Originally Published by Religion News Service

(RNS) — Mainstream American Jewish institutions have vociferously condemned the pro-Palestinian protests roiling student campuses, throwing their support behind Israel and labeling all critics, even Jewish ones, as antisemitic.

On Thursday (April 25), the head of the Anti-Defamation League went so far as to suggest some of the activists on campus were Iranian proxies.

“Iran has their military proxies like Hezbollah, and Iran has their campus proxies like these groups, like Students for Justice in Palestine, Jewish Voice for Peace,” ADL chief Jonathan Greenblatt said on MSNBC.

But unconditional support for Israel and for Zionism, the national movement that established a homeland for Jews in Israel, has not always been a given. From the 1880s through to the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, American Jewish leaders were ambivalent, if not downright opposed, to the idea of a Jewish nationalism. It wasn’t until 1967 that they began to coalesce behind allegiance to Israel.

A new book by Babson College historian Marjorie Feld looks at the long history of American Jewish dissent on Israel, which, she argues, has increasingly been silenced by the mainstream U.S. Jewish establishment.

Feld’s book, “The Threshold of Dissent,” shows how, over the course of the past century, unconditional support for Israel became the de facto position of American Jewish institutions. 

That may be beginning to change as younger groups such as Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow mount their largest-ever demonstrations. For now these groups are still considered on the radical left.

College students — including many Jewish ones — believe they are witnessing Israeli forces committing a genocide in Gaza, one that is aided and abetted by an American president and Congress. To date, more than 34,000 Palestinians have been killed and vast swaths of the Gaza Strip are in ruins in response to Hamas’ Oct. 7 rampage in Israel.

Religion News Service spoke with Feld to ask her what she thought of the campus protests and where she sees the American Jewish community going. Feld has served on the Jewish Voice for Peace Academic Advisory Council and is also active in her Boston-area synagogue.

The Q&A was edited for length and clarity.

What do you see happening on college campuses?

Let me back up. After the Israeli election of 2022, many established mainstream American Jews were saying, we don’t think this represents the best of Israel or Israeli democracy. Many had shut their institutional Jewish doors to (hard-liners) like Bezalel Smotrich, who was serving in Benjamin Netanyahu’s Cabinet, and to his hateful rhetoric and ideologies.

After Oct. 7, nearly all those individuals had fallen completely behind Israel and said now is not the time to criticize Israel. This was very reminiscent of much of what I’m writing about in the last 150 years. And I think we’re living through a period where the threshold of dissent is at an all-time low. There are a lot of people with a lot of power who do not want an airing of this kind of dissent. So this crackdown on students is just breathtaking in its severity.

What drove American Jews to coalesce behind support for Zionism?

It’s a very good question.  I think that Zionism was a mobilizing force. It was a force that made American Jews feel good and distinct and comfortable in a largely Christian America. But you really have to start with the Holocaust and the very real fears, not just of destruction and attempted genocide, but of accusations of dual loyalties. Critics of American Zionism worried that American Jews would fall victim to accusations of dual loyalty that had a long antisemitic, xenophobic history; this is why they rejected Zionism. American Zionists felt strongly, though, that dissent on Israel weakened the unity of American Jews, and unity was absolutely paramount in the face of the horrors of the Holocaust.

You chronicle some of the chief enforcers of this allegiance to Zionism, such as the Anti-Defamation League.

The ADL has been a very conservative force grounded in McCarthyist fears of Jewish accusations of communism. That’s where it sort of found its initial bearings. The ADL since then has really acted as a force of surveillance. From the 1970s on forward, almost every organization that ever mentioned Arab rights, any invocation of the word “Palestinian,” was listed and often surveilled.

They joined forces with the American Jewish Committee and other Jewish organizations that felt deeply invested in appearing united and fully supportive of Israel.

As far as the Reform and Conservative movements, I don’t think I could say that each denomination has always fallen behind this consensus. I think at different points, there have been leaders who stood out as being willing to speak out against it. But the Jewish Federations and Hebrew schools, those were entirely invested in a deep loyalty to Israeli policies and Zionism and gave no access to anything about the history of the Nakba (the 1948 dispossession of Palestinians) or of Palestine. All of these organizations prioritized Jewish safety and that’s important.

How has dissent been silenced?

In my book I give the example of people like William Zukerman, who wrote and edited The Jewish Newsletter from 1948 to 1961. He was a voice for dissent who fell victim to some Israeli diplomats and U.S. Jewish leaders and lost funding for Yiddish- and English-speaking newspapers. He was marginalized and likened to a Jew who helps Nazis. It often ends up being a concerted effort out of a fear for Jewish safety to quell those whose voices they feel present a danger to American Jewish life.

Obviously, right now we’re living in a moment where university administrations are working with police to arrest these college students who are voicing dissent.

Do you see what’s happening on campuses as antisemitism?

It would be arrogant and misguided to tell someone their feeling of lack of safety (on campus) is not real. But I don’t feel it and I don’t see it. I do hear criticism of Israel. When unqualified support for Israel is categorized as Jewish, I think that’s wrong because it erases this history of dissent that I chronicle in my book, and the very visible and vocal dissent we are hearing right now in this moment. It flattens Jewish life and diminishes inclusion.

American Jews are usually seen as liberal and have championed many liberal causes while also championing Zionism. That has created some tensions. How have they balanced that?

There was some phrase that someone introduced me to a couple of months ago, “Progressive except Palestine.” Starting in the 1950s, and through the 1960s and 1970s, some of the best teachers on what Israel has done to Palestinians have been in the Civil Rights Movement, the Palestinian American movements. American Jews, by and large, weren’t very open to those lessons. And so, there’s  a lot of confusion among Americans about how it is that American Jews are so liberal on so many issues but are unwilling to listen to or learn the lessons of Israel’s settler-colonial history.

I think we really need to ask where this unquestioning brand of American Zionism has positioned us. Who are our allies? If we’re not paying attention to Palestinian displacement and Palestinian suffering and Israelis’ military actions, who do we ally with? And how comfortable are we holding on to feminism and reproductive rights and affirmative action and prison reform and all these other more liberal causes when we can’t ally with Black activists and Palestinian American activists or even just people in the anti-war movement. There are Jews who get really good lessons in those movements and then find themselves without a place to go in American Jewish life. And then there are those who had to make very painful, very difficult choices to keep their fealty to Israel and exit those movements.
One of the most exciting things that’s happening right now is that these young Jews and others are creating bridges between American Jewish life and these progressive coalitions. They’re happening in predictable spaces but also in spaces you might not expect. After I attended an iftar gathering, I had two of the Muslim Student Association leaders from my own campus at my Seder. And that was their first Seder. I too am trying to build bridges of understanding.

