Author: Stacy Keltner

Stacy Keltner is a first-generation graduate, writer and professor based in Atlanta. Find her on Instagram, TikTok or Twitter.

‘In Protest’: The Women Leading the Resistance Against Israel’s Authoritarian Turn 

On Oct. 27, Israelis go to the polls in the first national election since Hamas’ attack on Oct. 7, 2023. It is also the first since Benjamin Netanyahu returned to power at the end of 2022 and launched an assault on Israeli democracy, beginning with a plan to strip the courts of their independence.

For the feminist movement that revolted against Netanyahu’s government, the vote comes after three years of pressure to choose between opposing the state and standing with the nation.

One of the Israeli feminist movement’s most visible leaders is now on the ballot. Moran Zer Katzenstein founded Bonot Alternativa (Women Building an Alternative), the group behind the red-cloaked Handmaids marches that became a defining image of the 2023 protests.

This spring she joined Yair Golan’s Democrats party, and in July she won the 12th spot on its slate. In Protest, a short documentary by Paula Kweskin and Carli Fogel (available to stream on YouTube), shows how she got there.

What the 3.2 Million-Year-Old Lucy Fossil Reveals About Nudity and Shame

Fifty years ago, scientists discovered “Lucy,” a nearly complete fossilized skull and hundreds of pieces of bone of a 3.2-million-year-old female specimen of the genus Australopithecus afarensis, often described as “the mother of us all.”

Though Lucy has solved some evolutionary riddles, her appearance remains an ancestral secret.

Popular renderings dress her in thick, reddish-brown fur, with her face, hands, feet and breasts peeking out of denser thickets.This hairy picture of Lucy, it turns out, might be wrong.

A Violent Denial: Combating Silence Around Hamas’ Sexual Violence and Preventing Future War Crimes

Feminist lessons of war are traumatically and often fatally difficult to come by. In her 2023 book, Twelve Feminist Lessons of War, Cynthia Enloe offers a list that includes: “Women’s wars are not men’s wars,” “wounds are gendered” and “feminists organize while war is raging.” She declares that “feminist lessons are for everyone.”

Cochav Elkayam-Levy is still figuring out the feminist lessons to be learned from the Oct. 7 attack. As she has come to accept, this will be her life’s work.

(This article originally appears in the Summer 2024 issue of Ms. Join the Ms. community today and you’ll get issues delivered straight to your mailbox!)