Jewish Feminist Research Articles

Beyond the Secular-Religion Divide: Judaism and the New Secularity

In his 2018 survey of twenty-first-century American Judaism entitled The New American Judaism: How Jews Practice their Judaism Today, Jack Wertheimer references a 2015 Pew Research study that presupposes the secular-religion binary as the analytical metric for its determination that both the American public and American Jews are becoming less religious. Nonetheless, Wertheimer’s use of this analytical frame prohibits him from making sense of many details of the twenty-first-century American Jewish life that he seeks to describe. Indeed, any survey of the contemporary American Jewish scene is remiss if it does not discuss the rise of orthodox Jewish feminism, current trends towards substantial denominational change, and/or the emergence of a “post-ethnic” Judaism. Even so, recent historical-ethnographic accounts have outpaced analytical challenges to the secular-religion binary. Contemporary historians and ethnographers find themselves forced to choose between an analytically deficient model and a default rejection of analytical tools altogether. Arguably, the roots of the current impasse are derived from the influence of what scholars refer to as the secularization thesis. Therefore, to overcome this impasse, ethnographers and historians of American Judaism need access to a more refined categorical lens. In this essay, I argue that they may find the analytical support they need by turning away from the secularization thesis and turning toward far more complex accounts of the relationship between Judaism and modernity provided by the canon of modern Jewish thought. Such a turn yields an analytical category we may refer to as the “new secularity” which, when applied to studies in Jewish life in America (and potentially elsewhere) sheds light on communal realities that the secular-religious account misses.

Breaking the Taboo: Ritual Impurity in Israeli and American Jewish Feminist Art

ABSTRACT: The article examines works by two Orthodox artists, an American, Mierle Laderman Ukeles (b. 1939) and an Israeli, Hagit Molgan (b. 1972), both concerned with the Jewish laws and rituals of niddah (menstruation) and tevilah (immersion). The analysis of the similarities and differences between works from two major Jewish centers, Israel and the United States, provides insight into how critical responses in works of art point to complex cultural divides. Scholars and curators of Jewish art tend to examine Jewish-Israeli art as distinct from Jewish art created elsewhere. Due to this disconnect, the relationship between Jewish-Israeli art and its patrons around the world has received little attention before now. Consequently, the discussion of art created in different spaces and times contributes to a richer, more contextualized understanding of diasporic art.

