Clare Kinberg
Jewish and Feminist Activist
A) What qualities make the nominee deserving of the Z3 Bridge Builder Award?
Using Jewish institutions to connect with those too often on the margins of Jewish communal life has been an animating and consistent focus of Clare’s life and work. She has brought her organizing, editing, writing and leadership skills to multiple initiatives at the national and local level over her roughly 50 years of activism. At the national level, Clare was central in the creation of, and then the managing editor for, Bridges: A Journal for Jewish Feminists and Our Friends (1990-2011). She also had important leadership roles in New Jewish Agenda, and was on the founding board of Brit Tzedek v'Shalom: Jewish Alliance for Justice and Peace. Locally, Clare used her skills as a librarian and educator at three congregations in Ann Arbor, Michigan (Reconstructionist, Reform and Conservative). And currently, Clare continues in her role as publisher and editor of the Washtenaw Jewish News (WJN)—a communal newspaper for the Jewish community of Ann Arbor, MI and the surrounding communities.
What these initiatives share tells the story of Clare’s inclusive approach to building community. They all involve bringing people together in a specifically Jewish context who might otherwise be doing their work either isolated from each other in denominational and institutional silos of Jewish life, or perhaps not thinking that their concerns are of interest to the wider Jewish community. It is no coincidence that the magazine to which Clare devoted over two decades of her life, Bridges, shares the name with the award being given by the Z3 Project.
The wide range of authors published in Bridges illustrates Clare’s commitments. As examples, an ongoing column “Working Class Words” (starting Spring 1991) and a special section “Making our Lives Visible: Poor and Working-Class Women Speak out (Spring/Summer 1992) highlight Clare’s and the Editorial Board’s insistence on listening to Jewish stories around class and poverty not often told in other settings. Similarly, in a focus section titled “Sephardi and Mizrahi Women Write about their lives” (Winter 1997/98) and an issue titled “Writing and Art by Jewish Women of Color” (Summer 2001) Clare brought together authors and stories that told of the complex and varied nature of Jewish life and experience around ethnicity and race. These were not Jewish stories often highlighted in Jewish publications of that era, and Clare was instrumental in bringing them together. Clare steered Bridges to include important articles about lesbian and gay Jewish life, about gender, about sexual abuse, and about the range of concerns for Jewish feminist activists.
Clare’s work with New Jewish Agenda, as a national conference organizer and as a founder and leader of its national Feminist Task Force, similarly reflects Clare’s commitment to bringing people together, and increasing participation in Jewish communal life. As a multi-issue, progressive Jewish organization, NJA (which identified as “a Jewish voice among progressives, and a progressive voice among Jews”) involved the continual building, and rebuilding of bridges—both within the organization where it’s focus on multiple issues inevitably raised conflicts around priorities, as well as outside the organization to the broader Jewish and progressive worlds in which NJA aimed to operate. Clare’s willingness to stay in dialogue despite (or perhaps because of) differences, her desire to understand the motivations and concerns of varied perspectives, and her deep commitment to listening to and respecting others in community, were central to her success in these endeavors.
Clare wrote about her growth into activism in a specifically Jewish communal context in an essay for Tablet Magazine called “My American Bundism” published in 2017. She wrote of discovering the history of the Bund in books, outside of her Reform Jewish upbringing and of her excitement in finding a Jewish tradition that reflected her interests: “But it wasn’t until I read the work of poet Irena Klepfisz, who did grow up in a Bundist community, in the anthology of lesbian writing, Nice Jewish Girls, that I began to see that my own idiosyncratic labor, feminist, lesbian, Jewish writing and activism had solid antecedents, first in Eastern Europe and then in the United States.”
Clare’s more recent local work in Washtenaw County, Michigan reflects these same qualities. She has used her library and educational skills at three different congregations—each of a different religious denomination. In 2019, Clare added the role of publisher and editor of the Washtenaw Jewish News (WJN) to her attempts to build an inclusive Jewish community. Distributed free of charge throughout the County, the contents of WJN have included a wide range of voices—with Clare acknowledging her desire to supplement the important and recurring articles about activities of the legacy Jewish institutions (Congregations, Federation, etc.) by bringing in more voices of people creating Jewish religious and cultural activities in smaller and less public spaces.
B) In what ways has the nominee demonstrated exceptional leadership and commitment to their work in bridging divides?
