“How could you?!” Esther screamed.
“What? What are you talking about?” I asked.

Last week, a group of JWA staffers gathered on our lunch break to watch the HBO documentary Gloria: In Her Own Words.

As second wave feminism gathered peak velocity forty years ago, the late bombastic and behatted Congresswoman (D-NY) Bella Abzug persuaded Congress to designate August 26th as Women’s Equality Day. It recognized the 19th Amendment to the Constitution that in 1920 gave all U.S. women the right to vote.

As I watched HBO’s incisive documentary Gloria: In Her Own Words, one irony became clear instantly: Gloria Steinem is an icon who is utterly uncomfortable with the whole idea of being an icon.

On August 18, 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution prohibiting any citizen to be denied the right to vote based on sex was ratified. Today, 91 years later, we take a look back at the Jewish women who dedicated their lives to women's suffrage in America and around the world. This is by no means a comprehensive list; so many Jewish women fought for suffrage, this is merely a sample of the stories we know.

How many more stories have yet to be told?

Last weekend the eighth and final Harry Potter movie hit theaters. In the Harry Potter series, J.K. Rowling created a magical alternate universe.

Her writings are archived in the Minnesota Historical Society. The Minneapolis Public Library has a chair in her name.

I recently had the pleasure to sit down for brunch with Jaclyn Friedman, Executive Director of Women, Action and the Media and co-editor of Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and a World Without Rape. Jaclyn Friedman is writer, speaker, activist, and rising star in the current feminist community.

Jaclyn Friedman is a 'Jewess with Attitude' who talks the talk and walks the walk -- the Slutwalk, that is. Jaclyn Friedman, founder and the Executive Director of Women, Action & the Media, is a powerful voice in the current Feminist movement. Co-author of Yes Means Yes!: Visions of Female Sexual Power and A World Without Rape, she is particularly concerned with tearing down rape culture.

Brooklyn-based, ultra-Orthodox, Hasidic Jewish newspaper, Der Tzitung, has decided to rewrite history by photoshopping Hillary Clinton out of the photo of U.S. leaders receiving an update on the mission against Osama bin Laden (right). Why? Because the idea of a woman in the Situation Room was "too scandalous."

Last week, I had the great privilege of attending the conference “Women’s Liberation and Jewish Identity: Uncovering a legacy of innovation, activism, and social change.” (JWA was a conference sponsor, and you can check out Judith Rosenbaum’s response to the conference here!) As a research intern for Professor Joyce Antler, the conference convenor, this past summer, I spent hours reading short essays, activist statements, and poetry by many of the conference’s speakers, who were primarily Jewish women involved in feminist activism in the 1970’s and 1980’s. Seeing their words come to life as they spoke to an audience of peers, academics, and a few young feminists was enlightening, particularly as it provided me with a chance to rethink my own relationship to Jewish feminism as it relates to Jewish ritual practice.

This year I tried something new at my family’s Seder. We used a new Haggadah!

This delicious article in the Boston Globe had me pumping my feminist fist in the air! In a report on the Combined Jewish Philanthropies Women’s Philanthropy’s annual Pomegranate event held at Congregation Mishkan Tefilah in Chestnut Hill, MA, Beth Teitell reported that there were no "visible panty lines," or "VPLs."

Recently in The Forward, Jay Michaelson compared four characters from “Glee” to the “Four Children” from the Passover seder tradition. What I loved about the piece was Michaelson’s point that for young Jews, Jewish identity is one variable in a multi-variable identity that youth will embrace, when and if they find it meaningful. What bothered me about the piece was the language Michaelson used describing Rachel Berry, the analogous “Wise Child,” as an “irritating control freak” and “intolerable.” It was particularly difficult to read this because, well, I used to be Rachel Berry.

By now it's both a truth and a truism that the personal is political.

I first read the Joyce Antler’s book The Journey Home: How Jewish Women Shaped Modern America as an undergraduate, deep in the thrall of Jewish feminist academia.

Many years ago I was sitting in a kibbutz dining hall in the north of Israel. One of the older members, a woman, was reminiscing about the equality of the sexes that supposedly existed when the kibbutz was founded.

There’s a lot of buzz these days about Stephanie Coontz’s new book A Strong Stirring, an assessment of Betty Friedans’s 1963 manifesto The Feminine Mystique. It’s stirring up some personal memories of my own.