Gloria Steinem never forgot her Jewish roots

Gloria Steinem did not grow up in a synagogue. She did not have a bat mitzvah. She was raised, for the most part, without religion at all. But when it came to antisemitism, she never hesitated.

“Never in my life have I identified as a Christian,” she once said, “but wherever there is antisemitism, I identify as a Jew.”

Steinem, the writer, organiser and most recognisable face of America’s second-wave feminist movement, died last week at her home in New York City. She was 92. 

A statement posted to her Instagram account said she passed peacefully, surrounded by loved ones.

Steinem spent more than five decades fighting for women’s equality, co-founding Ms. Magazine, helping establish the National Women’s Political Caucus and turning lived experience into political force. In 2013, President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom. But to remember Steinem only as a feminist icon is to miss half the story. 

Her Jewish heritage, complicated and largely secular, shaped how she understood oppression itself.

Steinem was born in Toledo, Ohio, to a Jewish father, Leo, and a Protestant mother, Ruth Nuneviller. Leo was a charming, restless man who sold antiques on the road. He left the family when Steinem was 10. Her older sister was away at college, and Steinem, still a child, became the primary carer for her mentally fragile mother.

She later reflected that she “became a grown-up too early, from ten to 17, a small person responsible for a big person”.

It was Ruth, the non-Jewish parent, who gave Steinem her sense of Jewish identity. Steinem told The Forward in 2015 that her father rarely discussed his heritage, but her mother presented Judaism as something positive. More significantly, Ruth made sure her young daughter understood what was happening to Jews in Europe. Steinem recalled her mother urging her, aged about eight, to listen to a radio dramatisation of Jewish suffering under the Nazis. According to JTA, Ruth told her, “This is going on in the world, and we must know about it”.

That early moral instruction stuck. 

Steinem came to see women’s liberation not as a cause unto itself but as part of a broader fight against every system that sorted human beings into superior and inferior groups. At Cornell University in 1981, she argued the oppression of women and racial minorities were interdependent and could only be fought together.

She was articulating intersectionality years before the term existed, and she never stopped. 

As The Conversation noted, her landmark 1969 essay for New York Magazine argued that if the women’s movement could form alliances with the less radical middle classes, it should be easy to do the same with “poor women of all colours”.

That same logic led her to defend Jewish self-determination. In 1975, she joined 60 prominent women, including her sometime rival Betty Friedan, in condemning the United Nations General Assembly resolution equating Zionism with racism.

What Steinem did not know until well into adulthood was that her activism had a Jewish precedent close to home.

Her paternal grandmother, Pauline Perlmutter Steinem, kept kosher, raised four sons in Toledo, and quietly blazed her own trail. As Kveller said, Pauline became the first woman elected to the Toledo Board of Education, served as president of her local chapter of the National Council of Jewish Women and in 1908 travelled to Switzerland as a delegate to the International Council of Women. Some historians believe she may have been the first Jewish woman elected to public office in the United States. During the rise of the Nazis, she worked to rescue family members from Europe. Steinem and her sister later donated a catalogue of jewellery seized from Nazi victims to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Pauline’s honour. 

Nobody told Steinem any of this growing up. She knew her grandmother as a wonderful woman who kept a kosher table, not as someone who had addressed Congress. 

“Different measurements of success,” Steinem once observed. 

Her strongest connection to Jewish ritual was personal rather than institutional. For more than two decades, she joined a small circle of Jewish feminists in New York for an annual women’s Pesach seder. The founding premise, as one of the women, Letty Cottin Pogrebin recalled, was simple. Women mattered. Their roles in the Exodus story and their ongoing struggle for equality in Jewish life deserved acknowledgment. 

Steinem lived long enough to see many of her victories reversed, most painfully the 2022 overturning of Roe v Wade.

But throughout her life, she didn’t believe in slowing down, or indeed, retreating. 

At a packed Town Hall event in Melbourne in 2016, a young woman asked her what the women’s movement had done wrong. Steinem’s answer was characteristically direct: “I think we’ve been too nice,” she said according to The Conversation. 

She married once, at 66, to South African activist David Bale, who died of lymphoma three years later. She had no biological children.

Steinem told the New York Times in a joint 2015 interview with her friend, the late Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, that kindness and empathy mattered enormously, and finding some point of connection. 

She spent a lifetime proving it.