“For 47 of my 48 years,” Milwaukee educator Dale Weiss said she had felt “a lot of shame about being Jewish.”
The primary reason, Weiss said in a recent interview, was that she had come to define herself as a person who works for social justice, fighting against racism, sexism, political oppression and economic injustice — and the Jews and Judaism she had known seemed to side with the opposition.
She had been bothered for a long time by what she saw as many Jews’ materialism and lack of concern for the poor; “the schism between the Jewish and African-American communities”; the ways “women are not included in the full range of Jewish religious experiences”; and Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, which many American Jews defend.
“How could I be Jewish and believe in justice when Jews don’t practice justice?” she said. “I didn’t know how I could reconcile these things.”
But she has found an unusual way to do this — by writing a doctoral thesis in which she interviewed seven Wisconsin Jewish women who are all social justice activists.
“I wanted to interview women from each expression of Judaism to understand their perspectives on working for social justice,” Weiss said.
Through friends, members of her dissertation committee at Cardinal Stritch University and “word of mouth,” she found women who defined their individual Jewish identities as Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionist, Jewish Renewal, secular and “mixed.” In their stories, she found her path back to Judaism.
Finding herself
The women ranged in age from 50 to 78 at the time Weiss interviewed them. She spent between five and seven hours with each in three different interviews. Each woman is identified in the dissertation by a first name, sometimes her real name, sometimes a fictitious one.
All of them worked outside the home, mostly in what Weiss called “helping professions”: education, social service, health care. All of them defined themselves as feminists; but interpreted that term differently.
Each had a different experience of growing up Jewish and encountering anti-Semitism and sexism. Some grew up in communities with high percentages of Jews and were shocked when they later discovered that Jews are a minority in the U.S. One grew up a member of “the only Jewish family in town” and encountered frequent expressions of anti-Semitism.
But all of these women equated being a Jew with working for social justice. They all cited the biblical passage “You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Exodus 22:20-21); said they were reminded of it many times when they were growing up and that it inspired their work in social justice causes.
Though this may seem commonplace to many Jewish activists, it was a revelation to Weiss. “Their stories really show what their experience of working for justice is: the kinds of struggles they deal with, how they define themselves, how they work out the contradictions,” she said.
Her work with them “reconciled the tensions I felt my whole life,” Weiss said. “I realized Judaism was broad enough to encapsulate a lot of different meanings of what it is to be a Jew…. I found myself in their stories.”
Weiss is a native of St. Louis who “didn’t grow up with a strong sense of what it meant to be Jewish.” She had attended a Reform synagogue’s Sunday School through confirmation, but her family’s Jewish involvement “was minimal.”
Nevertheless, she “always believed in God” and has been seeking to “deeply understand how people work, how life works.” Throughout her education (she also has a bachelor’s and two masters’ degrees) and her different residences (Des Moines and Seattle, before coming here about six years ago), she had been experimenting with different religions: reading about them, attending meetings of different groups.
While in her present job as dual language project coordinator for a Milwaukee elementary school, Weiss heard about the graduate program in education at Cardinal Stritch University. She found it appealing because of its “three prongs”: leadership, learning and service. She decided to interpret “service” to include social justice work.
She believes that “God gave me this topic” for her dissertation. She said the idea flashed into her head while she was talking on the telephone with a friend “and I knew it was the right topic.”
Completion of the dissertation not only brought her a doctor of education degree, but changed her relationship to the Jewish community. She has joined Congregation Shir Hadash (Reconstructionist) — “the first synagogue I’ve joined in a long time” — and wants to become more active in it.
“I like it because it’s small and open,” Weiss said. “It has room for everybody, whatever their belief system or theology. It has a strong belief in social justice. And women are included in everything.”
She also wants both to publish the dissertation she has written and to do more work on the subject. “I’d like to write a book of portraits of Jewish women working for social justice,” she said. “The subject warrants more attention.”
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