Marcia Freedman

Marcia Freedman was born in 1938 in Newark, New Jersey, and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area.[1] She studied at Bennington College and New York University and immigrated to Israel in 1969, after which she taught in the philosophy department at the University of Haifa.[2] In a 1999 essay, however, Freedman wrote that she had first gone to Israel in 1967, suggesting that the dates may refer to different stages of her move.[4]

Before her Israeli career, Freedman had been active in the American Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s.[2] That experience shaped her approach to politics: she later promoted workplace-adjacent daycare centers in Israel and brought an activist sensibility from American feminist and civil-rights work into Israeli public life.[5] In Israel, she became active with the Independent Socialists and in 1972 helped found the Women's Liberation Movement and was chosen to lead it.[2]

Freedman entered the Eighth Knesset after Shulamit Aloni, seeking feminist support for human- and women's-rights issues, asked her to take third place on the Ratz party list.[2] Freedman described the move as unplanned. Following the 1973 election, she served in the Eighth Knesset until 1977.[2][1] During her term, Ratz joined with Lova Eliav to form the Ya'ad faction; Freedman and Eliav later left and formed the Social Democratic faction, while Aloni's group reverted to the Ratz name.[2] Accounts also list the Independent Socialist Faction among her parliamentary affiliations.[1] She served on the Knesset's Education and Culture Committee.[2]

From the floor of the Knesset, Freedman raised subjects that had been excluded from public and parliamentary discussion or treated as taboo: violence against women, incest, prostitution among girls, breast-cancer prevention, birth control, abortion rights, gay and lesbian rights, drug legalization, Palestinian national rights in the territories, and secret Israeli arms sales to apartheid South Africa.[2] In a 2007 interview, she recalled being asked, "By what right do you wear pants in the Knesset?"[6]

In mid-July 1976, Freedman raised the agenda item "Wife-beating by their husbands," initiating the first Knesset discussion of domestic violence against women.[7] She argued that the law and police protected citizens from violence but left married women exposed to violence by their husbands, and that abuse was obscured by silence and by police practices that often failed to record injuries limited to bruises.[8] Her estimate was that the number of battered women in Israel ran "in the thousands rather than in the hundreds" and that the problem was not restricted to poor neighborhoods or development towns.[8]

Lawmakers interrupted the discussion with jokes. When the Minister of Police argued that he could not identify a specific problem of men's violence toward their wives, Freedman replied, "That is the problem—that you do not see it."[7] The minister asked that the issue not be placed on the Knesset agenda, but Freedman's proposal passed by 20 votes to 9, bringing the issue into official consideration by the Knesset and state authorities.[7]

For the 1977 election to the Ninth Knesset, Freedman established a Women's Party, but she was not included on its candidate list and the list did not pass the electoral threshold. She said the party's purpose was also to use the campaign to inform women about their position in Israeli society, and she believed it succeeded in doing so.[2]

Shortly after her failed bid for re-election, Freedman asked her friend Judy Hill, "Do you want to open a shelter for battered women?"[3] Together with Hill, Joyce Livingstone, Cholit Bat-Edit, and Barbara Swirski—none of whom had been born in Israel—Freedman made the idea a reality, with help from dozens of feminist activists.[3] On September 1, 1977, the group formally established the Haifa organization Women for Women; on November 3, 1977, the first shelter opened in a five-room apartment in Haifa's Hadar HaCarmel neighborhood, its location kept secret.[2]

The apartment was furnished through local donations. Most staff volunteered, and a lawyer, doctor, and gynecologist provided services free or for nominal fees. The shelter's rules—developed after the founders read professional literature and studied shelters in England and the Netherlands—allowed stays of up to three months and provided residents with legal, personal, and medical assistance.[3]

After a newspaper article published on February 3, 1978, more than one hundred women applied for shelter in the months that followed.[3] When the original apartment's owner required them to leave, the founders and shelter residents, together with their children, publicly occupied a larger abandoned building in Haifa with media present to draw attention to the crisis.[2] After a further occupation of a property belonging to Na'amat, Labor and Social Welfare Minister Yisrael Katz arranged for his ministry to rent a facility for them.[2] A second shelter opened in Herzliya six months after the first; a third opened in Jerusalem in 1981, and a fourth in Ashdod later that year.[3]

