There are advantages to living in a small country. If I was in America or even England and saw that someone whose work I admire and whose blog I read regularly was speaking somewhere, chances are it would be 1,000s of miles away and I wouldn’t be able to get to it.
In Israel, on the other hand, when Danya mentions that she will be talking about her book, it’s happening 10 minutes drive away from my house, and I could go along and even did the full groupie thing and got her to sign my copy afterwards.
Seriously, though, something she said gave me a big hhizzuk which I will always be thankful for. I literally drank in feminism with my mother’s milk though I should note that my mother ע״ה would never have let me get away with using “literally” like that. I used to claim that I didn’t mean “literally” literally, but she wasn’t convinced., but when I was growing up in the 1970s, there was a very strong vibe in publications like Spare Rib that “only a women can be a feminist” which has ever since made me describe myself with half-hearted terms like “a supporter of feminism”.
So it made a big impression on me when Danya firmly contradicted that and said something to the effect of “feminism is for everybody”. From now on, I am out of the closet and identifying myself as a feminist, with no more weasling.
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