No More Nice Girls: Women’s Liberation, Cosmopolitan Jews, and Expanding the Boundaries of American Intellectual Life

In the 1970s, feminist writers challenged the axiom that the intellectual vocation was inherently masculine, along with its corollary—that a woman needed to write like a man to be taken seriously. Many of these women, like the New York intellectuals before them, were secular Jews. Jewish women were so prominent in second-wave feminism that the eminent intellectual historian David Hollinger has wondered, “In what sense was Women’s Liberation… a Jewish story?” This talk, part of a new project in i