Do you feel like that’s going to change as a result of this war?

I was listening to a Zoom session when Rabbi Rebecca Hornstein quoted a verse from the Psalms: “The stone that the builders rejected becomes the cornerstone.” And her proposal was that these activists, doing small things and large things, are building the next chapter in American Jewish life.

So I do think the threshold is at an unprecedented low. But I can’t help but notice the generational divides. Future Jewish leadership will likely come from these brave young people.

I can only hope the next chapter will be more open and more tolerant and more inclusive.

Explores the long history of anti-Zionist and non-Zionist American Jews

Drawing on rich archival research and examining wide-ranging intellectual currents—from the Reform movement and the Yiddish left to anti-colonialism and Jewish feminism—Feld explores American Jewish critics of Zionism and Israel from the 1880s to the 1980s. The book argues that the tireless policing of contrary perspectives led each generation of dissenters to believe that it was the first to question unqualified support for Israel. The Threshold of Dissent positions contemporary critics within a century-long debate about the priorities of the American Jewish community, one which holds profound implications for inclusion in American Jewish communal life and for American Jews’ participation in coalitions working for justice.

At a time when American Jewish support for Israel has been diminishing, The Threshold of Dissent uncovers a deeper—and deeply contested—history of intracommunal debate over Zionism among American Jews.

Two years ago, Politico published a draft opinion indicating that the United States Supreme Court would strike down federal protection of abortion rights. Thousands of people hit the streets, yelling “We will not go back!” and “My body, my choice!”, flashing coat hangers to signify the dangerous future toward which the country seemed to be careening. Protestors hoped to show support for abortion rights and sway the court’s majority.

On June 24, 2022, the official decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization was released. Despite the tireless work of pro-choice activists, Dobbs overturned two landmark court cases—Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey—and nearly 50 years of precedent protecting a person’s right to choose. The repercussions were immediate: 13 states had trigger bans in place to outlaw abortion should Roe ever be overturned.

Over the past two years, the assault on reproductive freedom in the United States has not slowed. Today, the Center for Reproductive Rights reports that 28 states have outlawed, are hostile to, or do not protect abortion. The Supreme Court is currently considering whether to limit access to mifepristone, a medication used in more than 60 percent of US abortions. As abortion bans and restrictions multiply and abortion clinics close, mifepristone is an essential tool for preserving abortion access. It can be prescribed without an in-person medical visit by a professional other than a doctor and can be mailed to patients, making it accessible to persons living in rural areas and states where abortion is restricted. While early reports indicate the Court is skeptical of restricting mifepristone, some questions from conservative justices signal possible future pathways for limiting access to medication abortion. The case is yet another attack in an unrelenting war against abortion access.

As the matter of abortion access shows, movement toward gender equality is not simply a matter of two steps forward, one step back. Most measures indicate that progress toward gender equality stalled beginning in the 1990s. For instance, mothers are now more likely to be out of the labor force than they were two decades ago, a trend accelerated by the increased childcare demands of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The power that makes progress happen—the relentless strategizing and work of movement organizers fighting real-world constraints and a well-resourced opposition—is often invisible to the people who enjoy the fruits of their labor. Until recently, many people still believed that the moral arc of the universe bent toward justice and that the occasional hiccup was just that. But two years ago, the Dobbs decision catapulted us backward nearly 50 years. Dobbs and other recent events—Donald Trump’s 2016 victory, the fierce opposition to the Black Lives Matter Movement, pandemic-fueled anti-Asian hate, and the surge in anti-trans legislation—teach us that progress is not unidirectional. It relies on commitment, time, and work.

Organized backlash movements, like anti-abortion groups, contribute to the stalling out of the gender revolution. But another part of the story is the failure of feminist allies to bring to bear their resources and power in service of gender liberation. Four-in-ten American men consider themselves feminists, but this hasn’t reignited the gender revolution. I uncovered why in my forthcoming book, Good Guys, Bad Guys: The Perils of Men’s Gender Activism. The men I interviewed identified as feminists to bolster their moral sense of self, well aware that others might perceive them as privileged because of their gender. Becoming a feminist allowed them to feel and signal to others that they were exceptions to the rule that men are the “bad guys.” Yet this rarely translated to meaningful activism because simply identifying as a feminist was enough for them to feel like and portray themselves as good men. Despite volunteering for a study of feminist men, nearly half of the men I interviewed did no activism beyond posting the occasional opinion online, signing petitions, or attending a march. Feminists recruit men to the movement so that men can use their disproportionate power, resources, and status to bring feminist goals to fruition. When men can use feminism in service of a self-centered identity project, they don’t need to do activism.

When men did do activism, their work often centered the concerns of privileged people like themselves. For example, they organized groups where men could discuss the tensions of being an ally. Instead of dismantling their privilege for the liberation of others, feminist men focused their efforts on learning how to live with their privilege.

While men’s feminist identification is symbolically significant for feminism as a movement, men’s allyship is less than ideal. One in five American men have been involved in an abortion. It will take more than their posting online or their participation in a march to confront the well-organized anti-abortion movement slowly but deliberately chipping away at abortion rights in this country. Real progress requires that men allies be in the trenches, organizing for reproductive justice. As we approach the two year anniversary of the Dobbs decision, feminist men must ask themselves what feminism does for them and what they in turn can do for the movement and gender liberation.

Emily K. Carian is Assistant Professor of Teaching in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Irvine. She is co-editor of Male Supremacism in the United States: From Patriarchal Traditionalism to Misogynist Incels and the Alt-Right.

This year, the new Mean Girls movie was released by Paramount Pictures, reinterpreting both the beloved 2004 film and the 2017 Broadway musical. The cast includes familiar faces, and fans of the first film will recognize Tina Fey as Ms. Norbury and Tim Meadows as Principal Duvall. Meanwhile, lovers of the musical heard Renee Rapp’s powerhouse vocals translated to screen in her role as antagonist Regina George, the leader of the mean-girl Plastics friend group. The modernized project also brought on Gen Z newcomers, such as Avantika Vandanapu. She plays a revamped version of the Plastic’s Karen Shetty, whose name was originally Karen Smith. Her character elucidates the contradictions present in Mean Girls (2024), which provides positive representation but waters down the story’s original, satirical message.

