Full Description
By revealing the importance of gender in interpreting the Jewish past, this collection of original essays highlights the profound influence that feminist scholarship has had on the study of Jewish history since the 1970s. Gender and Jewish History considers the impact of gender on Jewish religious practices and political behavior, educational accomplishments and communal structures, acculturation and choice of occupations. The book stimulates conversations on such topics as Jewish women's creativity and spirituality, violence against women, Jews' reactions to persecution in the Holocaust, and Judaism as lived religion and culture. Honoring Paula Hyman, one of the founders of Jewish gender studies, this volume shows gender to be an eye-opening entry into realms of Jewish history previously untouched by it.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction / Deborah Dash Moore and Marion A. Kaplan
Part 1. Women's Culture in Modern Jewish History
1. How Does a Woman Write? Or, Pauline Wengeroff's Room of Her Own / Shulamit S. Magnus
2. Wives and Wissenschaft: The Domestic Seedbed of Critical Scholarship / Ismar Schorsch
3. Jews, Women, and Coffee in Early Modern Germany / Robert Liberles
4. Water into Blood: Custom, Calendar, and an Unknown Yiddish Book for Women / Elisheva Carlebach
5. "The Murdered Hebrew Maidservant of East New York": Gender, Class, and the Jewish Household in Eastern Europe and Its Diaspora / Rebecca Kobrin
6. Jewish Courtship and Marriage in 1920s Vienna / Marsha L. Rozenblit
7. "Did you bring any girls?" Gender Imbalance in a Jewish Refugee Settlement: Sosúa, the Dominican Republic, 1940-1945 / Marion A. Kaplan
8. The Contribution of Gender to the Study of the Holocaust / Dalia Ofer
Part 2. Gendered Dimensions of Religious Change
9. Women in the Thought and Practice of the European Jewish Reform Movement / Michael A. Meyer
10. German Orthodox Rabbinical Writings on the Jewish Textual Education of Women: The Views of Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch and Rabbi Esriel Hildesheimer / David Ellenson
11. Gender and Conversion Revisited / Todd M. Endelman
12. The Politics of Love in Lev Levanda's Turbulent Times / ChaeRan Y. Freeze
13. Fruitful Weaving: Eve and Penelope as Icons in the Poetry of Linda Pastan / Anne Lapidus Lerner
14. Vernacular Kabbalah, Embodiment, and Women in the Early Modern and Contemporary Periods / Chava Weissler
15. Telling Stories: The Legal Turn in Jewish Feminist Thought / Claire E. Sufrin
Part 3. Jewish Politics in American Accents
16. "The Call to Action": Margaret Sanger, the Brownsville Jewish Women, and Political Activism / Judith Rosenbaum
17. "Too Good to Have Been Made by a Woman": American Jewish Women Artists as Political Activists from the 1920s to the 1940s / Lauren B. Strauss
18. Walkers in the City: Young Jewish Women with Cameras / Deborah Dash Moore
19. Assembling Eichmann's Shackles / Deborah E. Lipstadt
20. Golda and the Court Jew: Golda Meir, Henry Kissinger, and the Personas They Denied / Michael Scott Alexander
21. Gendered Journeys: Jewish Migrations and the City in Postwar America / Lila Corwin Berman
22. Constructing Manhood in American Jewish Culture / Beth S. Wenger
Afterword: An Emancipating Experience: The Jews of France in Paula Hyman's Oeuvre / Richard I. Cohen
Bibliography of Paula Hyman's Works
List of Contributors
Index
