Was Shulamith Firestone Jewish?

Yes, the pioneering feminist Shulamith Firestone was at the brackets of her life an Orthodox Jew. She was brought up as an Orthodox Jew as a child, and she was buried in an Orthodox Jewish rite.

During her life, the radical feminist activities that she engaged in and the critical books that she wrote were as far from the values of Orthodox Judaism as day is from night.

The inspiring and haunting New Yorker profile, "AMERICAN CHRONICLES: DEATH OF A REVOLUTIONARY," BY SUSAN FALUDI informs the reader that "Shulamith Firestone helped to create a new society. But she couldn’t live in it."

It informs us, "Best known for her writings, Firestone also launched the first major radical-feminist groups in the country, which made headlines in the late nineteen-sixties and early seventies with confrontational protests and street theatre."

The article begins, "When Shulamith Firestone’s body was found late last August, in her studio apartment on the fifth floor of a tenement walkup on East Tenth Street, she had been dead for some days. She was sixty-seven, and she had battled schizophrenia for decades, surviving on public assistance. There was no food in the apartment, and one theory is that Firestone starved, though no autopsy was conducted, by preference of her Orthodox Jewish family. Such a solitary demise would have been unimaginable to anyone who knew Firestone in the late nineteen-sixties, when she was at the epicenter of the radical-feminist movement, surrounded by some of the same women who, a month after her death, gathered in St. Mark’s Church In-the-Bowery, to pay their respects..."