When intersectionality failed Jewish women

In Year 12, I wrote my final extended English piece on Intersectional Feminism.

I had always considered myself a feminist, and when I discovered the work of Kimberlé Crenshaw, the legal scholar who coined the term, I finally found the language to describe what I had always believed. Crenshaw defines intersectionality as a framework for understanding how overlapping identities combine to create unique and compounding forms of discrimination. The foundational example used was of Black women, who face discrimination as Black people and as women simultaneously. It resonated deeply. I genuinely believed, and still believe, that all women deserve equality regardless of background or identity.

I am a proud Jewish woman. For a long time, I saw no tension between my Judaism and my feminist identity.

October 7 changed that.

In November 2023, a mere month after the greatest loss of Jewish life in a single day since the Holocaust, I attended the annual Cultural Showcase for a professional women in law organisation I was volunteering for in the Sydney CBD. The purpose of the event was cultural exchange and showcasing the diverse cultures of attendees. A keynote speaker conflated the Palestinian cause with her own community’s struggle, the Indigenous Australian community, and called for the “annihilation of Israel”. Other speakers called for an end to “carpet bombing Palestinians”. Whilst I held it together through the event, at the end, I ran out of the room and burst into tears.

I felt betrayed. Not just as a Jewish woman, but as someone who genuinely believed in the feminist spaces I was part of.

What followed confirmed that feeling. When I went online, I encountered denial, dismissiveness, and genuinely distorted arguments that would never be applied to the documented experiences of other groups of women. People disputed documented crimes against Israeli and Jewish women, subordinating our trauma to politics, deciding that we didn’t deserve the same protections that feminism had always claimed as foundational.

The institutional failures matched those online. The United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women took weeks to issue a statement on the sexual violence committed on October 7th 2023. Feminist organisations, including the United Nations’

Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women and the National Organisation for Women, which had built its identity around believing in women, found reasons not to. One moment that haunted me occurred in June 2024, when Briahna Joy Gray visibly rolled her eyes while Yarden Gonen, sister of then-hostage Romi Gonen, shared her sister’s story on an online program – a program that generated up to 1.5 million daily views. This small gesture, the rolling of the eyes, said everything.

The broader progressive movement has failed Jewish women in the same way. Spaces that have long claimed to stand for the marginalised, the vulnerable, and the oppressed went silent or, worse, became actively hostile when it was Jewish women who needed solidarity. The message was clear: inclusion is conditional. Our pain is inconvenient. Our identity disqualifies us. Our experiences do not fit within the convenient narrative.

This is not a fringe observation: Jewish women across Australia and beyond report feeling abandoned by communities and organisations they had considered their own. Many Jewish women, myself included, lost close friends over our support for Israel and embracing our Jewish identities proudly. The progressive frameworks that promised to hold complexity instead flattened it, placing Jewish women outside its protection.

Crenshaw’s framework was designed to ensure no woman’s experience was erased or subordinated to another’s. Yet that is precisely what happened.

This is not intersectionality. This is its betrayal.

I still believe in the principles that drew me to Crenshaw’s work, the framework itself is not the problem. The problem is the movement, actors, and individuals that apply it selectively, extending solidarity to every identity except the Jewish one.

Being a Jewish feminist today means seeing that contradiction for what it really is. It means believing in equality for all women while recognising that not all feminist spaces currently believe in equality for us. It means continuing to show up, to speak, and to demand that the framework means what Crenshaw intended: for women to be protected, not ignored.

Intersectionality only works if it is applied without exception – Jewish women are not asking for special treatment. We are asking for consistency. We will keep making that case and ensuring our voices are heard, because the alternative is accepting a version of feminism that is weaker, narrower, and far from its founding principles.

The progressive, feminist movement can still address what it failed to do. When it does, Jewish women will be there.

Ariella Tracton is a StandWithUs Australia Emerson Fellow