly on the basis of merit. Where reality fell short of the ideal, the model of the Civil Rights movement and the assertion of Black Power demonstrated how a disenfranchised group can confront a discriminatory system and force it to change.
The critique of halakhah and the efforts both to mend it where it harmed or excluded women and to supplement it where it did not address women are among the earliest themes of feminist Judaism. !” The activists on this issue were modern Ortho dox and learned Conservative women. I wrote the much reprinted essay“The Jew Who Wasn't There,” as an Orthodox woman in 1971.18 The first Jewish women’s group to place feminist themes on the American Jewish agenda, Ezrat Nashim, was an offshoot of the New York Havurah and had many Conservative Jewish members. Its members lobbied at the 1972 national meeting of the Rabbinical Assembly of the Conservative movement and distributed a manifesto calling for equal participation in Jewish life and ritual. They also provided the first nationally known model of a Jewish women’s community at prayer.
Early in 1973, under the sponsorship of the North American Network of Jewish Students, a national Jewish women’s conference was held in New York . Five hundred women attended, among them a number of Orthodox women, including the keynote speaker , Blu Greenberg . One of the most electrifying experiences of the conference was Shabbat worship for women only, led by members of Ezrat Nashim. Most of the attendees had never before heard women lead prayers or chant from the Torah or seen women wear a tallit, nor had they had ever experienced themselves as full participants in the service. Women who had never touched a Torah scroll before were called up for their first aliyot. They wept, and the congregation wept with them.
Participation was revelatory on many levels. Women experienced new spiritual dimensions in communal worship. They emerged with an enhanced sense of Jewish competence, a hunger