See The Secret Jewish History Of Rosie The Riveter (Forward)
The world is about to change, thanks to heroes like Epstein victim Virginia Roberts Giuffre, who should not be defined solely by her victimhood, and who wrote this in her memoir before her mysterious and tragic death:
“When you grow up female, danger is everywhere….”
“But just because justice has been served in a handful of high-profile cases doesn’t mean we’ve solved the larger problem: a culture that tells girls their primary worth is to appeal to men; a culture that tells men that young girls are the ideal—the younger, as Epstein said, the better. I’m not saying those cultural trends cause most men to become child molesters. But I do believe that because of those societal forces, when a molester shows his face, many people tend to look the other way.”
― Virginia Roberts Giuffre, Nobody's Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice
While the world is on fire all around us, we can’t forget that so many of the catastrophic events we are confronting were designed and timed primarily to overshadow the Epstein files. Donald Trump literally broke the world to keep us from finding out the truth behind the shameful history of all the President’s men. It’s not working, but at the same time, we haven’t yet had the chance to fully absorb Epstein’s impact on our society, and Trump’s full involvement in this story. Still, even at this early stage, the Epstein saga has reignited the #MeToo movement and with each new revelation from the files and witnesses, our anger will only intensify over the coming months. With each passing day, countless independent journalists and amateur sleuths are crowdsourcing the millions of pages of files and coming up with more vivid descriptions of the disgusting patriarchy that Epstein exemplified.
The Epstein files are revealing the depths of a depraved system that has repeatedly failed to protect women and girls. Women who did speak out were not heard; instead their voices were suppressed. To quote The Guardian:
The Epstein files reveal a patriarchy in action. This is a world where the men are rich and powerful, and the women are not. The emails showcase the private behavior of a male ruling class, as they network, joke and trade information. Women exist at the periphery, tolerated because they organize the diaries of the busy men, they arrange food, they grace a table, they provide sex.1
I believe that when all the testimony is revealed and absorbed, the disruption will be monumental, and, if we can get beyond the initial period of grief and shock, ultimately positive.
A Seismic Shift
We are on the cusp of a seismic societal shift with regards to women in America. And when we look back at this second Trump presidency, with all the destruction he has wrought, the Epstein saga will have the greatest long-term impact.2
Sunday March 8 was International Women’s Day, commemorating a New York uprising of women wanting to unionize in 1908, and the later a women’s strike that sparked the Russian Revolution in 1917.
When I would ask my mother of blessed memory what she wanted for Mother’s Day, she would reply with a smirk, “Every day should be Mother’s Day.” And indeed, Women’s Day didn’t end on the 8th. All of March is Women’s History Month, and this year that month leaves us off on the doorstep of Passover, which begins on April 1. So before Women’s History Month ends next week, it makes sense to take a closer look at the historic significance of this Epstein Moment.
It’s fitting that it leads into Passover. For at no time have Jewish women traditionally felt more enslaved than in preparing for a holiday that demands so much work with so little appreciation.3
I recall my own mother, Miriam, who was from the transitional generation following the Great Immigration, born here in America to refugees from Czarist Russia. She had the honor of being liberated, but in a very liberated, Betty Crocker kind of way, by the dishwasher and the vacuum cleaner; plus she feared the judgment of her mother-in-law, who was one tough unleavened cookie, and who, fortunately, did not live close by. But as hard as she worked to clean and cook for weeks on end - and yes, we even had a carp in the bathtub as she prepared her gefilte fish from scratch. I helped, and took great pleasure in seeing the ingredients hit the chicken soup pot, including the neck, claws and pupik. No wonder I became a vegetarian!
And then came the baked goods. The cakes and cookies were, well, suitable for Passover consumption, but her Passover rolls were divine. Yes, I said rolls. They were “risen” but still unleavened because they were made with matzah meal instead of flour, along with plenty of egg. Eggs are the unofficial food of Passover, aside from matzah. And yes, there’s even egg matzah.
My mother would slave over the stove and then, with my sister, would serve the men and guests at the Seder table, even walking around with the basin for us to ritually wash our hands. She rarely complained about that, though I didn’t get the impression she enjoyed all the thankless, hard work. It’s just what a woman did.
