Introduction

Abstract

Introduction Benjamin M. Baader (bio) The essays in this volume use the methodology of gender theory in order to interrogate the category "Jewish." Gender studies has for decades critically examined the categories "male" and "female" and has created an entire body of theoretical approaches to analyze their operations,1 while the theorizing of "Jewish" is a relatively recent development in the field of Jewish studies. Thus, a group of scholars has set out to explore whether this gender studies tool kit might be deployed productively to investigate Jewish difference and Jewish coherence. Lisa Silverman and I first organized a 2010 Association for Jewish Studies (AJS) roundtable on the issue, and then together with Beth Berkowitz and Chaya Halberstam we convened the conference "Grammars of Coherence and Difference: Jewish Studies Through the Lens of Gender Studies," at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee in May 2015.2 Roughly half of the essays in this journal issue began as presentations at the scholarly gathering in Milwaukee, which was structured as a dialogue between gender studies scholars and Jewish studies scholars from a large range of disciplines and working in the entire spectrum of geographic and historical locations. The discussions at the conference stood out because Jewish studies scholars from areas as disparate as rabbinics and modern Jewish history joined in the same conversation; because Jewish studies scholars seriously engaging with gender studies scholars opened radically new vistas to all of us; and because for much of our gathering, we succeeded in addressing some of the big conceptual questions that underlie the nitty-gritty of our scholarly engagement with things Jewish. At the same time, more questions were raised than answers provided, and we organizers were left exhilarated, yet not fully satisfied. Thus, I am delighted that our firework of thoughts, ideas, and explorations finds a more organized and permanent expression in this volume. Throughout the history of this project, the scholars involved in it have been struggling with—and at times disagreed about—terminology. While Silverman and I used "Jewishness" at the AJS roundtable, the group that organized the Milwaukee conference became cautious about the term, due to its vagueness and theoretical imprecision. We tried to step away from the concept of "Jewishness," and called the conference "Grammars of Coherence and Difference," [End Page 1] to suggest that the operations of gender and the operations that create the category "Jewish" were comparable systems in which order and meaning is created in logical and systematic ways, like in the grammar of a language. Yet while we call the grammar that produces the categories of "male" and "female" by the name of "gender," an equivalent term for the grammar that produces the category of "Jewish" is lacking. In order to address this want, Silverman had suggested in 2011 and 2012 publications using the term "Jewish difference" as the equivalent of the term "gender."3 In the call for a Jewish Difference Working Group, that we conference organizers composed in the months after the conference in Milwaukee, this program is made explicit: Right now, Jewish studies scholarship lacks a common term that refers to the relationship between the constructed poles of the Jew and the non-Jew. This relationship forms the basis of much of our work across chronological and geographic time spans. We often call upon the terms "Jewishness" and "Jewish identity" to perform some of this work, but these terms are limited in their ability to refer to the much more specific and powerful analytical and cognitive structures at play in how we come to understand the meanings of the Jewish and non-Jewish. We propose using the term Jewish difference to refer to this relationship. Jewish difference occupies a linguistic space similar to the one gender occupies with regard to the relationship between "man" and "woman": it names the analytic structure that houses the "Jew" and "non-Jew." It is one of a number of analytic categories or frameworks, like gender and class, that often intersect, overlap, and use each others' terms in order to articulate their power. However, Emily Sigalow is alone, among the contributors to this volume, in using the term "Jewish difference" in the novel conceptual meaning that we...