TORONTO — Twenty years ago, Francine Zuckerman’s film Half the Kingdom explored Jewish feminism, a project with roots in a 1983 conference on the role of women in Judaism.

Rabbi Elyse Goldstein

The topic was considered very controversial at the time, recalled Rabbi Elyse Goldstein at a recent 20th anniversary event.

But she derives hope from the fact that baby namings for Jewish girls – an innovation shown in the movie – have become “normative,” and from other changes in recent years.

Rabbi Goldstein, director of Kolel, the Adult Centre for Liberal Jewish Learning, was part of a panel discussion celebrating the film’s 20th year and putting it in context 10 years after the last anniversary event.

The Nov. 30 program, a sold-out evening organized by Kolel at the Bloor Cinema, was titled “Half The Kingdom: the next generation.”

Along with Rabbi Goldstein, panelists who appeared in the film with her included journalist Michele Landsberg, University of Ottawa professor Naomi Goldenberg, and Concordia University associate professor Norma Joseph, who is also a CJN columnist.

Representing the younger generation were novelist Alison Pick, Rabba Sara Hurwitz, an Orthodox religious leader who made headlines when she was ordained last year by Rabbi Avi Weiss, and Rabbi Miriam Margles of the Danforth Jewish Circle, who co-founded an organization in the United States that brings together Jewish leaders and Palestinians.

Zuckerman also spoke, and actor Marilyn Lightstone moderated the panel.

Alice Shalvi, who won the prestigious Israel Prize for her work in advancing women’s rights, said in a video from Israel that the Orthodox rabbinic establishment there still shows no indication of becoming more open, lenient or tolerant.

However, she added, there are more opportunities for women to practise their Judaism. A former president of the Masorti movement’s Schechter Institute – a departure from her Orthodox background – Shalvi said it has been extremely gratifying to be accepted as both religious and feminist.

Likewise, Joseph recalled the anger she expressed in the film at being told there was no such thing as an Orthodox feminist.  “I’m no longer an oxymoron,” she said.

Goldenberg, an atheist, recalled a scene of women praying at the Kotel. “Even though I’m a Jewish secularist, the power of that wall is so important.”

But she denounced the “sexism enforced by male violence”  at the Kotel, referring to shouting and even chair-throwing by haredi men.

As well, she said, a scene that showed Women in Black “standing up for justice for non-Jews [Palestinians]” moved her. “I haven’t seen that in a long time, and that used to be a tremendous part of secular Judaism.

“How did it happen that Jewishness got reduced to being religious?” Goldenberg replied to an audience member who said there has been a “killing off” of the secular community.

Joseph clarified that secular Jews “had to do Jewish… you couldn’t just declare it.”

Landsberg lamented the loss of dynamism that was evident in the film. At that time, she said, “You could be a self-respecting strong feminist, and still have a rightful, prideful place within the Jewish community. I feel that’s diminished tremendously.”

She said she was disheartened by the “extent of patriarchal sexism” in Israel as well as the path that Canadian Jewry has taken in terms of self-definition.

“It used to be a point of pride that Jews argued and debated,” Landsberg said. “Now we’re not allowed to question. Everything has hardened. Wherever on the spectrum you stand, there’s anger and animosity towards Jews who don’t have the same view.”

Rabbi Goldstein took a more positive view, recalling her first position in Toronto as assistant rabbi at Holy Blossom Temple in 1983. “It was exhilarating and excruciating, and unbelievably lonely. I was an exotic specimen, and people would come to Holy Blossom to see me – not to hear me, not to learn from me, but to see me.”

Among unexpected milestones in the past decade, Rabbi Goldstein was elected the first woman president of the Toronto Board of Rabbis and was involved in organizing an all-female cantors’ concert. As well, she noted, a female rabbi was hired to teach rabbinics at the Anne and Max Tanenbaum Community Hebrew Academy of Toronto.

She also mentioned the Toronto Partnership Minyan, an Orthodox group that gives women Torah honours, including aliyot.

“So, honestly, I feel more optimistic than I felt 10 years ago,” she said.

Rabbi Margles expressed gratitude to the women who appeared in the movie, and to their generation.

She expressed concern, however, that advances have been in one direction only, and that qualities associated with women, such as emotional intelligence, spiritual attunement and empathy, are dismissed as “touchy-feely.”

Pick, whose paternal grandparents renounced their Judaism in the wake of the Holocaust, has converted to Judaism, and “was able to step into a ready-made liberal Judaism in a way I in some ways take for granted,” she said.

Her hope for Jewish women, particularly her young daughter, is that there will be an even greater tolerance for and acceptance of diversity in the Jewish community.

New York-based Rabba Hurwitz said that, a year before her ordination, she and her learning partner were told by the head of the all-male yeshiva where they had been meeting that they could no longer meet there. The incident indicated “how far we have come [and] how much further we still have to go,” she said.

She said she hopes women will continue to have a sense of belonging, and will “be able to take their textual knowledge… for it to be goal-oriented. I’m hoping for a time when women and men can sit together at a beit midrash in the Orthodox community and learn side by side.”