In interviews and press events, Avantika has emphasized her gratitude for playing Karen as a South Asian woman. Through Karen, she subverts the stereotypes that Western society assigns to Asians and Asian Americans: the assumptions of nerdiness and social awkwardness, of unattractiveness and undesirability. Karen is the comedic opposite of those tropes. At times, she is unbelievably stupid, but she is made likable by the innocent joy with which she declares “one of [her] life goals…to not touch a tiger.” She is popular, she is pretty, and she is artfully portrayed by Avantika, who has brought to light important questions of representation. Speaking with an interviewer from Entertainment Tonight, she explained that women of color, and specifically South Indians like herself, “rarely get to see [themselves] represented in a group of girls who are…unanimously considered beautiful and popular.” Since the film’s release, Avantika has gained real-life, well-deserved popularity among Gen Z viewers, social media, and magazines like Vogue and Marie Claire.

As Karen, Avantika gives a dazzling performance of the solo song Sexy, which takes place during a Halloween party. Those who have seen the original film will remember the iconic voiceover that introduces this scene: “In girl world, Halloween is the one night a year when a girl can dress like a total slut and no other girls can say anything about it.” The line illustrates how teenage girls are encouraged to sexualize themselves under the guise of freely expressing their sexuality, and the song is a hilarious and infectious rendition of this idea. Karen dances through the party, listing increasingly ridiculous costume options: sexy pirate, sexy ballet dancer, sexy doctor curing “sexy cancer.” In the middle of the song, the main character Cady enters the party in a terrifying, bloody costume, and Gretchen, another member of the Plastics, takes her aside to explain that “if [she doesn’t] dress slutty, then that is slut-shaming [them].” She continues by saying that since “traditionally, girls had to be witches or clowns, and we’ve worked really hard to progress past that,” dressing sexily for Halloween is a reclamation of their sexuality. As long as they wear a skimpy costume, women can be whoever they want. In the 2024 film, Karen closes the song by singing “This is modern feminism talking/Watch me as I run the world in shoes I cannot walk in/I can be who I want to be/And sexy.”

Upon first listen, this version of Sexy seems like an anthem for sexual empowerment and girly Halloween fun. However, upon reaching the last lines of the song, I found myself rewinding to make sure I heard the words right. The lyrics had been changed from the original musical, where Karen sang: “This is modern feminism talking/I expect to run the world in shoes I cannot walk in.”

In both versions, being sexy and running the world in unwalkable shoes are portrayed as the cornerstones of “modern feminism.” However, the original words were intended to be ironic. Firstly, Karen and the other Plastics are underage, high school girls—they should not be encouraged to sexualize themselves without a proper understanding of how they are perceived. Furthermore, women and girls like Karen have been taught that sexist barriers are not barriers if they put them in their own path, and that limited success within these bounds is all of the achievement that they are allowed to “expect.” It’s subtle but effective wordplay, and the new lyrics completely erase it. The line change would only work if the song actually championed women’s choice, but Sexy is not about meaningful sexual reclamation. Like the rest of Mean Girls, Sexy satirizes the fragile hierarchies that dictate high school social life, and the curated images of feminine beauty and sexuality that uphold them. Avantika’s casting as Karen upends the stereotypes of South Asian women being unpopular and unsexy, but having her sing altered, weakened lyrics removes much of the meaning from her character.

Unfortunately, Karen singing “watch me” has been received by many as an improvement on the original. On Genius, an annotation claims that the original “could have been interpreted as a dig at modern feminism and they didn’t want to offend feminists.” An article from The Daily Beast similarly celebrates that “no one’s shamed for their choices” to wear revealing costumes. However, taking a dig at modern feminism was exactly the point of Sexy, and changing these lyrics to be less biting allows for worrying misconstruction.

The original lyrics do not mock any woman for wanting to be sexy. Instead, the song pokes fun at the fact that, whatever else a woman may be, she must first be sexy. Karen doesn’t care if she’s a doctor or a ballet dancer. She doesn’t seem to see any difference between being “sexy corn” or “a sexy Quint from sexy Jaws” — nor the complete disregard of real feminism in wanting to be a “sexy Eleanor Roosevelt.” While she says she can be whoever she wants, all she wants is to be sexy, and thus she is only seen as such. Karen is a product of the so-called “modern feminist” belief that being sexy, and sexualizing oneself, is equivalent to being empowered. The original lyrics showed that; the new lyrics have made the song what it was supposed to satirize. Instead of exposing the hypocrisy of the beliefs that trap her, they reduce her to be looked at and laughed at within them by the unwitting viewer. Gretchen’s lines about how Cady inadvertently slutshames the other girls could demonstrate how women are expected to be sexy, but the effect is watered down because the song frames women’s sexualization as their own, feminist choice.

Sexy was not supposed to make a spectacle of women or their sexuality, but to prompt a closer examination of choice feminism. “Choice feminism” is the dangerous belief that feminism is a social issue, not a structural one, and that women’s choices are inherently empowering. This belief system tells us that a woman who does anything in her own self-interest is automatically making a feminist choice. But feminism is not, and never has been, about individual choice. Feminism, like every other social justice movement, is about collective liberation, and social, economic, and political justice for all. If Karen and Gretchen’s insistence on dressing sexy leads them to shame Cady, then they are not making a feminist choice. They are just being mean girls.

My critiques of this song don’t stop me from loving it, but good entertainment shouldn’t come at the expense of important social commentary. It’s precisely because Sexy is my favorite song in the movie that I critique it so much. I will continue listening to it on repeat, with the volume all the way up. Furthermore, I will continue to watch and support as Avantika and other young women of color rise up to run the world. Enjoying Sexy or Mean Girls doesn’t make me a bad feminist. But as we celebrate it, we should be critical of its messaging. We need to look closer at what it takes for women to run the world — and if we can really be whoever we want to be.

Kimi Canete is an Editing and Production Intern at NYU Press. In May 2024, she will receive her Bachelor of Arts in English and American literature, with minors in Creative Writing and French.

For more on intersectional feminism, sexual culture, comedy, and diverse representation in media, read these titles from NYU Press:

Whiter
Asian American Women on Skin Color and Colorism
Edited by Niki Khanna

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How does skin color impact the lives of Asian American women? In Whiter, thirty Asian American women provide first-hand accounts of their experiences with colorism in this collection of powerful, accessible, and brutally honest essays, edited by Nikki Khanna.

