Full Description
National Jewish Book Awards Finalist
for the Barbara Dobkin Award for Women's Studies, 2017.
The 'Jewish mother' figure is a hallmark of Jewish culture, one which appears in the works of rabbis, artists, poets, and activists across time and place. While depictions of mothers and motherhood abound in Jewish writings, they vary significantly according to social context. These representations therefore offer important insights into the Jewish cultural imagination, and the ways in which writers resort to the figure of the Jewish mother to comprehend and construct their world.
The contributors to this volume highlight the complex network of symbols and images associated with Jewish mothers and motherhood as well as the vast array of social, historical, and cultural patterns that characterizations of mothers reflect. Each essay treats the topic from a specific perspective, spanning from mother--daughter relationships in the Talmud to depictions of mothers in twentieth-century American Jewish children's literature. Collectively, they present a provocative examination of the ways mothers shape and problematize Jewish identity.
This volume seeks to give the figure of the mother a new and enhanced place at the heart of Judaism: not only as a central figure in family life, but also as a key agent in the transmission of Jewish religion and culture.
Contents
Note on Transliteration
Introduction: Reimagining Jewish Mothers
Marjorie Lehman, Jane L. Kanarek, and Simon J. Bronner
PART I . IDEALIZED MOTHERS
1 Cooking, Cuddling, and Candle-Lighting: Motherhood in Award-Winning Jewish Children's Literature
Emily Sigalow
2 The Jewish Mother's Prayer: Mothers in Late Nineteenth-Century Hungarian Jewish Women's Prayer Books
Krisztina Frauhammer
3 Nene Mesl-e Na¯n—'Mother is Like Bread': The Perception of Motherhood and Folklore Expressions among the Jews of Afghanistan
Tsila Zan-Bar Tsur
4 Mothers and Children in Ottoman Jewish Society as Reflected in Hebrew Sources of the Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries
Ruth Lamdan
PART II . CONSTRUCTIONS AND CONTESTATIONS OF MOTHERS
5 Like Mother Like Daughter: Mother-Daughter Relations in Babylonian Talmudic Stories
Moshe Lavee
6 The (Re)production of a Maskilah: The Mother-Daughter Bond between Menuhah and Hava Shapiro
Carole B. Balin and Wendy I. Zierler
7 Maurice Sendak's Jewish Mother(s)
Jodi Eichler-Levine
8 The Jewish Mother as Metonym for Community in Postwar America
Josh Lambert
PART III . ACTIVIST MOTHERS
9 The 'Mothers' Who Were Not: Motherhood Imagery and Childless Women Warriors in Early Jewish Literature
Caryn Tamber-Rosenau
10 Motherhood as Motivation: American Jewish Women in Action, 1890-1940
Melissa R. Klapper
11 'Two Voices Heard in Castile': Rachel and Mary Weep for Their Children in the Age of the Zohar
Sharon Koren
12 'Where Was Sarah?' Depictions of Mothers and Motherhood in Modern Israeli Poetry on the Binding of Isaac
Dalia Marx
PART IV . RE-EMBODYING MOTHERS
13 Depictions of Childbirth in Rabbinic Literature: The Innovation of a Genizah Midrashic Text
Shana Strauch Schick
14 Upending the Curse of Eve: A Reframing of Maternal Breastfeeding in BT Ketubot
Miriam-Simma Walfish
15 The Biblical Root 'mn: Retrieval of a Term and Its Household Context
Deena Aranoff
PART V . RECASTING MOTHERS
16 Mothers and Ma'asim: Maternal Roles in Medieval Hebrew Tales
Elisheva Baumgarten
17 On Teachers, Rabbinic and Maternal
Mara H. Benjamin
Contributors
Index
