Birgit Seemann

Anarcha-feminism and Judaism - Some topics

I want to open the unexplored field of relations between the topics of Anarcha-feminism and Judaism. Anarcha-feminism is the answer to Western anarchism as a political project dominated by white American and European middle-class men. Till today most anarchist men and women want to free the public sphere but neglect the private sphere and family life.
In the history the most famous anarcha-feminists were Jewish women, for example in the United States and later in Europe Emma Goldman, in Germany and England the anarcho-syndikalist Milly Witkop-Rocker, the wife of Rudolf Rocker. The libertarian pacifist author Hedwig Landauer-Lachmann, who was married with Gustav Landauer, refused to close to the anarchist and feminist movements in Germany but connected women's lives with non-hierarchical Judaism at her poems. The writings of Emma Goldman, Milly Witkop-Rocker or Hedwig Landauer-Lachmann present various views on a female interpreted libertarian Messianic socialism.
In my lecture I want to discuss three topics: the "life-centered" base of Jewish religion with its matriarchal essentials, the emancipative influence of Jewish social traditions on the revolutionary change of society, and the critics especially on Christian and Capitalist patriarchy. Jewish anarcha-feminists don't look on "society" as a "system", "structure" or "production sphere" but as a multidimensional arrangement of human relations; they connect caring human life with every revolutionary vision and strategy.