Movie-Made Jews: An American Tradition by Helene Meyers

Reviewed by: Movie-Made Jews: An American Tradition by Helene Meyers Nathan Abrams Helene Meyers. Movie-Made Jews: An American Tradition. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2021. 224 pp. Any new book on the representation of Jews on screen is always welcome, especially one that considers a fast-moving topic that presents lots of new examples. Into the breach steps Helene Meyers’s Movie-Made Jews: An American Tradition. Meyers’s basic premise is not only that Jews make movies that feature Jews but also that such movies help to make Jews, in that movies can help to shape viewers’ sense of themselves as Jews. Thus, there are not only the Jews in the movies but also those who make them and those who watch them, and Meyers aims to shift attention toward the latter rather than focusing purely on the on-screen representations. Meyers pays close attention to the production and reception histories of these diverse films. An example she provides is how, after making Protocols of Zion in 2005, its director Marc Levin rejoined a synagogue. In terms of structure, because Meyers’s stated goal is “to chart a usable tradition of continuity and change rather than a narrative of progress” (13), she has organized the chapters of her book thematically rather than chronologically, while remaining attuned to chronology within those chapters. Naturally, for any book about Jews, antisemitism is the predictable subject of the first chapter after the introduction. It begins with Gentleman’s Agreement before considering School Ties, The Believer, and The Protocols of Zion, which, very timely, explores post-9/11 conspiracy theorists, neo-Nazi groups, evangelical Christians, and Jewish Hollywood insiders. Levin’s film, Meyers, says “seems especially prescient viewed from the post-Charlottesville, post-Pittsburgh era” (13), as well as in the age of QAnon (not discussed here). The next chapter explores a set of fiction films that deal with the Holocaust through indirection, where the Shoah is present at a remove, including The Pawnbroker, Enemies, A Love Story, Crimes and Misdemeanors, Barton Fink, and A Serious Man. Entitled “Focusing on Assimilation and Its Discontents,” chapter 4 considers The Way We Were, Next Stop, Greenwich Village, Crossing Delancey, Avalon, and Liberty Heights. In chapter 5, “Assertively Jewish Onscreen,” Meyers considers unapologetic representations of cultural and religious Jews. Here, the selections may be considered contentious as they include another Woody Allen film (Whatever Works) as well as a film in which he stars, Fading Gigolo. Interestingly, chapter 6, “Queering the Jewish Gaze,” discusses I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry alongside Trembling before G-d. Chapter 7, “Cinematic Alliances,” focuses on representations of Jews in relation to other groups. It is here that Meyers discusses Schindler’s List rather than under the section on the Holocaust, which some may consider an unusual choice but makes sense in not following the typical tendency. Finally, chapter 8, “Epilogue: Cinematic Continuity and Change through a Feminist Lens,” focuses on two Jewish feminist documentaries of 2018: Paula Eiselt’s 93Queen and Julie Cohen and Betsy West’s RBG. [End Page 194] Thankfully, Movie-Made Jews is not another survey of American Jewish cinema relying on the old favorites, although the choices of the earlier chapters do tend toward the predictable. Neither is it purely restricted to feature films; rather, the book blends fiction and documentary films, which is unusual for a book of this type. It also does not purely focus on what is on screen in the belief that “Jewish stories of film production and reception” are central to the history of American Jewish cinema (5). Consequently, it offers a methodological challenge to what is still a limited field in Jewish studies scholarship. The pleasure in reading such a book, then, comes when the reader is introduced to a variety of new films; because of her deliberate decision to include documentaries, I am sure that readers both familiar and new to the topic will make some discoveries. Meyers’s aims are ambitious and there is a clear commitment to education beyond the academy. As she states, “Movie-Made Jews is, quite intentionally, a work of cinematic and religious pluralism. By highlighting a diverse cinematic tradition that...

A Jewish Reclaiming of German-Jewish Women Thinkers

Abstract: The following essay describes a typical uneasiness with regard to the reception of the intellectual legacy of German-Jewish women thinkers like Hannah Arendt, Bertha Pappenheim, Regina Jonas and Margarete Susman. The material reality of the large role played by such Jewish women thinkers may have vanished in the Shoah. Their Jewish intellectual descendants in Germany today have built upon their work, but that work takes place in contested territory, where other, non-Jewish scholars also lay claim to this legacy. In this personal reflection, I analyze the different motivations of non-Jewish and Jewish feminists in post-Shoah Germany to engage with Jewish thinkers. Certainly, the conflicts are also about academic power and the control of interpretation. Yet, they have a political quality that is interesting in and of itself, one that underlines the far-reaching impact of the intellectual legacy of Jewish women thinkers in societal discourse in Germany today.

A Jewish Reclaiming of German-Jewish Women Thinkers

Abstract: The following essay describes a typical uneasiness with regard to the reception of the intellectual legacy of German-Jewish women thinkers like Hannah Arendt, Bertha Pappenheim, Regina Jonas and Margarete Susman. The material reality of the large role played by such Jewish women thinkers may have vanished in the Shoah. Their Jewish intellectual descendants in Germany today have built upon their work, but that work takes place in contested territory, where other, non-Jewish scholars also lay claim to this legacy. In this personal reflection, I analyze the different motivations of non-Jewish and Jewish feminists in post-Shoah Germany to engage with Jewish thinkers. Certainly, the conflicts are also about academic power and the control of interpretation. Yet, they have a political quality that is interesting in and of itself, one that underlines the far-reaching impact of the intellectual legacy of Jewish women thinkers in societal discourse in Germany today.