Ironically, no biblical story celebrates the contributions of so many badass women as the liberation from Egypt, from Miriam, Moses’ sister, to Jocheved, his mother, to the Egyptian (or Hebrew) midwives, to Pharaoh’s daughter, to all the women who danced with their timbrels at the Red Sea. This all changed with the advent of feminism, which brought us Women’s Seders4, Miriam’s Cup5, which has become ubiquitous, and the marvelous music of Debbie Friedman, who sang of women dancing at the Red Sea.
So as Women’s History Month draws to a conclusion by leading us into Passover, let’s take a moment to look at where women stand in 2026, this Year of Epstein.
The Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security describes a Trump-led global backlash against women’s rights and gender equality. The Trump Administration’s gutting of USAID has been particularly harmful to women and families, and women have been disproportionately impacted by Trump’s immigration and trade policies too.6
And then there’s the decline of women in leadership positions.
According to Pew, at this moment there are 13 female heads of state in the world - it was 23 a decade ago. The current number includes Japan, where Sanae Takaichi became prime minister in the country’s last parliamentary elections and was summarily insulted by Donald Trump on her first state visit to the U.S. last week, with his idiotic locker-room Pearl Harbor joke, which was almost as insulting to the families of vets who died there as it was to the Japanese. At least Trump didn’t bring up Hiroshima, or the WW2-era mass incarceration of Americans of Japanese descent.
We can add to that lucky 13 the dozens of other nations that have had female leaders in the recent past, including such bastions of feminism as Mozambique and Bulgaria. The first was Sri Lanka, in 1960. In all, of the 193 United Nations members, 63 have ever had a female leader. The club of nations who have been led by women is surprisingly large. There have even been a handful of female dictators. But America is still looking on from the outside, and given recent history, it’s hard to imagine that changing any time soon.
America’s lack of a female president, sadly, can be blamed on the two R’s, Russia and religion.
For Russia, you’ll have to look back at the legacy of the report filed by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who passed away this weekend. Mueller showed conclusively that the Russians were instrumental in denying America its first female president. Don’t let Trump’s Big Lies about Mueller, or his despicable tweet following his death, distract you from the facts that Mueller uncovered.
Adam’s Better Half
As for religion, well, like so many of the world’s other social ills (like racism) the institutionalization of sexism can be traced back to Genesis:
Interestingly, Genesis 1:27 indicates that male and female were created simultaneously, perhaps even androgynously, which would have made it very hard for them to use a bathroom in a number of states. Commentators have tried to reconcile this depiction with a second version of the story in Genesis 2, where Eve is created out of Adam’s side (“rib” is a mistranslation), which again could have indicated an androgynous origin, or perhaps the world’s first conjoined twins.7 But in this account Eve goes on to take a role of subservience to Adam (Gen. 3:16) as her punishment for that little fruit-eating, snake-inspired caper.
That still leaves us with the woman from chapter 1, who disappears mysteriously but never is relegated to a submissive position. Folklore has ascribed to her the name of Lilith, and ancient sources are replete with stories about her.
See a large collection of sources here8 and see Judith Plaskow’s modern midrash based on the ancient formulations, The Coming of Lilith.
Our ancestors were both fascinated and scared to death over the prospect of a powerful, independent she-creature. In order to protect their newborns from being absconded by this cold-hearted demon, Jews buried magical bowls with Aramaic incantations in front of their homes.
So as soon as there was a woman, there was a demonized woman. Unlike other strong women who followed, from Hagar to Hillary, Lilith’s demonization was quite literal — she was turned into an evil spirit — and that demonization set a precedent for insecure baskets of testosterone like me to replicate until the end of time.
The long, slogging process of achieving equal status for women has been, in many respects, a process of Eve-tizing Lilith in the eyes of males; that is, domesticating Lilith by transforming her from demon to help-mate, while simultaneously transforming Eve from Betty Crocker into a post-feminist apron burner, unabashedly equal, with no more glass ceilings to shatter or even any idea that such ceilings ever existed. That transformation is not yet complete, but with #MeToo, the near misses of Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris and the possibilities of positive change when the Epstein dust finally settles - including a massive electoral rejection of the Old Boy culture that Trump has brought us - we might find ourselves right back at the place where God and original couple were at twilight of the Sixth Day.
At that instant, the apex of the Creation saga, the perfect balance between male and female was forged: male and female, distinct, powerful, and utterly equal. But before you could say “Shabbat shalom,” the balance was shattered and God called for a fateful cosmic do-over. It’s as if God couldn’t contemplate the implications of what God had wrought. Humanity’s first cold night produced divinity’s first cold feet, as God backtracked away from the unimaginably harmonious world that was about to be born.