The Pornification of America
How Raunch Culture is Ruining Our Society
By Bernadette Barton

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Drawing on interviews, television shows, movies, and social media, Barton argues that raunch culture matters not because it is sexy, but because it is sexist. From twerking and breast implants, to fake nails and push-up bras, she explores just how much we encounter raunch culture on a daily basis.

The Hollywood Jim Crow
The Racial Politics of the Movie Industry
By Maryann Erigha

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Erigha exposes the key elements at work in maintaining Hollywood’s racial hierarchy, namely the relationship between genre and race, the ghettoization of Black directors to black films, and how Blackness is perceived by the Hollywood producers and studios who decide what gets made and who gets to make it

The Revolution Will Be Hilarious
Comedy for Social Change and Civic Power
By Caty Borum

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Through this exploration of today’s multi-platform comedy and social justice activism, Borum argues that building creative power is crucial for marginalized groups to build civic power. The Revolution Will Be Hilarious positions the rise of social justice comedy as creative, disruptive storytelling that hilariously invites us to agitate the status quo and re-imagine social realities to come closer to the promise of equity and justice in America.

Critical Race Feminism, Second Edition
A Reader
Edited by Adrien Katherine Wing

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Revealing how the historical experiences and contemporary realities of women of color are profoundly influenced by a legacy of racism and sexism that is neither linear nor logical, Critical Race Feminism serves up a panoramic perspective, illustrating how women of color can find strength in the face of oppression.

Jumping Ship — You open your book with several provocative quotes calling to mind the historic act of enslaved people jumping from the ships of the Middle Passage, the first of which is from Marvel’s 2018 movie Black Panther. Erik “Killmonger” Stevens refuses to be healed by the movie’s hero and instead chooses to die, saying, “Just bury me in the ocean with my ancestors that jumped from the ships because they knew death was better than bondage.” How does this narrative of “jumping” from slave ships pervade popular culture and literature, and what inspired you to take up this action as the central theme of your book? 

When I saw the scene in Black Panther, I was both surprised and not. The film came out after I had already done years of research mapping out these jumps of the enslaved, and I had grown accustomed to finding the jump in unlikely places. Whenever someone would find out about my book, they would tell me about an example. But the fact that such jumps are referenced in the film only confirmed, for me, that they emerge to unsettle our conventional political frames. In the context of the film, that’s the well-worn dichotomy of vilifying black militancy and celebrating a kind of liberal racial inclusion. There was pushback when I started to pursue this project, from people who believed it was either too defeatist and depressing, or that I was making too much out of nothing. There’s a quote I return to time and time again from Christina Sharpe in an interview she gave in Rhizomes with Selamawit Terrefe. When she discusses the resistance to the imposition of nonbeing, she says, “It doesn’t rupture the totality. But that doesn’t mean that we don’t have to attend to it.” This book became an attempt to attend to it. 

Refusal – In this chapter, you write about the enslaved Black boy, Pip, in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, whose jump from the whaling ship offers, “a refusal of the master’s authority, of authority in toto.” How does Pip’s story help us understand a politics of refusal of racial authority?

Pip’s story is where this book started. I was reading Moby Dick for a class in Political Theory, and I was struck by everyone’s sidestepping of Stubb’s appeal to the auction block and Pip’s slaveability. He’s a young Black cabin boy on the Pequod who at one point has to take over for an injured after-oarsman in Stubb’s whaling boat. The first time he jumps he does so because he gets scared of a whale they’re chasing and he gets caught in the harpoon line. Stubb begrudgingly cuts him loose and then chastises him saying, “We can’t afford to lose whales by the likes of you; a whale would sell for thirty times what you would, Pip, in Alabama.” No one felt the need to discuss how antiblackness was structuring this scene. Pip’s Blackness seemed to matter to the point of unmattering, just context for his lowly status on the ship and his tambourine. Scholars have written about Pip at length, but never, it seems, about antiblackness. The jump isn’t discussed in relation to Stubb’s violence. 

As I started to work on this project, I recognized a twinned political order: the antiblackness that structures the ship as representative of Western modernity and Ishmael’s (and scholars’) narration of that political order meant to disappear antiblackness. Readings of Pip’s jumps are often deracinated and depoliticized, but I wanted to know what could be gleaned from viewing his jumps alongside the historical practice of the enslaved (oftentimes enslaved women) jumping from the slave ship. By taking Pip’s jumps as a refusal, we see that he’s not just refusing Stubb’s threat, but he’s also unsettling Ishmael’s desire to find commonality and analogy. Placing the jump outside the hem of politics, often in favor of more conventional forms of resistance like ship takeovers, can protect liberal horizons. Thinking through these jumps allowed me to think through black anarchism and vice versa, and how they both refuse Western Modernity’s order and antiblackness as that order from chattel slavery to its afterlives. Looking at these jumps as an anatomy of black anarchist practice allowed me to see them emerge in different carceral geographies as refusals of the antiblackness that authorized and is authorized by these geographies. 

Collectivity – The voyages of the Black Star Line, the shipping line of Marcus Garvey and the United Negro Improvement Association, are generally considered to be an economic failure tied to Garvey’s own imperial aims. However, you argue that Black anarchism offers a different reading of this historic moment. How do you define Black anarchism as distinct from Classical anarchism, and how does it change our understanding of the Black diaspora’s relationship to the nation state? 

The chapter on the Black Star Line was, in some ways, the most challenging one to write because Marcus Garvey is not without political controversy within Black Studies. I’ve been asked “How can you tell me Garvey is an anarchist?” I’m not. The chapter isn’t about Garvey as much as it’s about his ships, and these ships have been excised from a generative conversation about political practice because of both an economically fueled reading that is aligned with white notions of capital accumulation and a dismissal of black nationalism. 

White anarchism has long dismissed Black radical practice because of its dismissal of Black nationalism as aligned with the state. But I argue that the state contested by Classical anarchism and the state refused by black anarchism are fundamentally different. Classical anarchism is ultimately a class-based politics that goes racially unmarked, but the ships emerge as a Black diasporic critique—one that is driven by Black collectivity—of white nation building and its carceral constraints. This critique resists the colonial-racial authority embodied in the state. Unlike the unmarked state of Classical anarchism, black anarchism challenges an antiblack state by naming the antiblack foundation of the state. 

Ruination — The Watts Rebellion of 1965 remains famous for its material destruction of property, including acts of arson, theft, and vandalism. These actions are labeled cathartic, criminal, and senseless, and they have been taken up by talking heads who claim that the destruction of property delegitimizes political protest. How does the Watts Rebellion disrupt our conceptions of property, and law and order? How is this relevant to protests today? 