Modern Confections: Jews, New Women, and the Business of Fashion in Imperial Berlin

This article analyzes a series of visually arresting albums by the Jewish-owned Berlin department store and clothing manufacturer Kaufhaus N. Israel, published between 1899 and 1914. The company wooed and shocked bourgeois audiences by photographically illustrating the gender norm-defying activities of early twentieth-century “new women”—over a decade before the equivalent German term became commonplace. The N. Israel albums relied on readers’ extrapolation from their pages to the Israel company brand and the fashionable inventory of its store. The article demonstrates how an innovative device to craft the image of a Jewish clothing company also incorporated tacit ideas about Jewishness. Along the way, these visions traveled through the prism of female figures, establishing connections between Jewishness, fashionability, and modernity—the “fashionable” Jewish feminist, a reformer of Imperial German society, and the “fashionable” “Oriental” Jew, a style icon and imitable “cross-dresser.” The article examines the albums’ visual and verbal components as part of a larger design, isolating the voice of the department store. The Israels used their albums, the article argues, to style their store as a “women’s paradise,” simultaneously, however, confecting their own public identities as liberal allies of the feminist cause and creators of modern German culture.

Mishnaic modernisms: Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans: Being a History of a Family’s Progress as a work of modernist Jewish feminism

ABSTRACT Either by default or design, studies of literary modernism seemingly remain indifferent and at times antagonistic toward religious principles and practices, particularly in discussions of women’s writings. In this essay, I seek to bridge the gap between modernism and religious studies by conducting a close textual study of Gertrude Stein’s, The Making of Americans: Being a History of a Family’s Progress (TMOA). Conducting close, comparative readings and analysis of Stein’s novel to tractates of the ancient Judaic text, the Mishnah, overlapping and intersecting themes and topics, as well as language mechanics and structures, are revealed. I propose that in TMOA, Stein composes from a Modernist Jewish Feminist perspective based in her own history and heritage. Engaging with her multiple positions of subjectivity, as a Jewish, American, woman, in TMOA, Stein develops female character types that challenge and advance contemporary discourse on gender constructs.

The Weight of RBG’s Crown: Jewish Feminism and Its Appropriations

AbstractThis article takes a critical look at the “Notorious RBG” iconography that has proliferated since the 2010s, when shifts in the ideological makeup of the U.S. Supreme Court caused Ginsburg to find herself more frequently in dissent. Attending to the trope’s origins in the “King of New York” photo shoot featuring Christopher George Latore Wallace, aka Biggie Smalls, it situates Notorious RBG rhetoric in the long history of Jewish racial ventriloquism in the United States. Through close readings of children’s literature, memes, film, pop biography, and merchandise, I consider what the racial codings of RBG’s crown tell us about Jewish feminisms in contemporary pop culture. The identification of Ginsburg with Wallace registers tensions between assimilationist and de-assimilationist Jewish identities, liberal and intersectional feminisms, and the affective politics of stoicism and rage. I argue that Notorious iconography problematically works to install Ginsburg as the standard-bearer of both the white Jewish Second Wave and its Black feminist critique.

The Influence and Impact of Bernadette Brooten Not Only on LGBTIQ+ People in Germany

