America's most famous feminist talks about one subject she left out of her new book. It's been almost 30 years since Gloria Steinem, a mid-Westerner raised by her divorced gentile mother to identify with the Judaism of her father, donned a Playboy bunny's bushy tail and infiltrated the Hugh Hefner mansion to gain attention as a serious journalist. By the late 60s, she had switched gears; with her blond good looks and aviator glasses, she had become a glamorous and self-assured symbol of the women's movement in America, in which she distinguished herself as a co-founder of Ms. magazine and as an organizer and speaker. Like so many 60s media figures, Steinem in the 90s has abandoned flamboyance for a softer image and politics for an eclectic pop psychology. The trademark glasses are gone. The political stridency is muted. The 58-year-old Steinem, who could still fit into her erstwhile bunny suit without much struggle, has moved into the lucrative self-help market. Only recently, Steinem made gossip-mongers gawk when her torrid love affair with U.S. News & World Report publisher Mort Zuckerman hit the skids. Now, she's become a best-selling author, with "Revolution From Within: A Book of Self-Esteem." Already several weeks on the New York Times's best sellers list, Steinem's book argues that one cannot hope to better the world via political movements without first learning to value oneself. Predictably, this inwardly directed revelation has opened Steinem to charges that she has deserted the women's movement.
She denies them. "When I was a journalist, people often said What's a nice journalist like you doing in a movement like this?' Now it's What's a nice activist like you doing with internal concerns like these?' I have a feeling that at bottom there's fear. Talking about self-esteem is really very radical. In South Africa, (Black-consciousness activist) Steve Biko was killed for it. There are a lot of structures out there that rest on their ability to undermine our self-authority." It's hard to envision how Steinem's book could pose a threat to anything. "Revolution From Within" is a pleasant, uplifting read, and it has a little something for nearly everyone: snatches of narrative, bits and pieces of essays, insightful anecdotes about individual men and women Steinem has encountered and befriended over the years, moments of tantalizing personal confession, and meditative exercises aimed at improving one's sense of self-worth. One thing missing is an indication that Steinem has learned to affirm her own sense of Jewishness, or specific insight into the challenges Jews have faced maintaining their own self-esteem. For that, one has to confront the author herself. "My father's family was the Jewish half of my heritage," she explains. "My parents were the mixed marriage of their generation, which means that both families disapproved. They first got married secretly, and remarried publicly, which caused my father to always refer to my mother as his second wife. "The thing I remember most clearly is that my mother and her Jewish mother-in-law who became the first female member of a school board in Ohio loved each other enormously. I think sometimes my mother married my father because she loved his mother. "It was from my mother not my father that I got my sense of Jewish identity. She would teach me. I remember… I must have been very little… it was during World War II, and she sat me down and said there would be a radio show about the concentration camps, and this is something you should know about. Not to terrify me, but just so I would know that it happened." Possibly because her Jewish identity was not very sharply defined, Steinem has rarely believed her Jewishness, such as it was, worked against her personally or professionally. She says she has frequently encountered anti-Semitism from the fundamentalist Christian right, which often characterizes feminism as a Jewish plot to undermine the Christian family. But she has not experienced the same affronts suffered by Jewish feminists like Letty Cottin Pogrebin and Andrea Dworkin, who have reported that the women's movement itself was once virtually riddled with anti-Semitism, characterized by JAP-bashing and hostility to Israel. Steinem believes that the women's movement has had its own consciousness raised about anti-Semitism. "The heartening thing now," she says, "is that I notice within the women's movement, when there are lists of types of prejudice made, anti-Semitism is included. That wasn't true 15 or 20 years ago." Steinem agrees with Pogrebin that the hatred of women and of Jews is similar. JAP-bashing, says Steinem, has become the classic meeting point of anti-Semitism and misogyny. It comes, she says, from a perception of both women and Jews as being too powerful. "These two things come together in a very sinister way," she says. "It's as if it's fair game, that Jewish American Princesses are so privileged and powerful you can say anything. For a while women shrank from it. Now, I think it's more likely to be taken on." Steinem has little use for the Bible, and despite the efforts of trailblazers like Rachel Adler, she does not think that Orthodox Judaism and feminism will ever be able to reach an accommodation. Despite these reservations, Steinem apparently believes that Judaism provides a measure of sustaining self-esteem still wanting in the women's movement. "While researching the book," she says, "I looked and looked for what I'm sure must exist but was unable to find: self-esteem studies that trace the difference between a religion that tells you you are intrinsically sinful versus one that tells you you are chosen. Clearly we would not have been able to survive these thousands of years without that kind of internal self- esteem."