Notes from the Second Generation

Abstract

Notes from tbe Second Generation NOTES FROM mE SECOND GENERATION by Beth S. Wenger Beth S. Wenger received her Ph.D. from Yale University and now teaches modern and American Jewish history at the University of Pennsylvania. During the 1995-96 academic year, she will be a Visiting Fellow at Princeton University's Center for the Study ofAmerican Religion. Her articles have appeared in AmerlcanJewisb History and the Journal of Women's History. A forthcoming book, New YorkJews and tbe Great Depression, will be published by Yale University Press. 93 In 1987, while I was in my first year of graduate school, an article in the New York Times Sunday magazine declared that feminist criticism, "once a sort of illicit half sister in the academic world," had "assumed a respectable place in the family order.,,1 For me and for most of my colleagues in graduate school, such firm proclamations seemed plausible. I had studied women's history in college and participated in graduate seminars that usually included some discussion of gender. I belong to a generation of teachers and scholars that did not pioneer but rather inherited a new arena of academic inquiry. To be sure, we were legacies to an emerging, not a fully defined, intellectual diScipline. In a span of only two decades, women's history has progressed through at least two distinct stages. What began as an effort to provide new information about women and reclaim women's experience for the historical record has evolved into a more complex consideration of the role of gender in shaping categories of knowledge, tradition, and power. The enormous conceptual growth in women's history informed the intellectual initiation lElizabeth Kolbert, "Literary Feminism Comes of Age," New York Times Magazine, 6 (December 1987): 110. 94 SHOFAR Fall 1995 Vol. 14, No.1 of my generation ofscholars. Yet, having arrived in the academy during the second stage in the development of women's studies, having benefited from female teachers as role models, and having had access to a growing body of scholarly literature about women, we have not yet fulfilled the optimistic predictions announced so confidently in the New York Times. Feminist scholarship has indeed become part of academic discourse, but its relationship to other disciplines and its impact upon the master narratives ofhistory remain inconsistent, often contested, and in the worst cases, even non-existent. Few fields have been slower to integrate gender analysis than Jewish Studies. A traditionally text-based area of inquiry, centered on intellectual rather than social history, and lacking a rigorous theoretical approach, Jewish Studies has lagged noticeably behind other fields in aclq'lOwledging gender studies as a legitimate enterprise. Nevertheless, in my own diScipline ofJewish history, there has recently been a remarkable increase in works about Jewish women. From studies of Jewish women in the ancient world through works that address the differing gendered experiences ofJewish modernity, the last ten years have witnessed an enormous production of Jewish feminist scholarship.2 The literature of Jewish women's history has certainly increased at a rapid pace, but I am not convinced that Jewish historians have taken significant steps toward integrating gender as a category of analysis. How much have gender perspectives transformed our writing and teaching ofJewish history? Do our students leave our courses with an understanding ofgender as integral or rather as marginal to Jewish experience? While our knowledge ofJewish women's lives continues to grow, how much is that knowledge changing the ways we conceive and present Jewish history? While space does not permit a thorough exploration of these issues, I want to raise a few of my greatest concerns about the current status ofgender studies within Jewish history. 'The list of such works would be fur too lengthy to reproduce here. See, for example, the recent anthology in Jewish women's history which contains essays covering the biblical period through twentieth-century America. Judith Baskin, ed.,Jewish Women in Historical Perspective (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991). Notes from the Second Generation Women as an Objectified Category 95 During the last year, I have attended two Jewish history conferences, both organized by leading male scholars, which made conscious attempts to include papers about...