The Influence and Impact of Bernadette Brooten Not Only on LGBTIQ+ People in Germany Angela Standhartinger (bio) As we all know, Bernadette Brooten is an impressively polyglot person. She knows Norwegian, Arabic, Hebrew, Greek, French, and of course German. Actually, she is the best non-native German speaker I have ever met in my life. In preparation for this contribution, I solved the riddle of Brooten's facility: she started her career with a maxima cum laude BA in German from the University of Portland, Oregon, including one year of study in Salzburg in Austria. Immediately after, she studied theology for another two years at Tübingen in Germany before entering the PhD program at Harvard, which included a year at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.1 At Tübingen she became involved in the critical discussion, at that time, of the recently closed Second Vatican Council of the Roman Catholic Church and its failure, among other reforms, to begin ordaining women as priests. So her famous rediscovery of the female apostle Junia was published in the volume Women Priests: A Catholic Commentary on the Vatican Declaration, edited by Leonard and Arlene Swidler.2 The following year, the Junia article was published in one of the premiere German publications on feminist theology, the book Frauenbefreiung (women's emancipation), edited by Elisabeth Moltmann-Wendel.3 With Moltmann-Wendel and Hans Küng, Brooten developed a research project, "Women and Christianity," part of which resulted in her famous paper "Early Christian Women and Their [End Page 183] Cultural Context: Issues of Method in Historical Reconstruction."4 The German Volkswagen Foundation funded the Women and Christianity project, under the category "unconventional ideas," with 732,000 DM. From 1982 to 1984 Brooten held an academic research position at the University of Tübingen to publish in the area of "Sexualität, Ehe und Alternativen zur Ehe in den ersten vier Jarhunderten christlicher Geschichte" (sexuality, marriage, and alternatives to marriage in the first four Christian centuries). However, when she decided to focus on "Frauen, Macht und Sexualität: Röm 1,26 im Kontext" (women, power, and sexuality: Rom 1:26 in context), Hans Küng, the only chair holder in the group, saw this as a fundamental thematic change of topic. Because of this academic freedom dispute, Bernadette Brooten left Tübingen and moved to Harvard and later to Brandeis. Yet she had already initiated two political movements in Germany. One movement was the discussion of anti-Jewish patterns in Christian feminist theology. Brooten's engagement in this debate was triggered by the 1981 issue of Concilium, the international journal dedicated to critical Catholicism and perhaps the first mainline journal in Germany to publish on feminist theology.5 That same year, Brooten responded to the initial volume her paper "Jüdinnen zur Zeit Jesus" (Jewish women at the time of Jesus).6 She openly criticized the anti-Jewish stereotyping involved in constructing a feminist Jesus through a contrast with the (other) alleged patriarchal Jewish teachers and the accompanying tendentious selections of Jewish sources, in order to rescue early Christianity from patriarchy. The next year she republished most of the Concilium articles in her coedited book Women in a Men's Church, in which she included her own article and two from Jewish feminists Naomi R. Goldenberg and Judith Plaskow as well as one from Jacquelyn Grant entitled "Black Theology and Black Women."7 In so doing, [End Page 184] Brooten wrote in the foreword, she hoped to initiate a dialogue between Jewish and Christian feminists in Germany—a goal the book accomplished.8 While the German debate on anti-Judaism in feminist theology reached its high point in 1986–87, Brooten's 1981 article is still remembered as the starting point.9 One typical apologetic argument of that time was that Jesus rescued women from the patriarchal arbitrariness of Jewish men through his general prohibition of divorce. Brooten countered with extensive source work in "Konnten Frauen im Alten Judentum die Scheidung betreiben? Überlegungen zu Mk 10,11–12 and 1 Kor 7,10–11" (Did Jewish women divorce themselves from their husbands? Considerations on Mark 10:11–12 and 1 Cor 7:10–11).10...

In the Forefront and on the Margins: Jews, Secularism and Women's Liberation in Ontario and British Columbia, 1960s–1980s

AbstractThis article examines Jewish feminists in the British Columbia and Ontario women's movements, particularly among radical and socialist feminists. Feminists within these movements saw organised religion as patriarchal, hostile to the interests of women and thus to be rejected. Using archival and oral history sources, we argue that looking more closely at Jewish feminists within second‐wave feminism can help us to more clearly understand the nature of secularism in the women's movement, its implicit contradictions and unspoken Christian bias. Jewish feminists noted, for example, that Christian holidays such as Christmas or Easter could be seen as secular celebrations, while any celebration of Jewish heritage, even if it emerged from a very secular Jewish socialist culture, was suspect within secular feminist circles, and indeed could be denounced as an acceptance of patriarchy. We analyse the distinctive experiences of Jewish feminists as a minority community within an ostensibly secular women's movement. We argue that Jewish activist women, because of their liminal position within the movement, as both secular feminists and ethnic/religious other, could challenge and reveal the Christian roots of feminist secularism.

Hannah’s Suffering: The Power of Voice

Hannah’s story in the Old Testament has been written about considerably by Jewish feminists, womanist theologians, and other biblical scholars. This paper strives to build upon these works in asking the reader to consider Hannah’s story from a liberatory theological theory of suffering by Sölle, as well as a postmodern and non-religious lens as discussed by Sandoval’s Theory of Oppositional Consciousness in Methodology of the Oppressed and Lorde’s “Transformation of Silence into Language and Action”. This paper asks if this narrative can serve as an example of taking back one’s power by confronting a complex system of power and oppression for Black women. Intercessory prayer aptly defines the personal as political, especially with the multiple minoritized identities of Hannah. I argue that Hannah’s story can serve as a complex narrative of differential consciousness and the reclamation of one’s own power, by using her voice. Her audacity to correct a prophet, fight for her valid desire of motherhood, and determine her own happiness is evidence of an empowerment ethic that is necessary for minoritized women in a post-modern era and political climate where the erasure of all forms of difference and consciousness is the priority.

