Jewish Feminists Warn East Berlin Confab May Repeat Mexico City

A group of Jewish feminists warned today that a Soviet-sponsored “conference of socialist feminists” scheduled for East Berlin in October may be used as a forum for anti-Jewish, anti-Israel and anti-Zionist activities as was the recent United Nations-sponsored International Women’s Conference in Mexico City.

The New York Chapter of the Jewish Feminist Organization, a national group which defines itself as defending the rights of Jewish women everywhere, declared at a press conference that it will serve “as a watch guard for the Jewish community to work to forestall the manipulation of feminists everywhere as pawns” in the Arab attack on Israel. The group began circulating a petition denouncing the “Declaration of Mexico” for attacking Zionism and Israel and linking them with colonialism, imperialism and apartheid.

In attacking the Mexico declaration, the JFO petition said: “We find this document offensive in its particulars” because it subverted the purpose of the conference “subordinating women’s concerns to the political machinations and internecine struggles of the United Nations.”

The petition also declared “that an international women’s conference should have been asked to endorse a view equating the two is not only an outrageous distortion of history, but further evidence that the universal oppression of women has been negated and trivialized by those national and international organizations which sponsored it.”

“Zionism is nothing more than the Jewish people’s national liberation movement,” Anne Mintz, a JFO board member, declared, “We, the New York Jewish Feminists Organization, believe in our liberation as Jews, as well as our liberation as women.”

She stressed that “We as Jewish feminists are tired of prostituting ourselves to such dangerous rhetoric as has recently been issued in the guise of feminism: we are tired of submitting ourselves as victims to such political ploys in the arena of world affairs; we are tired of being used by anyone trying to further his, her or their own means.”