I open the chapter on Watts by reflecting on The L.A. Times’s semicentennial retrospect on the rebellion, published just one year after the uprising in Ferguson that followed Michael Brown’s murder by the police. Historian Robin D.G. Kelley cautions that the 50^th anniversary will bring crude reductions to gruesome violence and destruction, which is true, and then concludes that “what they burned is less important than what they built,” couched in the assessment that “a focus on violence and looting” fails to engage residents’ actual confrontation with “social and economic catastrophe.” But for me it begged the question, what if the opposite is true? What if the destruction was part of Black Angelenos’ confrontation with the matters of property and law and order that govern black life? Destruction is uncomfortable, and Watts protesters in 1965 have been sensationalized as opportunists setting fire to their community through the media’s repetition of “burn baby burn.” Yet protesters’ acts of vandalism actually place the ghetto and the property relations of antiblackness in relief, demonstrating that they don’t get to own these neighborhoods, they’re only housed there. Despite characterizations running the gamut of desultory and reactionary to criminal and cathartic, these destructive practices abut the state’s own propertied analysis and solutions. They propose questions of property itself and interrupting an ever-growing nexus paying fealty to law and order. Listening at the socio-spatial register allows us to hear the rebellion differently, where ruination counters the state fables of the common good and crime prevention told through environmental design that inalienably link property and the police. This same sensationalism and misrecognition happens in 2014, in 2015, and in 2020. Black protesters are being told to act appropriately, that they can protest but they have to respect the laws when doing so. But when you’re protesting the law, the expectation to respect it is bunk. When the political practices are being delegitimized by the very structural relations that these practices are calling into question—this is a crisis that black protest raises for Western liberal democracy. 

Maneuvers — You trace the history of antiblack carcerality from the slave ship to the modern prison industrial complex. In your final chapter, you tell the story of Assata Shakur — both her physical escape from prison, and its textual reflection in her autobiography. How does her “jump” from prison demonstrate the broader politics of refusal you explore in the book? What comes after the “jump”? 

I’m not the first scholar to draw this link between the slave ship and today’s prison and surveillance state. My work is indebted to Angela Davis, Simone Browne, Dennis Childs, and Christina Sharpe among others. For me, looking at the prison industrial complex as a descendent of the slave ship helps us see how mobility and movement too, rather than simply stagnation, are used to form antiblack carceral geographies. Incarceration isn’t just about being held in one place, but about being moved—about the conditions of oscillation and disorientation. The policing of movement is immanent in the history of Black criminalization, and I see this most in the concept of vagrancy which was and is broadly defined and broadly enforced to commit antiblack violence and criminalize Black (political) mobilizations. I focus on Assata Shakur’s escape from prison to Cuba because it issues a counter use of movement, one that reveals both the necessity of the jump but also its precarity. Upon her escape from one carceral geography, she hasn’t escaped the carceral conditioning of Blackness. She is still being pursued by the state and her image is still being used to police black communities across oceans. So I look at her escape as a dis-incarceration, one that is necessarily iterative and incomplete but must still be attended to as a disruption. Like Pip at the beginning of my book, Assata’s jump refuses the structural antagonism of antiblackness as much as she refuses the state’s narration and representation. This is why looking at her escape as an “absent chapter” in her autobiography reveals the necessity of opacity as it resists the representative requirements of political claim making as the route to liberation. It reveals a necessary fugitivity. 

The question as to what comes after the jump is one I’m not very interested in pursuing for two reasons that I explore throughout the book. One is that the question of outcomes is used to constrain (and dismiss) Black political practice to the horizons and maintenance of the existing world. The second is that I don’t know. I don’t aim to be prescriptive, and the book doesn’t attempt to outline what is and isn’t anarchism for the purposes of creating a typology. The jump resists the repression of the referent, that is, it aims to reveal the antagonism. The jump, for me, also resists prefiguration; rather than provide answers, it asks questions.

Sam C. Tenorio is Assistant Professor in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and the Department of African American Studies at The Pennsylvania State University.

“Change the name, the groove is the same.” If Jack Kerouac was still around today, that is the way the legendary voice of the Beat Generation would have connected the iconic Knicks’ broadcaster Marty Glickman with contemporary star commentator Walt “Clyde” Frazier, who right now is celebrating 25 years on the air. Back in the day, in 1957, Kerouac offered a tribute to his hero by having one of his fictionalized characters exclaim: “Man, have you dug that mad Marty Glickman, announcing basketball games-up-to-midcourt-bounce-fake-set-shot-swish two points. Absolutely, the greatest announcer I have ever heard.”

Were he listening to Knicks’ games today, Kerouac would have chuckled knowingly when he heard how Marty’s “swish” had become Clyde’s “swishing,” as in “Brunson was swishing and dishing,” sending a bounce pass to an open teammate who would the rise-up for a “gravity-defying” splash dunk. He would be no less impressed with Frazier’s rhythmic declaration as Julius Randle powered a “pulverizing, provocative” put back basket.

Meanwhile, I imagine that Glickman would be gratified by his own game-time reincarnation. From his perch in broadcaster hall of fame heaven, ensconced much like he sat in the mezzanine on the old 49^th Street Madison Square Garden, Glickman would appreciate the style and content of Frazier’s delivery. He knew and influenced the former athlete as Frazier achieved his own radio and television success.

But perhaps, Glickman would be even more delighted by Frazier’s use of multi-syllable words to characterize courtside action. Glickman proudly recalled how his word choice set the scene, but he was also very happy that local schoolteachers, the day after a game, had their students consult dictionaries for definitions of words like “torpid” or “desultory” or “phlegmatic:” terms they had heard from the Garden broadcast booth. Glickman spoke to them as they listened under the covers with an ear plug in their transistor radios.  

Incidentally, Jewish listeners were gratified when Glickman interspersed Yiddish words in his accounts. He had “no hesitancy about it” and even said “I particularly like to use it with gentile people.” Even as he comfortably spoke to, and for, all of his fans in Gotham, it was a subtle indication of his Jewish background and a linguistic synthesis of American identities.

Frazier is no less a teacher to fans of all ages and groups with his judicious use of words and terms like “riverting” or “precocious neophyte” to describe a rookie. In fact, he has gone one step further than Glickman. Early in his broadcast career, he authored a “Word Jam Guide for Awesome Vocabulary,” directed at pre-teens. Of course, students today don’t need a thesaurus or dictionary. The internet is just fine.

