Chana Goldstein can often be seen at the Taylor Place Starbucks, usually with chocolate, and usually chatting with a downtown Arizona State University student.
Goldstein is the wife of Rabbi Mitch Goldstein. The couple has worked with Jewish Arizonans on Campus since 2014, but ASU is the latest school where Goldstein has mentored young Jewish women and taught them about both Judaism and feminism.
“I’ll start at like 10 o’clock in the morning,” she said. “Every half an hour, I have a different date with a different girl, and I bring the chocolate and they bring a question.”
Goldstein lives in Tempe, but she mentors girls on both the Tempe and Downtown Phoenix campuses of ASU. She said she talks to girls about time management, how not to be scared of new experiences and how to handle boys.
“Most of what I do is I teach very basic ideas about feminism, I teach them how it affects their lives, and I give them my particular brand,” she said. “The kind of brand of feminism that I’m really trying to promote is firstly this idea of reclaiming the power of being a woman, and the very unique, special and effective tools that we really have.”
One person Goldstein works with is Monica Sampson, a journalism student involved with Jewish Arizonans on Campus (JAC). The two met last year at a tabling event at ASU’s Downtown Phoenix campus.
Sampson said she had been following Goldstein’s blog Reclaiming Pink for an English class feminism project and was stunned to meet Goldstein in person right on campus.
“I thought she lived in England! There she was,” Sampson said. “I had literally been quoting her 10 minutes earlier.”
The two talk frequently, and Sampson said Goldstein has been a resource for her when it comes to feminism, relationships and life.
“I love the fact that Chana was willing to talk to me about anything,” she said. “She always had an open mind, and that open mind came with a lot of facts.”
Goldstein said Sampson is a good representation of the kind of girls she likes to meet with to discuss whatever is on the student’s “agenda,” even if it includes some sticky topics, like sex, health and family issues.
Goldstein spoke at ASU Downtown’s Feminist February event, a panel of prominent local women who discussed love, success and how they first discovered feminism.
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Originally from London, Goldstein studied law at the University of Nottingham, where she soon found it hard to stomach some of the things she was learning about — for example, domestic violence laws and a justice system that often favors men.
“A guy could almost walk away from killing his wife whereas a woman could go down for first-degree murder for killing a man who has been abusing her for years,” Goldstein said. “I very much graduated university thinking there was no way I wanted to apply this law and that I wanted to change it.”
She worked briefly in politics, lobbying for a mental health organization and working on an election campaign for the office of Mayor of London until her marriage to Mitch Goldstein, a Jewish rabbi, brought her elsewhere.
“I met Mitch when I was on a random Israel trip during my university time,” Goldstein said. “So he suggested that I come out to Israel, so I went out to Israel, and I studied in a seminary, which is something I never thought I would do. It was a very eye-opening and inspiring experience.”
When Goldstein and her husband moved to the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he served as campus rabbi, she said she was unclear about her role at first, until she decided to host a Jewish festival called Chocolate Under the Stars.
“I just basically went to the store and bought them out of like everything, Hershey’s Kisses and everything, and made a huge pot of hot chocolate and invited every Jewish girl on campus,” Goldstein said.
Goldstein said she was approached at that party by a student who was interested in getting to know her more. The two started meeting up, snacking on chocolate and talking about Judaism. Before long, more students were interested in chatting with Goldstein about everything from religion to relationships to schoolwork.
That was when Goldstein started her website, Reclaiming Pink, as a way to share the ideas she was discussing with students. The site includes life and relationship advice, with articles such as “5 Principles to Building Your Own Inner Circle and What It Can Do For You” and “Four Ways That Independent Women Fall In Love.”
“I write it because it’s great information that my girls need and they want to share with their friends,” she said. “This is information that I need to put out there in some kind of logical fashion, and I do that through Reclaiming Pink.”
After moving from UC Santa Barbara to the University of Toronto, Goldstein and her husband now live in Tempe, Arizona, where they work with Jewish students at ASU through the network JAC.
Mitch Goldstein emphasizes the role of action in teaching feminist ideals to their four children — Moshe, 9, Mimi, 7, Eli, 5, and Aaron, 2.
“They will see through action how to interact with women, how to have respect for women, and so I think that’s an important aspect,” he said. “They see how we interact, how I approach her, how our marriage exemplifies those ideals. They live with them.”
Mitch Goldstein said his wife’s ability to connect with female students has contributed to the model they follow in their work with JAC — he generally interacts one-on-one with the male students, she with the young women.
“Chana understands women so much better than a man does, and she understands the issues that they have or the questions that they have way better than I would,” he said. “It’s her strength.”
Goldstein said that although she has always identified as a feminist, her seminary studying focused heavily on women’s rights and “the fact that the way that society has tried to equalize the sexes is to give women the opportunity to be more and more like men.”
Goldstein said this is not sufficient.
“A lot of what I did when I was studying, a lot of my focus, was this idea that the world needs women,” she said.
Mitch Goldstein said his wife’s feminism and Judaism intersect to make her effective in what she does.
“Judaism has been an amazing and powerful tool throughout the ages to develop the idea of feminism even before modern feminism existed,” he said. “It’s just that when people judge from the outside, they don’t necessarily see it. That is part of Jewish outreach, Chana being an amazing example of an empowered Jewish woman … to show both in the action but also in her education and what she’s sharing — the beauty of the Jewish woman.”
Contact the author at libby.allnatt@asu.edu
Contact the columnist at Holly.Bernstein@asu.edu