God was about to forge this perfect male-female balance, and then rigged the system so Lilith would lose. Yes, God rigged it, not the Russians or Venezuelans. The glass ceiling was installed, and what was shattered was not that ceiling, but the harmony between man and woman and the unity between Adam’s two better halves, Lilith and Eve.
If the polls are to be believed, Lilith, Eve and Adam might just be coming closer to a new merger. In the coming midterms, America may once again take up the cause of empowering women, not by accident or by revolution, but by design. Not by might, not by power, but by the power of the vote.
Israel’s Retreat from Progress
Compared to Israel, America’s long been stuck in the Neanderthal age. But Israel is showing signs of heading back there.
Just to refresh our memory, let’s peruse some old posters from the pre-state period , as well as the early days of the state.
Not a single Suzie Homemaker is to be found. In iconic posters, especially those produced by the Shamir brothers, we find strong women with clenched fists, who weren’t just keeping the seat warm for males, like America’s Rosie the Riveter, they were literally parachuting in with the big boys - cue Hannah Senesh.
There is something to be said for Israel’s socialist origins. See this poster, where a couple who could pass for Adam and Lilith, awash in their worker’s utopia, proclaims, “How beautiful it is that we are a free people.”
Here’s a young Golda Meir, then still called Myerson, in a mayoral race, at around the same time that, in America, June Cleaver was bringing Ward his slippers and serving Brussel sprouts to the ‘Beve.
Look at the posters above and you’ll see a proud pioneer, a worker, an army recruiter, a Warsaw Ghetto fighter. None of them could have made the secretarial pool on Mad Men. While Americans were watching “And God Created Woman” and dreaming of Brigitte Bardot, and while Rat Pack dudes fondled and were objectifying their dames, Israel was enlisting and electing theirs.
Now I have no illusions of Israel’s ever having been an ideal society for women. Far from it. One could justifiably claim that America recently has lapped Israel many times over in the area of women’s rights, especially in the practice of Judaism.
And of late, Israel is going in the wrong direction.
A few years ago, when a new Israel government was sworn in (don’t ask me which, there have been a lot of them!), one Ultra-Orthodox newspaper tried to airbrush women out of the picture completely. See below, first the original photo and then the airbrushed version:
Even Golda, the gold standard for female achievement, was praised in her day primarily for masculine qualities, her rock solid cojones - David Ben Gurion famously described her as “the best man in his cabinet.”
It’s likely that a woman would not be able to be elected Prime Minister today, even with Israel’s indirect parliamentary system of choosing its leaders.
But Israel can still point to Golda and say, “We’re in the club,” and at this moment, America cannot.
Meanwhile, let’s hope the dads are doing their share of the Passover cleanup this week.
It’s time for men and women to join forces to defeat the Epstein Class, and send them back to the kitchen - I mean prison - where they belong.
And my mom’s wish will be fulfilled, and it will be Women’s Day, every day.
For some examples, see that article from the Guardian: “Sex and snacks, but no seat at the table: the role of women in Epstein’s sordid men’s club.” Here’s a snippet:
He expresses annoyance at the behaviour of a long-term girlfriend whom he accuses of “crying and whining” because he will not let her attend the dinners he organizes with powerful men. Somehow the women have not yet learned that they cannot expect to sit at the table. The women cannot have their own preferences; the women must always be ready to dance.
Admittedly, it is very hard to look beyond the destruction in just today’s headlines, to a better future that awaits us - and it assumes that we do not give in to despair and get out there to protest - and vote.
See this personal tribute by Mayim Bialik to her grandmother:
I miss my grandmother today. She was a woman who really knew how to clean. Give that 5- foot-tall, 5-foot-wide Hungarian balabusta a sponge in a kitchen and by nightfall, the sink would take on a luster unseen before her thick hands set to it. My grandmother lived a life of cleaning and cooking and sewing and caretaking in an apartment in the Bronx with my grandfather, his father (who had active Tuberculosis, by the way), and three daughters, the middle of whom was my mother. My mother learned to cook and clean from her mother, and passed on those skills to me. We spent many pleasant and productive Type-A Personality hours cleaning and organizing and washing my dolls’ clothes and darning socks (any other 36-year-old out there have a memory of darning socks on a wooden darning egg!? Didn’t think so!). It was a special time for us, and when I watched my grandmother clean our house when she visited, I saw myself and my mother as part of a long line of cleaning and cooking women who were destined to greatness in our own way.