Clare’s twenty-one years as managing editor for Bridges: A Journal for Jewish Feminists and Our Friends (1989-2011), is illustrative of her leadership. In the words of Irena Klepfisz, a member of Bridges’ founding Advisory Editorial board: “In terms of Bridges: I believe Clare's editing was remarkable. She reached out and published Jewish women--both gay and straight--who were rooted in a variety of communities and published work in translation and in the original Yiddish, Hebrew, German, Spanish, Ladino, French and German. She had special issues and was probably the only editor who began actively recognizing and giving voice to Jewish women of color. She recognized the various expressions of Jewish identity in its various forms of secularism and in observance. I can't think of another editor more committed to finding voices that were overlooked and silenced than Clare.”
As publisher and editor of the Washtenaw Jewish News (WJN) since December 2018—a newspaper published 10 time/year for the Jewish community in and around Ann Arbor, Michigan—Clare has similarly worked diligently to build an institution that expands the boundaries of the Jewish community. As WJN’s Mission Statement expresses it: “The Washtenaw Jewish News is completely independent and is not affiliated with any one program, organization, movement or point of view within Jewish life, but endeavors to give expression to all facets of that life.”
This has required engaging and representing the wide range of opinions in the Jewish community on many issues, but perhaps the past year since the October 7 Hamas attack, resulting in the death of over 1,200 people and kidnapping of more than 240 people—mostly civilians in both cases—followed by the Israeli military response resulting in tens of thousands of Palestinian deaths—also mostly civilians—has been the most challenging. Throughout, Clare has had the personal courage to publish articles with widely divergent views. She has been strongly criticized and has published strong letters that she received objecting to her editorial decisions. In her “From the Editor Column” in the June 2024 WJN, Clare wrote: “The important thing for me is that more and more of us are digging into where we stand, and why. Our differences are not a fracture if we are listening to each other. If we are listening and speaking with humility, then it is makhloket l’shem shamayim, “a debate/dispute for the sake of heaven.”
C) How has the nominee's work impacted the Jewish community and beyond?
Clare’s efforts have created specific and important impacts both nationally and in her local Michigan community. The bridges that Clare helped build remain, even as they are constantly being rebuilt.
As written in the Jewish Women’s Archives: "For just over twenty years, Bridges drew the margin to the center, at turns foregrounding lesbian, leftist, working-class, diasporic, non-white, and non-traditional Jewish women’s worlds, bound together in dialogue, in citation, and in critical engagement." These various identities and understandings of Jewish life remain as relevant today as they were when Clare worked on Bridges. While is some areas, great progress has been made in making these bridges wider and more permanent, in other areas the gaps are perhaps greater now than before. But Clare, and the many people she worked with, created a two-decade long initiative that was part of moving the Jewish community forward on many feminist issues—and pushing for a progressive understanding of how to understand those issues.
Irena Klepfisz, who both served on Bridges Editorial Advisory Board and was published in the magazine multiple times describes Clare’s impact: “She did this in her life--always studying tradition and giving space to the new in expression and in content and point of view. This meant that the "friends" in the subtitle (A Journal for Jewish Feminists and Our Friends) were sometimes non-Jews or perhaps or openly identified as Jewish but not-Feminist. She continued giving voice to those committed to peace and reconciliation in Israel and Palestine. I remember how eager she was to have Rita Falbel and my interview with Renee Applebaum, a founder of the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo in Argentina. Renee was a founder who had lost a daughter. Clare has always challenged herself and pushed boundaries of what was relevant for Jewish women--feminist or not.”
Certainly, Clare’s work with New Jewish Agenda and Brit Tzedek V’Shalom have left an impact on Jewish life and our understanding of Jewish community. Despite the institutional resistance to these organizations in their times, Clare continues to live as a Jewish activist in progressive spaces, and a progressive activist in Jewish spaces. Clare’s legacy in this area is not just of commitment and continuity, but of an insistence on belonging and of communal acceptance. Today’s progressive feminist and peace and justice organizations in the Jewish community are built on the work that Clare, with others, contributed over many years.
Clare’s work with the Washtenaw Jewish News remains ongoing, and wonderfully illustrates her impact. She has created a community forum that allows for the voicing of varied, even oppositional, opinions. She has exposed herself to criticism for her decisions, but been transparent in sharing the criticism, and her responses. In the WJN, Clare is building the kind of community she has worked to create through her previous endeavors—open, varied, honest, and bridging the incredibly wide range of experiences and views found among Jews.