Women of a certain age. We know what the term implies, but it doesn’t really begin to convey what it has meant about how we have traveled through life, both personally and professionally.  

I am a woman of a certain age. I went to a co-ed public high school and a women’s college where we socialized with our counterparts from male single-gender schools. I worked on Wall Street in the late ’70s and through the ’80s. My husband and I raised two daughters. I went to law school in my mid-40s and began to practice federal criminal defense at 50. 

What’s the significance of my CV? The recent reawakening of the women’s movement has caused me to reflect on what I have benefited from, normalized and, yes, endured. All of the #MeToo revelations have prompted me to recall what I have clearly remembered over the years, and also what I’ve repressed.

I do not exaggerate when I say I was sexually assaulted in high school and college. But in the 1970s, there was no support system to report and bring perpetrators to justice. There was only victimhood for girls and women. When I worked on Wall Street, I endured daily sexual taunts, innuendos, harassment and constant verbal abuse. A few clients I thought I could trust actually tried to physically force themselves on me. In today’s climate, it is fair to ask if I reported any of these incidents. The answer: rarely. The one time I went to my boss to tell him that a client had physically attacked me, I was removed from that lucrative account and my income suffered as a consequence.

Yet, despite all of this, I loved working on Wall Street: the daily adrenaline rush, the action, building relationships with decent and smart clients. There were so many brilliant and exciting people to learn from. I knew that if I reported any more of these comments, events or assaults, I would be viewed as trouble. Or fired. There were very few women on the trading floor of major Wall Street firms, and being able to play with “the boys” was the test for survival. 

During my years on Wall Street, there were times when I was exhilarated at the end of the day, and there were evenings I would come home and cry. I rationalized that if I wanted to work in the heretofore male arena of a trading floor, I had to put up with all of the harassment. After almost 10 years, for a variety of personal reasons, I left Wall Street. Enduring the daily indignities of the trading room did finally burn me out. 

When I started to practice law, I was more mature and generally tougher. Or so I thought. My very first day in court, in front of a federal judge, I nervously asked him my first question. Before he got to the substance of the question, the judge said to me, dressed for court in blue pants and a pea green blazer, “And, Ms. Smith, what do you think you’re dressed for, a Park Avenue bridge club?” In front of the jury. 

I do not exaggerate when I say I was sexually assaulted in high school and college. But in the 1970s, there was no support system to report and bring perpetrators to justice. There was only victimhood for girls and women. 

Now, as I reflect on the moment that we are experiencing, I’m grateful for the changes we have seen and filled with optimism for the changes yet to come. My mother’s generation (with notable exceptions, such as Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg) did not generally dream about equality. My generation was the beneficiary of the activists of the women’s movement: women’s liberation, bra burning, political access and equal employment. We dreamed and we made progress, but not enough. We still suffered from harassment, received lower pay than our male counterparts, suffered discrimination when we opted to have children and rarely made it to the C-Suite. I’d like to think that in the moment of #MeToo, my daughters’ generation will fully benefit from needed changes so that women will at last be respected as equals, paid fairly, not treated as sexual objects and not suffer discrimination. 

The Jewish community is no different than the rest of the world. Sadly, as has been recounted with alarming detail lately, we have abusers among us and we have far too few women in positions of leadership and power. This year, the Genesis Prize Foundation is proud to be an agent of change by focusing our philanthropy on women’s issues in Israel and in the North American Jewish community. Our Genesis Prize Women’s Empowerment Challenge, managed by Jewish Funders Network, is offering matching grants to organizations committed to making systemic change in four targeted areas in Jewish workspaces and communal spaces in North America. We invite organizations and donors to join us in making a difference. 

It’s time to work together, take action and make changes so that no woman in the Jewish community will have to endure what our mothers — or those of us of a certain age — did. My daughters and my granddaughter deserve better.

Jill Weber Smith is Senior Advisor to the Chairman of the Genesis Prize Foundation. 

I am intermarried. 

That is to say, I am a Jew from Tehran who married a Jew from Shiraz, Iran. 

In the United States, that’s usually about as far as intermarriage goes for Persian Jews. For now, anyway. 

Some are beginning to marry non-Persian Jews, and their Ashkenazi spouses appear ecstatic to finally be able to eat rice during Passover — and only slightly less important, finally to have found love.

At a recent ketubah-signing for my sister-in-law (a Shirazi) and her fiance (a Tehrani), the sound of the non-Persian rabbi’s voice as he spoke about the obligations of marriage was drowned out by the melodic unity of Shirazi mothers pouring their hearts out singing “Vasoonak Shirazi,” the wedding song whose melody all Iranians in Iran know, regardless of faith. I knew that song before I could walk, talk or grill my own meat by the age of 3.

Beyond its soulful poets, famous gardens and, before the revolution, its winemaking legacy, the southern city of Shiraz also has produced one of the greatest Persian songs of all time, whose words, sadly, few in my generation of 30-somethings know (much less 20-somethings and younger folks). At least the original song has been commercialized — some will recognize it as “Mobarak Baad,” which has a few of the original couplets. 

I like to poke fun at anyone not from Tehran, but I was so mesmerized and moved that I began to cry between my bites of cucumber and walnuts.

As I watched those wonderful women — their hearts full of pride and their ankles swollen from 45 years of housework — sing in a cappella unison about a joyful bride and groom, I began to tear up from the heartwarming duality of watching a young Persian-Jewish couple who have their entire (American) lives before them, and much older Persian Jews who, when they pass on, may no doubt take with them everything that still makes us Persian, especially our songs. 

My mother-in-law also sang “Vasoonak Shirazi” for my husband and me at our ketubah-signing in 2014. The song originated in Shiraz and is sung at most Shirazi weddings, which explains why the non-Shirazi women at the ketubah-signing didn’t quite know what to do with themselves once the impromptu singing began. I like to poke fun at anyone not from Tehran, but I was so mesmerized and moved that I began to cry between my bites of cucumber and walnuts.

And the Shirazi women? In that moment of cultural sharing, it seemed like the only thing we cosmopolitan Tehranis could teach them was the priceless beauty of holding on to their own traditions.

I felt transported to a time and place when a wedding was celebrated by an entire community; when mothers, aunts and grandmothers came together to prepare a luscious wedding meal using recipes passed down several generations and with aromatic ingredients that don’t come close to what we have outside of Iran; a time when the concept of a Jewish wedding in my community was less about drones flying over guests’ heads to film $250,000 worth of extravagance, and more about the celebration of Jewish continuity. And lots of homemade Persian food.

After she led the song, my mother-in-law lamented to me that she was slightly more out of breath this time than she had been four years earlier when she had recited it for my husband and me. It was then that I wanted a copy of her handwritten lyrics to “Vasoonak Shirazi” so that, in a few decades, I may sing the song to my own children. They were born in Los Angeles; they don’t understand the language of their ancestors dating back 2,700 years (not yet, anyway), but they can run for president of the United States. You lose some, you win some.

The older Shirazi women that night were magnificent. I had no doubt that the matriarchs in their families also sang the same song for them when they were young brides, in a country that once was. 

Those women were the only threads — the last threads, I fear — between us and a homeland to which return is utterly impossible, as well as a certain Jewish tradition I adore. As they belted out Persian-language harmonies, competing with the Hebrew-chanting rabbi over singing rights, the full breadth and delicious tapestry of being Iranian and Jewish was on display for all to see. 

Well, for almost all to see. A lot of the younger folks were scrolling on their phones.

Tabby Refael is a Los Angeles-based writer.