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Five years ago (almost to the day), I devoted this column to some public utterances of Rebecca Steinfeld, who was then undertaking doctoral research at the University of Oxford. The title of her thesis was "War of the Wombs: The History and Politics of Fertility Policies in Israel, 1948-2010"; its focus was "on the extent to which the archival sources substantiate the claim… that Israel has established and maintained an ethnically selective pro-natalist policy that seeks to simultaneously encourage a higher Jewish birthrate and a lower non-Jewish, specifically Palestinian-Arab, one." I'll return in a moment to the substance of this argument.
Dr Steinfeld is nothing if not a consummate multi-tasker. While pursuing her research, she managed to find time to indulge another of her passions. She has maintained her role as a leading - perhaps the leading - British-Jewish campaigner against brit milah.
In my June 24 2011 column I drew attention to a Guardian website article she had co-authored on this subject. "Men, too, [the essay thundered] can be victims of unjust hegemonic systems tolerated in the name of tradition, culture or religion. If we oppose female genital mutilation, has the time not come for us also to oppose male genital mutilation?"
Well, on 27 October 2013, at a so-called "Free-Thinking Festival," Steinfeld intensified her attack on brit milah by delivering a lecture that was subsequently broadcast on BBC Radio 3. I should add that the lecture was delivered in - of all places - Gateshead. That's chutzpah for you!
Meanwhile, on her own Twitter page she has apparently encouraged Limmud to give airtime to those supporting the BDS movement. Separately, she (or someone bearing a name identical to hers) was a signatory to an advertisement in The Times (December 1, 2009) supporting the now-discredited Goldstone Report.
I suspect that Steinfeld really wants abortion on demand
She is also reported to have described shechitah as "awful" and to have criticised the Board of Deputies' support of it. And do you remember the heterosexual couple who, only last January, tried unsuccessfully to convince the High Court in London that they should be able to enter into a civil partnership rather than a marriage? That was none other than Steinfeld and her partner Charles Keidan.
I return now to Steinfeld's doctoral thesis, on which she lectured at the London School of Economics on 7 June. I haven't read the thesis and didn't attend the lecture. But I have read an article, written by her, which appeared last year in Israel Studies, published by Indiana University Press. The article I take to incorporate some of the distilled essence of the thesis.
Abortion is legal in Israel, but is only permitted if one or more of four strict criteria are met. A woman seeking termination must be (1) under 18 or over 40; or (2) pregnant as a result of criminal, extra-marital, or incestuous relations. Or (3) the foetus must be judged likely to have a physical or mental defect. Or (4) continuation of the pregnancy is viewed as likely to endanger the woman's life or cause her physical or mental harm. The woman must also receive permission from a three-person "termination committee". Steinfeld condemns these arrangements as an "intrusion into women's reproductive lives." But her argument strikes me as blatantly one-sided.
I strongly suspect that what Steinfeld really wants (like most feminists) is abortion-on-demand. Be that as it may, I could not find, in the article, so much as one mention of the rights (or indeed the obligations) of the biological father, without whose input (so to speak) the foetus would not exist. As to the rights of the unborn child, Steinfeld restricts her discussion to a few sentences chronicling the intrusion of "American Christian" polemics into Israeli debate on the subject.
Instead, Steinfeld's overriding preoccupation seems to be (as she puts it) "resisting attempts to render [Israeli] women's wombs national vessels." I find it odd, incidentally, that Steinfeld should claim that, in attacking brit milah, she is defending the rights of the child while ignoring these rights if the child happens still to be in the womb.
Abortion is , as Steinfeld must know, the most emotive of subjects, and - as she ought to know - there are plenty of countries whose abortion laws are demonstrably far more restrictive than Israel's. Why single out the Jewish state for condemnation?
In my 2011 column I echoed the view of the JC that Rebecca Steinfeld was "a leading anti-Jewish Jew of the younger generation." She is, in fact, fast emerging as the leader of the pack.