Freedman was clear about the shelter's intended purpose: to demonstrate that violence against women existed. In a 2007 interview, she argued that treatment should be separated from the struggle against violence and that shelter conditions for battered women deserved to be better.[1]

After leaving the Knesset, Freedman returned to the United States in 1981 and settled in Berkeley, California, where she worked with Israeli-Palestinian and American women's peace groups.[1] In her own telling, she left Israel after a decade of leadership in the feminist and peace movements, describing herself as exhausted and seriously isolated.[4] In the same essay, she recalled that Israel's early feminist voice had been described as a threat to the security of the state and that its challenge to Israeli machismo was portrayed as potentially undermining the armed forces and the Jewish family; she linked that antagonism to her departure.[4]

She later divided her time between Jerusalem and Berkeley.[4] She returned to Israel in early November 1995, three days before the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, and wrote that the event redirected her attention from Arab-Jewish coexistence to what she saw as the urgent need for Jewish-Jewish coexistence.[4]

Freedman was the founding president of Brit Tzedek v'Shalom, a national American Jewish organization that advocated a negotiated settlement to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.[9][10] She was an early advocate of a two-state solution—"two states for two peoples"—before the idea was widely accepted. Brit Tzedek v'Shalom merged into J Street in 2010.[9]

She also continued her feminist analysis in writing. In an essay titled "Thirty Years of Feminism in Israel: A Prognosis for the Future," Freedman argued that despite decades of feminist activity, "little has changed in the material conditions of Israeli women's lives." She identified persistent economic and professional inequality and argued that liberal feminism had underemphasized equal division of family labor and the removal of gender stereotypes that perpetuate male dominance.[11]

Freedman authored the memoir Exile in the Promised Land, published by Firebrand Books in 1990, as well as numerous articles and reviews.[4][12]

Freedman is described as the first known Knesset member to come out as lesbian.[1] Ynet reported that she left her husband after her election and publicly identified as a lesbian several years later; Maariv placed her coming out around the 1977 election period and described her as Israel's first former Knesset member to do so.[6][2]

In 2015, the Aguda rights group named Freedman among 40 people it recognized as having had the greatest influence on Israel's LGBTQ community, stating that her coming out in the 1970s had inspired gay women and men who had been afraid to be themselves.[9]

Marcia Freedman died on September 21, 2021, at age 83.[2] Accounts described her as a pioneer of Israeli feminism, a human-rights activist, and one of the founders of Israel's first shelter for battered women.[8][2]

Her July 1976 Knesset speech on domestic violence—the first such parliamentary debate in Israeli history—established domestic abuse as a subject of legislative concern and helped lay the groundwork for the network of shelters that followed.[7][2] She brought into formal public discourse issues, including LGBT rights, abortion, breast cancer, and rape, that had been treated as private or taboo in Israeli political life.[2][9] Writing in 1999, Freedman described her relationship with Israel in terms that captured her dual role as insider and critic: "As some Jews wrestle with God, I wrestle with Israel."[4]

A dossier published by the Investigative Project on Terrorism, discussing J Street's 2015 conference, described Freedman as having suggested replacing a Jewish state with a "Jewish homeland" in which Jews would be a "protected minority" within an Arab Palestinian state. The dossier presents this account critically; it represents that organization's characterization of her remarks rather than an independently verified transcript.[13]

Freedman's broader political assessments—including her description of the Zionist enterprise as flawed, her account of shame about Israel's history as a driver of her activism, and her characterization of organized American Jewish communal life as stifling dissent on Israel—are her own stated views rather than uncontested historical claims.[4][10]

Some apparent biographical inconsistencies reflect differences in wording or changes over time. Freedman wrote that she first went to Israel in 1967, while Maariv dates her immigration to 1969; these may refer to different stages of her move.[4][2] Her parliamentary affiliations changed from Ratz to Ya'ad and then the Social Democratic faction, while other accounts also identify the Independent Socialist Faction.[2][1] Accounts place her public coming out after her election but differ on its exact timing relative to the end of her Knesset service.[6][2]