Not Simple Arithmetic

Abstract

As Miriam Peskowitz tellingly suggests, the use of a formulation like in ... reveals an approach to the past which sees women's experience as separate from or other than normative experience. Peskowitz carefully considers the problematic implications of adding Jewish women to a story of which they have always been a part. In so doing, she complicates the task of someone like me who is engaged in a study of the place of women in the development of American Judaism.1 Yet by pointing out the pitfalls of believing that we can either simply add women to Jewish experience or suddenly provide an integrated story by including gender as a category of analysis, Peskowitz provides a critical context for thinking about the gendered nature of Judaism even when the subject under study is the addition of women to male-defined realms. Much of my study focuses on the emergence of women's presence in the eighteenthand nineteenth-century American synagogue. Examination of the evolving status of women in relation to this realm, traditionally defined almost exclusively by male dominance and female marginality, unavoidably devolves into the kind of approach challenged by Peskowitz. And yet attention to and the synagogue, reveals the nineteenth-