All told, these broadcasting legends of different generations have done more than just entertain. They have educated their legions of New York fans of all ages, and changed the vocabulary of basketball forever.

Jeffrey S. Gurock is the author of Marty Glickman: The Life of an American Jewish Sports Legend, the first comprehensive biography of the preeminent voice of New York sports.

For close to half a century after World War II, Marty Glickman was the voice of New York sports. His vocabulary and method of broadcasting left an indelible mark on the industry, and many of today’s most famous sportscasters were Glickman disciples. Marty Glickman has also been remembered as a Jewish athlete who, a decade before he sat in front of a microphone, was cynically barred from running in a signature track event in the 1936 Olympics by anti-Semitic American Olympic officials. This lively biography details this traumatic event. Marty Glickman is a story of adversity and triumph, of sports and minority group struggles, told within the context of the prejudicial barriers that were common to thousands, if not millions, of fellow Jews of his generation as they aimed to make it in America.

On April 15, 1947, Jackie Robinson sent a seismic wave across America with his barrier-breaking first game in Major League Baseball. It was arguably the most significant progress in civil rights since Reconstruction.

That summer, Robinson captivated fans with his electrifying blend of speed and power, while meeting the withering barrage of hate he faced on and off the field with quiet restraint. His success made him the most famous black man in America and paved the way for other talented black players to join him in the integrated big leagues. It’s a well-told story, one that in the decades since Robinson’s pioneering first season has become almost mythological and taken on a sentimentality that has blinded us to his true nature and minimized the noxious racism that hardly retreated in his heroic wake. Too often we have remembered him as an unthreatening martyr who “turned the other cheek,” dependent on a helping hand from well-meaning whites. It’s a safe and simple narrative that provides white America convenient cover and does a disservice to an uncompromising patriot. It also distracts us from a dark reality: the oppressive conditions Robinson faced across his fifty-three years—casual and structural—remain as present in society today as they were then.

The silent stoicism that marked Jack Roosevelt Robinson’s initial year with the Brooklyn Dodgers ran contrary to his character. Stubborn, intelligent, with a fiery temper and full of deeply held convictions, Robinson had rarely missed an opportunity to speak out against the prejudice and injustice he saw nearly everywhere. Growing up in depression-era Pasadena, California, he faced down racist neighbors and refused to sit in the segregated section at the movie theater or leave a Woolworth lunch counter until he was served. Once he was arrested for singing a song that a police officer found offensive. Another time, while just a bystander to an argument, an officer rushed in and pulled a gun on Robinson before knowing who was to blame. As a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army during the Second World War, he faced a court-martial after refusing an order from a white civilian bus driver to move to the back of a military bus at Fort Hood, Texas—ten years before Rosa Parks’s own bold act of defiance in Montgomery, Alabama.

Brooklyn’s general manager, Branch Rickey, a high-minded opportunist, knew of Robinson’s scrapes with the law and his early discharge from the U.S. Army before signing him to the Dodgers. In these incidents, Rickey saw a man of considerable character who, though strong-willed and defiant, would care enough about succeeding that he would, for a time, suppress his natural impulse to fight back—and during his first few seasons, Robinson mostly did. But once his place in the game was secure, it was no longer necessary for Robinson to keep quiet. As President Barack Obama later observed, Jackie Robinson “had purchased the right to speak his mind many times over.”

Throughout his remaining playing days, Robinson used his enormous fame to bring attention to the countless ways in which his world was patently unjust. He criticized umpires who he believed were treating him unfairly, demanded that hotels provide equal access to him and his black teammates, and accused the New York Yankees of prejudice for failing to promote any black players to their team. When, during a midgame birthday celebration for the team’s Kentucky-born shortstop Pee Wee Reese, the grounds crew raised a Confederate flag over Ebbets Field, Robinson fumed. “Who would ever let Jim Crow back in the ballpark?” he asked resentful teammates, who were enjoying the festivities. The press, many of whom had once praised him for his self-control, took exception to his outspokenness, calling him ungrateful and urging him to be a baseball player, not a crusader. Bill Keefe, sports editor of the New Orleans Times- Picayune, declared that “no ten of the most rabid segregationists accomplished as much as Robinson did in widening the breach between the white people and Negroes.”

“If you showed anything that suggested dignity and the sense that you believed in equality, you were immediately undesirable,” said Harry Belafonte, referring to Robinson. “There’s always going to be a price to pay for any rebel sound that challenges oppression.” This of course remains true to this day. In 2016, San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick chose not to stand for the national anthem in protest of police brutality against African Americans. His actions were denounced by star quarterback Drew Brees as disrespectful and criticized by the National Football League as unpatriotic, and President Donald Trump described his dissent as grounds for firing. A free agent the following season, Kaepernick went un-signed and three years later remained out of the league in spite of his earlier success and widely acknowledged talents.

Toward the end of his career, when Jackie Robinson and his wife Rachel sought to buy a larger house to accommodate their growing family, they were met with resistance. Touring homes in New York City’s northern suburbs, they were glared at by neighbors, denied access by owners, and in one case, after making an offer, told it was off the market. The effect of such racially restrictive agreements among homeowners, brokers, and community associations—even though in some cases ruled unconstitutional decades earlier—continues to keep neighborhoods segregated and limits the housing opportunities of people of color.

After baseball, Robinson wrote hundreds of newspaper columns about inequality and injustice and raised money for the NAACP and Southern Christian Leadership Conference. When Martin Luther King Jr. asked Robinson to help boost morale among civil rights workers in Georgia or Alabama, Jackie took the next available flight. He also sparred with Malcolm X over the direction of the civil rights movement and later seemed to some out of touch in forcefully dismissing the arguments of younger, more militant activists who had grown frustrated with the slow pace of change, including Muhammad Ali. But Robinson continued to make his voice heard.

He stumped for politicians who he believed would best support the interests of African Americans, including Richard Nixon, a decision he later regretted. At the 1964 Republican National Convention, Robinson attended as a special delegate, rallying a tiny band of African Americans, who were abandoned when the party lurched sharply to the right. The eventual nominee was Barry Goldwater, who had voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and whose supporters included the John Birch Society and the Ku Klux Klan. At a rally outside the convention, Robinson thundered his disapproval.

“I am an American Negro first, before I am a member of any party,” he told the audience. “We will not stand silently for any major party nominating a man who in my opinion is a bigot and a man who will attempt to prevent us from moving forward.” That fall, Lyndon Johnson trounced Barry Goldwater at the polls. More than fifty years later, the party of Lincoln continued to find support among far-right organizations standing for white supremacy. In 2017, when hate groups gathered in Charlottesville, Virginia, to rally against the removal of a monument to Confederate commander Robert E. Lee, President Donald Trump, a Republican, declined to condemn the marchers after their gathering resulted in deadly violence.

