I’m a Jewess and I’m owning the term 

For much of modern history, the word “Jewess” carried a complicated and often uncomfortable weight. 

It emerged as a gendered label at a time when women were routinely defined in relation to men, and it was often used by outsiders rather than embraced within the community. To the modern reader, it could feel reductive, less a simple descriptor and more a way of setting Jewish women apart. 

“Jewess” wasn’t always negative. Rebecca, the iconic Jewess of Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, stands as one of literature’s most romanticised heroines, later portrayed on screen by Elizabeth Taylor—who herself converted to Judaism.

American women embraced the term in the 19^th Century, when it was the name of a women’s magazine that combined demands for synagogue membership for women with household and fashion tips and reflections on the propriety of women riding bicycles. 

Mostly though, it was a term that came with a shadow and by the mid-20th century, “Jewess” was obsolete. Just as a woman was no longer diminished as poetess or actress but given the full weight of poet or actor, the Jewess became just a Jew or, when gender was relevant, a Jewish woman, clearer, more contemporary, and free from the historical baggage that “Jewess” had accumulated. 

But language has a way of reshaping and reclaiming discarded words. Some young women are now using the term “Jewess” as an intentional inversion of how it has been used in the past.