Gendering Experiences of Anti-Semitism: A Quantitative Analysis of Discrimination in Europe

Abstract Little is known about the gendered dimension of anti-Semitism. Emerging from a literature review on social identity theory, anti-Semitism, sexism, and Jewish feminism, I demonstrate the urgency of examining the link between gender and experiences of anti-Semitism, using the FRA’s 2018 dataset “Experiences and Perceptions of Antisemitism: Second Survey on Discrimination and Hate Crime against Jews in the EU,” a large-scale survey of Jews in thirteen countries across Europe. The independent variable is gender identity. Five dependent variables relate to experiences of sex/gender discrimination, physical attacks, offensive/threatening comments, offensive gestures/staring, and online harassment. Using five control variables—being identifiable as a Jew in public, country, Jewish identity, education level, and Jewish population in one’s neighborhood—I engage with descriptive statistics and binary logistic regression analysis to analyze my variables. The findings show that while women are more likely to experience gender discrimination, men are significantly more likely to experience anti-Semitism.

Observant Feminism Across Borders: The Transnational Origins of Partnership Minyanim

Abstract This article provides a comprehensive account of the emergence of partnership minyanim at the beginning of the twenty-first century as a new social and liturgical phenomenon in contemporary Judaism. Partnership minyanim are lay-led congregations that came out of Orthodox networks; they separate the sexes similarly to an Orthodox congregation, but also adopt feminist practices that challenge Orthodox norms. In this article I explain how a milieu of observant, mostly Orthodox Jews, influenced by Jewish feminist developments, provided fertile ground for liturgical innovations. This milieu occurred in both Jerusalem and New York, and transnational communication and migration between the two national contexts was crucial to the invention of the new model. Specifically, Jewish feminism that came from the United States shaped the desire to include women in synagogue activity and prompted halachic conversations that taught founders what kinds of participation were acceptable, while the religious ecology of Israel provided the right kind of pressure for developing a new combination of ritual gender roles. The dense interaction between the two national contexts was necessary for the emergence of partnership minyanim, showing that transnational networks result in religious creativity that is more than the sum of their parts.

Unsettling: Jews, Whiteness, and Incest in American Popular Culture by Eli Bromberg