If we are serious about the kind of meaningful change Jackie Robinson campaigned for both on and off the field, and before, as well as long after his monumental major league debut, we should remember him in full, celebrate his outspokenness, and acknowledge that many of the obstacles he faced as a black man in America remain fixed, blocking the path to first-class citizenship for African Americans.

Explores Jackie Robinson’s compelling and complicated legacy

Many are familiar with Jackie Robinson as a baseball hero. Few, however, know of the inner turmoil that came with his historic status. Featuring piercing essays from a range of distinguished sportswriters, cultural critics, and scholars, this book explores Robinson’s perspectives and legacies on civil rights, sports, faith, youth, and nonviolence, while providing rare glimpses into the struggles and strength of one of the nation’s most athletically gifted and politically significant citizens. This volume recasts Jackie Robinson’s legacy and establishes how he set a precedent for future civil rights activism, from Black Lives Matter to Colin Kaepernick.

1. In Scarred, you describe your journey traveling to twenty countries in just over a year. Can you describe what motivated you to undertake so much travel, and how your concerns about your pain factored into your decision to go?

When I first set out to travel, I didn’t know that I was going to end up traveling to twenty countries. There were several countries that I knew I was going to visit, like where my family was, or where my writing residency and workshop took place, but the rest was up in the air. But I knew I wanted to travel, to take a break from it all. I was feeling frustrated with where I was with my life, personally, professionally, and also politically—especially with what was going on in this country when Trump won the election. I suppose when the fight or flight response kicked in, I chose the “flight” mode instead, and quite literally. So there I was traveling and hoping that it would make me feel better.

2. What was your favorite place you visited? How did your experience in this place help you understand pain differently, and did it ever answer your question, “Can travel really heal?”

One of my favorite places to visit was Nepal. That was probably evident from how I wrote an entire chapter based on my experiences there. I stayed at a meditation ashram called Osho Tapoban. There I learned a meditation technique called “no-mind” meditation. It basically takes us directly to our body to bypass our mind. The technique allows me to resurface the deeply buried emotions and to transcend them. And this technique of working with my body, and without the story helps transform my pain. Sometimes language limits how we can express, experience, and transform our emotions. We need to work with the body directly, without being trapped by our own stories of why we feel sad, or how we can deal with it, etc.

Travel can heal. But it depends on how we travel. If we travel only to replicate what we do at home, speak the language, eat the food, or do the routines we do at home, traveling is not going to heal us at a deeper level. But when we can create new routines, new habits, and eventually a new body, we can heal—we can live in a new body, so to speak. Having said that, I want the readers to know that healing should not be our ultimate goal in life. The goal, at least for me, is to understand that we will continue to live with pain, maybe in different forms and intensities throughout our lives, and therefore we want to explore how to live with and carry pain differently.

3. In your book, you talk about “perceiving” pain differently—not as something to move through, but as something we “carry with us.” How does society teach us to think about and deal with chronic pain, and what are you proposing we do differently? How did traveling help you come to this conclusion?

In our society, we are bombarded with so many methods, medicines, and meditation audios to manage and avoid pain. Sure, I meditate and take medicine as needed, too. But the approach or the story about pain as something that we need to avoid, to control, needs to be changed. What I’m proposing here is that we first accept that pain is here to stay. If we are going to live with it anyway, why not make our experience with pain more enchanting? How can we carry pain in a more comfortable way? If pain were a backpack, how can we adjust how we carry it, so it feels more comfortable for us?

When I suggest that we perceive differently, I am not saying that we should simply think positively. Not at all. I don’t want us to dismiss our pain. On the contrary, I invite the readers to honor the pain, and to perceive differently, by asking how has our society taught us about how to perceive? Does it further create pain in our lives? How can we perceive in ways that do not provoke even more pain and that liberate us from the shackle of societal gendered norms?

In the book, I talk about four things that I propose we do so we can live with pain differently: 1) to perceive differently; 2) to work with the body; 3) to practice feminist enchantment in our daily lives; and 4) to have emotional contract.

Traveling helps me get to this conclusion because as I was traveling with pain, pain gave me a lens to see things differently. My pain pushed me ask different questions that I would have not asked, and do different things (like a meditation retreat in Nepal) that I would have not done, had I not felt pain.

4. You ask in Scarred, “How can I work with my body to process pain?” Can you talk about what you mean, and what you uncovered about the ways we process and think about pain in our bodies?

In our society, whenever we feel sad, people would jump in and ask us, “do you want to talk about it?” It even feels like we have to talk about our feelings, if we want to feel better. But after doing the meditation that specifically teaches us to bypass our mind, I began to understand that words may get in the way of us actually feeling and transforming our emotions.

Nowadays, whenever I feel anxious, or other strong feelings in my body, my first go-to-activity is not to pick up the phone and talk to someone. I would turn on some music and dance, or walk while being focused on what I see, and try not to be in my head. I try to return to my body, but without telling stories about why I feel sad, or what I can do about it. Surprisingly, these simple activities would lighten my feelings a little bit. Ideally, I can do the “no-mind” therapy at home, too, but it is harder to do it at home/by myself, because it involves a lot of screaming that may scare my neighbor. I remember the meditation teacher in Nepal told me that there was a woman in Texas who would come all the way to Nepal because she couldn’t do the “no-mind” meditation at home. Now I understand what he meant.

5. In order to shift one’s relationship with pain, you describe a daily embodied practice that you call “feminist enchantment.” What does enchantment look like to you? How can others dealing with pain adapt this practice in their daily lives?

Being enchanted by something means that we suddenly forget about everything, including our pain, and be consumed by this enchanting thing. We become absorbed into its magnificence, its beauty. To be enchanted for me also means that we feel alive inside, we feel full, and we can feel the erotic energies running through our bodies. It means to return to our natural state of being playful. For me, because I live in Hawaii, I try to watch the sunsets every day. That’s my one thing that I do to feel enchanted. It’s amazing how the color, the shape, and the cloud are never the same. They put on a different show every day, including when it’s cloudy or stormy.

