The Response anthology represented a transformative moment in the history of Jewish feminism. In February of 1973, over 500 U.S. and Canadian women had come together at the first Jewish Women’s Conference in New York City. The size and diversity of the gathering were strong evidence that we were not just disaffected individuals. We were a movement. The anthology attested that we had achieved critical mass as an intellectual movement. We had something to say – indeed, many things to say. The anthology gathered together previously published work and new work, the work of political theorists, community activists, Judaica scholars, poets, educators, social scientists, and historians. And there was Judith Plaskow who, to my immense admiration, declared herself a theologian. I hadn’t yet understood that I had been writing theology, too. The Orthodox men who took me to task called it “ignorant drivel” or “pernicious garbage,” so I knew I was hitting a nerve, but I wasn’t exactly clear how.

I had two articles in the anthology: “The Jew Who Wasn’t There,” which had been first published in 1971 in the West Coast magazine Davka, and “Tum’ah and Ritual purity Taharah,” borrowed from the forthcoming Jewish Catalog (1973). “Tum’ah and Taharah” got written because I was asked a question about menstruation and mikveh (ritual bath) on a panel at the 1973 Jewish Women’s Conference, and I declined to answer with a sound-bite. The organizers offered a room and a time, and I said I would answer the question then. When I headed for the assigned room, I was stunned to see women lined up in the hallways, overflowing the room. We had to find a larger space. But I talked about the ideas I had been thinking through, and presented a very different way of thinking about purity and impurity. After I had spoken, Sharon Strassfeld came up to me and asked if I would put the presentation in writing for the Jewish Catalog. That was how I came to write it down.