Reviewed by: Unsettling: Jews, Whiteness, and Incest in American Popular Culture by Eli Bromberg Golan Moskowitz Eli Bromberg. Unsettling: Jews, Whiteness, and Incest in American Popular Culture. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2020. 206 pp. White and conditionally white American Jews have long straddled conflicting and uneven associations with white privilege and with victimhood predicated on antisemitic accusations, including the accusation of sexual perversity. Addressing this precarious position, Eli Bromberg's Unsettling is, in the best possible way, what its title suggests. Moving from Sigmund Freud to Ruth McBride Jordan, it is indeed unsettling to revisit public associations of Jews with incest, but it is also enlightening, as the author convincingly argues. More specifically, it is enlightening to consider the stakes that some have held and continue to hold in maintaining a particular collective image of American Jews vis-à-vis such accusations. These stakes, Bromberg demonstrates, are predicated on a harmful and outdated racial logic. Driving his study is the claim that premodern stereotypes about Jewish incest persist in postmodern American culture yet actual cases or accusations of Jewish incest have been rendered publicly unspeakable. This unspeakableness is due, on the one hand, to the accusers' fear of being deemed antisemitic, as well as due to the efforts of white Jews invested in maintaining social privileges by working against ongoing stereotypes of Jewish perversity. Through incisive, deeply researched case studies considered from multiple perspectives, Bromberg skillfully aligns this ongoing dynamic with discourses on sexual assault, patriarchy, racism, and white supremacists' unfounded characterizations of Jews as sexual deviants. Unsettling suggests sinister implications about dominant American cultural attitudes toward "off-white" minorities, the latter compelled to pursue impossibly spotless collective images as requisites for basic social dignities afforded to whiteness. Bromberg repeatedly addresses this latter point, emphasizing the ways in which incest reads as "not white," despite its appearance across all communities, and thus how it becomes a locus of anxiety and projection for those competing for social resources historically reserved for whites. In Jewish incest allegations, Jewishness may be a crucial factor to consider, this book asserts, not because of [End Page 198] any existing link between Jewishness and incest, but because the invocation of such a link promotes anxiety-driven behavior that carries potential harm in the name of securing white privileges. Such behavior includes the projection of sexualized prejudice onto others and the enabling or downplaying of misconduct within those Jewish contexts in which incest has in fact occurred but may not be recognized. Bromberg uncovers Henry Roth's editorial correspondence and unpublished drafts, for example, to show how the latter uses the invented figures of a Black prostitute and a group of young Black rapists to deflect from his own incest confessions in Mercy of a Rude Stream (chapter 5). To mobilize his argument, Bromberg introduces the useful concept of "Jewish community protective politics," a phenomenon described as "collective mainstream social anxiety about white Jewish male vulnerability to antisemitism" (2). This phenomenon results either in the public defense of accused white Jewish men, or in their "secular excommunication" (5), the disassociation of those men from authentic Jewish identity, as observed in second-wave feminist writings on Freud as a universal Victorian patriarch, rather than as a Jewish one, contrasting, on the other hand, harmful Jewish feminist depictions of Black masculinity (chapter 1). Some may leave this study with questions about its characterization of Jewish community protective politics. How, more precisely, is this phenomenon structured? Is it a Foucauldian politics of collective self-policing through the diffusion of self-consciousness and unspoken codes of conduct? Is it an explicitly organized set of agents coordinated in relation to the dominant culture? Is it something else entirely? Regardless of this potential ambiguity, Bromberg's examples convincingly connect the attainment of successful white masculinity with the likelihood of absolution from sexual misconduct accusations. Freud's status as a universal patriarch oriented toward white society, for example, facilitated the reframing of white Jewish male sexual misconduct cases into cases focused instead on the "hysteria" of their victims, some of whom were Jewish women without access to the same social protections available to their male counterparts. Similarly and more recently, while Woody Allen...

Consider the Container: Critical Reflections on Norms as Feminist Practice

Consider the ContainerCritical Reflections on Norms as Feminist Practice Julia Watts Belser (bio) In her powerful opening to this roundtable, Judith Plaskow begins by acknowledging a frustrating reality: that even though “the editors of the JFSR [Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion] have been committed to inclusion from the moment of founding the journal,” these efforts “have not been enough to keep it from remaining a fundamentally white enterprise” (3). As Plaskow makes plain, the pervasive whiteness of JFSR has persisted despite deliberate attention to racial equity in the journal’s intellectual content and its editorial leadership. Even though “Black women and other women of color have both sat on the editorial board and been coeditors,” Plaskow writes, “the container of the JFSR still feels like a white container” (3). While I am committed to a critical examination of whiteness and to the ongoing practice of deep learning, accountability, and action in the service of racial justice, I am no expert on the specific structures that shape the white container Plaskow names. I write as a white Jewish woman. Whiteness is the sea in which I swim. But I want to reflect on Plaskow’s insight through a strategy I’ve learned through anti-ableist practice, a strategy that asks us to pay attention to the container itself. Disability liberation work has taught me that disrupting and dismantling ableism requires critical attention to the basic norms and assumptions that undergird and shape our work, for it is these norms and expectations—built into the very fabric of what we do and how we do it—that feed and nourish the ubiquity of dominant culture, that sustain its investments in white supremacy, misogyny, Eurocentrism and Christian dominance, queer and trans hatred, ableism, classism, and more. It has become commonplace in feminist circles to recognize the facts of dominance. But it is difficult work to uncover the specific ways these norms become [End Page 67] expressed in daily life. Puerto Rican Jewish feminist Aurora Levins Morales recalls how her mother taught her “to identify the markings of sexism the way she taught me the markings of birds, the colors of paint—in the course of daily living.”1 So too, I ask: How do we recognize the particular architectures that build up the edifice of whiteness? In my Religion and Disability Studies course, I run a semester-long Analyzing Access Project, where students probe the norms and expectations that shape permissible modes of moving, thinking, feeling, perceiving, and expressing oneself at a religious or secular site of their choice. Through site visits and critical reflection, students investigate how access and inaccessibility get produced through tangible built environments, through specific religious and cultural practices, through myriad tiny choices. The first site visit asks students to map the particulars of the physical space—to notice centers and peripheries, sight lines and pinch points; to parse out the logics of the space, how power intersects with architecture, how people know where they belong and where they shouldn’t go, to recognize not just what designers intended but where gathering happens in practice. The second site visit focuses on time—asking students to consider how assumptions about proper pace and normative time get encoded in everyday practice; to investigate how we know when we are “on time” or “out of time.” We probe the unwritten expectations that govern how much time we are afforded to accomplish certain tasks, how long a body is expected to hold certain positions: to sit, to stand, to be silent, to sing. The third site visit examines affect—the norms that govern the kind of energy we are expected to bring to a space, the rules of decorum, the way we’re supposed to feel. What happens when our feeling doesn’t fit within the permissible range, when we’re too loud, too quiet, too angry, too sad? The project works to make visible and tangible norms many of us previously regarded as neutral. We learn to pinpoint specific acts and processes through which exclusion and marginality unfold. One of the tools we use to examine the unwritten logics of a site is to ask: What would disrupt the expectations...