When we feel enchanted, it’s as if we get this permission slip that says, “it’s okay. You can take a break from your pain now.” Sometimes we get ten minutes of enchantment, sometimes ten seconds of enchantment. But that’s okay. Those ten minutes or ten seconds help us carry pain better, than if we only feel pain 24/7. So, whenever it is still possible, try to do one thing, or eat one thing, or see one thing, that will bring us moments of enchantment every day. What would that be for you? I think this is the whole point of the book: rather than telling the readers, “Here are the 100 things you should do,” I say, “this is what works for me. What about for you?”

6. Your book takes the deeply feminist stance that the personal is political. What programs and policies does our government need to reform so that we can carry pain in a more life-sustaining way?

There are so many things that our government, our workplace, our neighborhood, and our family can provide us with so we can feel supported and live with pain differently. But we can start with three things.

The first is universal and accessible health care that includes mental health care. NPR has a special series, “Bill of the Month” that shares people’s stories about their outrageous medical bills. And this worries me. We can’t live like this. We need programs and policies that will make people be and feel better, regardless of their employment status, or class, gender, sexuality, and racial backgrounds, or health insurance! The pandemic shows how bad and unequal our healthcare system is. Improving our healthcare system and making it equal and accessible across the board is the first and most important thing that we need to address.

We also need to address parental and family leave in this country. We cannot be the only OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development)-member country or one of the few countries in the world that doesn’t have a national paid parental leave policy. Other countries such as Iceland gives each parent six month leave, for a total of twelve months for both parents. There is a limit to how much a person can receive, but within that limit, a person can receive up to 80 percent of their average income. We need paid parental leave to support parents, babies, and coworkers. If parents don’t feel supported, and if babies are not supported from the moment they are born, how can we say that we care for them?

Lastly, we need better new-immigrant programs that could make immigrants feel more supported and welcome in this country. This anti-immigrant sentiment is really hurting us as a community, as a nation. In Iceland (one of the countries I talk about in my book), they have legal counseling services for new immigrants, they even have women’s circle programs to support new immigrants feel more at home in the new country.

All of these programs are important: if we don’t have national programs and policies that support our physical and mental health, our family, and new members of our nation, then how can we say that our government really cares about us? Ultimately, pain is never only personal. It is also social, structural, and political. No matter how much pain-killers or meditation classes we take as individuals, if the political environments are not supporting us to thrive, we can only go so far in addressing the pain in our lives. It’s time for a change.

L. Ayu Saraswati is Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Hawai’i, Mānoa. She is the author of Pain Generation: Social Media, Feminist Activism, and the Neoliberal Selfie and Seeing Beauty, Sensing Race in Transnational Indonesia, which won the 2013 National Women’s Studies Association Gloria Anzaldúa book prize. She is also the co-editor of Introduction to Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies: Interdisciplinary and Intersectional Approaches and Feminist and Queer Theory: An Intersectional and Transnational Reader.

Parental leave may result in lower wages. There is plenty of evidence that mothers experience a wage penalty while men, particularly married, residential fathers, often experience a fatherhood wage premium. In perhaps the most cited study on the motherhood wage penalty, sociologists Michelle Budig and Paula England find that each child is associated with a wage penalty of 7 percent. Some of this penalty is due to the fact that women with more children have less work experience, but even after controlling for job experience, there is still a 5-percent wage penalty for each child. In the US, mothers who use work-family policies that result in fewer work hours or less time at the workplace also experience pay penalties.

One cause of the gender wage gap is gender segregation in occupations. Women tend to work in more female-dominated jobs, which tend to have lower pay. Policies that promote women’s employment may also result in greater occupational gender segregation. Another contributor to the gender wage gap is career interruptions. Women are more likely to experience career interruptions, particularly family-related interruptions, and long maternity leave is a chief reason women face disadvantages in the work force. There is evidence that the negative effect of motherhood on wages is at least partly due to loss of human capital during parental leave. In particular, longer parental leave policies encourage longer career interruptions for women, which exacerbates the gender wage gap. In addition to human capital depreciation, when employers expect women to have children and take leave, they are more hesitant to hire and promote women, a form of statistical discrimination. Employers may see long parental leaves as a “legitimate” reason to discriminate against women and favor men.

Researchers from the Netherlands find a sizable wage penalty from parental leave occurring as soon as during the first year. More commonly, researchers find a negative impact of maternity leave on women’s wages in the longer term. Different studies find different penalties, but two studies from Germany suggest there are large penalties. One study shows that women suffer wage penalties of 0.4 percent per month of parental leave and 1.3 percent per year beyond the initial year of parental leave. Another study shows that each year of parental leave decreases wages by 18 percent.

Based on a study that followed the career progression of a group of health care administration graduates in the US, career interruptions that are seen as voluntary, such as parental leave, have a larger negative impact on long-term salary growth than career interruptions that are seen as involuntary, such as unemployment, or part-time work. The health administration researchers go so far as to recommend that workers continue with part-time work rather than take leave during times of greater family responsibilities in order to ensure that they suffer fewer negative impacts from career interruptions. It would seem employers do judge those who take parental leave more harshly.

Furthermore, according to cross-national research, parental leave is more likely to have a negative effect on earnings in countries where there is greater support for more traditional roles in which men act as bread-winners and women as caregivers. Some argue that the gender pay gap is due to the unequal division of family responsibilities. Using Swedish register data, economist Nikolay Angelov and colleagues were able to examine parents of first-born children and track their labor market activities before and after the birth of their child. They found that the gender gap in wages increased after having a child such that mothers had 10 percent lower wages than fathers fifteen years after the birth of their first child. Sociologist Lynn Prince Cooke finds that motherhood penalties are similar across Australia, the UK, and the US for those in the upper half of the earnings distribution but wider in the US for earners in the bottom half. These patterns are encouraged by the lopsided division of labor at home. With women, and especially mothers, doing more housework and childcare, they have less time to focus on their jobs. Employers also expect women to place more priority on their families and this can affect hiring and promotion. This may extend to parental leave. Jennifer Hook, author of Gendered Tradeoffs, uses time-use surveys from nineteen countries to examine the effect of parental leave policies on housework. She finds that women do more housework in countries with long parental leave. On the other hand, women do less housework in contexts where men have access to parental leave.

…Men are not immune to the negative effects of long leaves. Particularly because men are expected to take shorter leaves compared to women, those who take leave often face backlash at work. The answer is not to have no leave but to consider a moderate amount of leave for both parents. Much of the negative impact of long parental leave may be due to the unequal division of parental leave and gendered expectations regarding women and men at home and at work.

Gayle Kaufman is Nancy and Erwin Maddrey Professor of Sociology and Gender & Sexuality Studies at Davidson College in North Carolina.