At Pesach, the cleaning of a home is a challenge unlike any other time of the year. Every crumb must be unearthed, every bit of hametz eliminated and purged. Why the apparent obsessive-compulsiveness of halakhic Judaism at Pesach? We are not only searching for oats, rye, spelt, barley, and wheat and other non-Kosher-for-Passover ingredients and foods. We are searching for the parts of ourselves that may also be hiding and in need of purging.
…And how grateful I am that my Judaism can take my blessed grandmother’s dignity, and my mother’s skills, and my desire to be a person worthy of happiness and blessing in this world and the Next One and that same Judaism shows me every single day and every single Pesach that the world is not perfect until each person finds a way to make it so.
From a Women’s Seder Haggadah into:
From Center for Global Development: Women Have Been Disproportionately Harmed by Trump Administration Aid, Migration, and Trade Policies:
Outside of health, programs connected to women’s empowerment and gender-based violence have also been amongst the most eviscerated. For example, the administration cut $2.5 million for programs aimed at reducing and responding to sexual and gender-based violence in Haiti, and $20 million for victims of gender-based violence in Venezuela. Cuts extended worldwide including to work in war zones including South Sudan and Yemen.
Rashi’s comment on 1:27:
Some feminist interpretations of Lilith:
that’a a lot.. to be read several times.. in a perfect world men and women would compliment and empower each other in equitable cycles through a life..each phase of life makes demands on women in new ways sadly men have never learned how to share the burden to be nimble and adaptable to the changes. In modern society.. the insane, two working parents with kids life is not one of comfort and calm but the exact opposite .. chaos.. creating stress that never goes away..
Yeah. Sometimes I opt for longer-form pieces that work best being absorbed slowly. Not easy to do online. Even harder when our lives are so stressful, as you described!
Rabbi, that was an excellent article and I truly appreciate the Hebrew angle that comes with it. We have so many strong women here and so many dispicable rich white billionaires who do women no justice, but harm instead. I hope all involved with Epstein get the punishment they deserve here on earth and burn in hell in the afterlife. They are liars, cheaters and rapists who need severe repercussions and punishment for their actions , including our pedophile President himself.
Agreed!
Trump's tweet "Good, I'm glad he's dead. He can no longer hurt innocent people!" is a characteristic act of self-defining projection. This soulless swipe invites the poetic justice of becoming a frame for writers of his own obituary.
He is definitely soulless and has no morals nor conscience. He needs to be impeached. Perhaps he will get mortal repercussions from the Iranians that he undeniably deserves for his heinous actions!
Canada also had a female Prime Minister - Kim Campbell - June to Nov 1973 🇨🇦
Thank you Sally!
Thank you for honoring women in such a wonderful way. Excellent post! (fellow vegetarian here).
Rabbi, are you familiar with the "Mystical" interpretation of Genesis 1? I wonder if this whole Creation Story of Genesis 1 wasn't originally meant for the priestly class, sequestered (safely remote) behind the Temple walls, vs. the "people's" Creation Story of Genesis 2, which is general "fallen" everyday life..
Genesis 1 describes a very different, cosmic Creation, and its blessed human is One, just as G*d is One. This fits the Mystical Experience, before everything "descends" into human individualized (and sexualized) form.
I don't think the original writers anticipated their texts being popularized and easily shared...
Interesting take, Melinda. I’ve always been a fan of Genesis 2, which features a Creation based on relationship and human being as caretaker rather than conqueror. But the cosmic unity of chapter 1 cannot be denied. Particularly the egalitarian creation of man and woman.
"Conqueror." -- interesting.
I'm more familiar with the Mystical Revelation from Jesus"s (Jewish) teachings, and from my personal experience. Jesus seemed to be not at all interested in the"conqueror" position. He treated humans as equals -- including slaves and women. And his specific mystical teachings were subtle and hinted at, until John's Prologue. (He lived his teachings and taught in parables, rather than saying them as "theory").
But Moses also had the "Mystical Revelation" -- the most famous one in the Scriptures.
And Mysticism, when correctly expressed, IS relationship -- as Jesus tried to point out, before his message became twisted. Christianity, for the most part, is NOT what Jesus taught. And his Mysticism has been mostly forgotten in the West.