“The World Was Given Us to Fix It”

Abstract This article explores the ecopoetry written by three women poets who also identify themselves as Jewish poets: Alicia Ostriker, Marge Piercy and Naomi Ruth Lowinsky. It examines whether they employ any or some/all of the “emancipatory strategies” characteristic of the ecofeminist re-imagination of nature and human relationships with the natural world, seeking to answer several questions: How far can these poems be considered part of eco-Judaism? Does the fact that their authors are women also make them ecofeminist works? Does the poets’ Jewish feminist identity contribute to their ecopoetic call for ecological change?

Drawing Torah from Troubling Texts: Gender, Disability, and Jewish Feminist Ethics

Abstract This article argues for the importance of developing queer feminist disability ethics in ways that push beyond the conventional canon, acknowledging the violence present in many traditional texts and their failures to do justice to lived disability experience. Critiquing a famous debate in the Babylonian Talmud, Ketubot 17a, in which Hillel and Shammai debate the permissibility of telling a lie in order to praise the beauty of a disabled bride at her wedding, the author argues for a Jewish disability ethics that engages secular disability arts. Examining the artistry of queer disabled dancer Claire Cunningham, the essay draws out the embodied ethical insights expressed through disability arts and argues that Cunningham's work offers a more compelling answer to the Talmud's question—in her claim that love lodges in the tangible acts of paying attention to another.

Jewish Agents of Memory in Linda Grant’s Still Here: A Transgenerational and Intersectional Feminist Reading

ABSTRACT By drawing on Jewish feminist scholarship along with intersectional feminism, the aim of this article is to explore whether the construction of the female protagonist and gender relations in Linda Grant’s novel Still Here (2002) offer fruitful models for reshaping Jewish memories and identities. I examine the way memory in the novel becomes multidirectional and palimpsestic by fusing various dimensions of time and space. Set in Liverpool and Dresden, with their very different histories, the novel traces how the two middle-aged Jewish protagonists, Alix Rebick and Joseph Shields, discover each other’s personal as well as disturbing family memories. The multidirectional and transgenerational bonds that connect them lead to their falling in love; and their relationship is shown to develop as a result of their ability to overcome their traumatic experiences and to open their own selves to feel empathic towards each other’s pain. The issues and questions raised in the novel are examined from the perspective of Jewish and intersectional feminism so as to fully explore Alix’s agency in coming to terms with her inherited past and troubled Jewish female identity.

