The Issue Is Power

The pieces in this collection are sometimes redundant or predictable on progressive Jewish and feminist issues, but they also convey bright flashes of originality. Writing on Jewish women and therapy, Kaye/Kantrowitz (co-editor of The Tribe of Dina ) offers some subtle insights into the complex relationship many Jewish women have with their ethnic/religious identity. She also argues that the myth of Jewish powerlessness perpetuated by Jews is as nefarious as the myth of Jewish power promulgated by anti-Semites. The strongest piece--on women and violence--is also the most troubling, from its implicit equation of violence against women with the Holocaust to its apparent espousal of vigilantism. But Kaye/Kantrowitz convinces that women should not be pacifists, as much through her articulate rage as through her marshaling of evidence of how endemic violence against women is in our society. She exhorts women who shun violence even in self-defense to ``imagine putting the knife in his flesh''--just the imagining alone is an empowering act, she says, in a world in which the legal/political/sexual deck is stacked against women. (Jan.)