Branching Out: Toward A History of Jewish Radical Feminisms

Branching Out:Toward A History of Jewish Radical Feminisms Lana Dee Povitz (bio) Joyce Antler, Jewish Radical Feminism: Voices From the Women's Liberation Movement. New York: New York University Press, 2018. viii + 453 pp. Figures, notes, and index. Hardcover $75.00. Jewish feminisms, like Jewish studies, like Jewish people, run a full gamut of experience: religious and secular, Yiddish and Hebrew, Zionist and pro-Palestinian, heteronormative and queer. In Jewish Radical Feminism, Joyce Antler unites "the two branches of Jewish-inflected feminism": members of "the early women's liberation movement [of the late 1960s and early 1970s] and the later, more self-consciously identified 'Jewish feminist' movement that arose in the 1970s and 1980s to address Jewish religious and secular life" (p. 3). The book is structured accordingly, with four chapters dedicated to the first branch and four more to the second branch. Each chapter focuses on one influential group or occasionally a subculture within a particular city. Antler's subjects are predominantly Ashkenazi women based in the northeastern United States.1 Using an open-ended understanding of radical, Antler explores universalist feminist groups such as the radical Redstockings and the socialist Bread and Roses alongside manifestly Jewish collectives, such as the spiritually oriented B'Not Esh (Hebrew for 'daughters of fire') and the lesbian Di Vilde Chayes (Yiddish for 'the wild beasts').2 Antler's project has been a long time in the making. A range of historians have noted the significant presence of Jews in the women's liberation movement, both in terms of their demographic numbers and their intellectual contributions.3 To accomplish her task, Antler employs prosopography or collective biography, a narrative strategy that could not be more appropriate to radical feminism's collective spirit. As Antler shows, no feminist ever worked alone. Whether analyzing the conditions of their lives in consciousness-raising circles, producing new research about their own bodies, organizing public speakouts against rape, coordinating childcare collectives, or reinterpreting Torah, Jewish feminists came to their ideas and plans through electrified conversation. Through Antler's oral history interviews with at least forty-six women, passionate friendships emerge as the matrix for Second Wave feminism's revolutionary [End Page 294] ideas (p. 31).4 "Much of the energy that had heretofore gone into sexual relationships and especially couples was now being directed towards women friends and the women's community in general," observed Ann Hunter Popkin, a member of the Boston-based Bread and Roses.5 Speaking about her friends in the Chicago women's liberation movement, Amy Kesselman recalled, "Our appreciation of each other was like fertilizer, liberating energy long stifled by the sexism of the male leadership of the new left" (p. 42). That disagreements and splits just as often drained their energies only further highlights the centrality of relationships to feminist world-making. Together, the profiles of different collectives–the backgrounds of their members, the forces that drew them together, what they accomplished, and (to a much lesser extent) why they dissolved—offer a panoramic experience that is akin to flipping through stacks of photo albums with an inordinately well-informed guide. Antler is also the sort of guide who prefers to focus on points of unity. In granting only limited space to matters of contention among feminists, Jewish Radical Feminism manages to cover a lot of ground and make itself palatable to the spectrum of readers interested in Jewish American history. The narrative launches confidently out of the late 1960s, sails smoothly through the 1970s, and glides to a stop in the mid-1980s, just as many Jewish feminists were beginning to grapple with crucial questions concerning whiteness, Zionism, and sexuality. It is unfortunate that Antler limits her admittedly long book in this way. Feminism was no less alive in 1990 than it was in 1980. In fact, as recent work by Lisa Levenstein has shown, by the 1990s, American feminism had been fortified by recent decades of international coalition building and the growing influence of lesbians, women of color, and activists from the global South.6 Jewish feminists remained vitally engaged with all of this new activity. Jewish Radical Feminism is not an argument-driven book. Instead, its rationale lies...

Devoted Resistance

Nechama Golan (b. 1947), is one of the best-known Jewish Orthodox feminist artists in Israel. This article deals with the reception of her most prominent and poignant work You Shall Walk in Virtuous Ways (1999–2011) – a high block-heeled sandal covered with Xerox copies of a Jewish sacred text. The article expands the study of reception by showing how the study of a work’s reception within different cultural spheres can clarify the processes of meaning-making of the work. By shedding light on feminist art that addresses religious issues, the article demonstrates that art, religion, feminism and critical thinking are not as antithetical as some had claimed.