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Gender and Jewish Identity

Nashim No. 22, Special Issue: Gender and Jewish Identity
Consulting Editors: Elisheva Baumgarten, Sylvia Barack Fishman

Gender scholarship, in both the social sciences and the humanities, shares many interesting parallels with identity studies. Both have been salient and productive areas of research within the various fields of Jewish Studies over the past three decades. The essays in Nashim 22 investigate a wide range of factors that affect women’s and men’s identities, social, religious, and political.

How did Jewish women leaders a century ago see themselves, and how were they seen by others? When 18-year-old women soldiers were sent to impart literacy skills to immigrant women on Israel's periphery, who were the learners and who were the teachers? Why would some ultra-Orthodox women take on standards of modesty going beyond the strict standards of their sects? Can women poets, writing in Hebrew, appropriate a stake in the world's literary and mythic corpus? What concepts of maleness and femaleness emerge when feminist analysis is applied to a famous Talmudic story? How are new roles emerging for women in the twenty-first century affecting the leadership of Orthodox Jewry? Can a biblical woman's voice emerge via the paintbrush of an Orthodox Jewish man? And, finally, whom do we call "mother"? These questions and more are addressed in Nashim 22. 

Jewish Women Recording, Reflecting, Revisioning

The cover photo of Nashim, No. 21 (Spring 2011, on the theme of "Women in the Responsa Literature,"
under the consulting editorship of David Golinkin), shows a close-up of a phenomenon unheard of until a very few years ago: a woman's hands scribing a traditional Torah scroll.* The hands are those of Shoshana Gugenheim, one of the world's first women Torah scribes. In her article "A Torah Scroll" (Read for Free) in the issue, Judith Margolis, Nashim's Art Editor, calls attention to Shoshana's work and to her involvement in two related and remarkable projects by Jewish women scribes and artists.

The Women's Torah, completed in Seattle, Washington, on October 15, 2010, with the help of many hands, hearts, and spirits, is not only the first Torah scroll to be written and embellished by an international community of women; it is also the first Torah scroll to be literally sewn together in community. READ MORE.

Women of the Book: Jewish Women Recording, Reflecting, Revisioning, a midrashic (interpretive) scroll based on the form and content of a traditional Torah scroll, is being created on 54 parchment panels (the number of Torah portions) by 54 Jewish women artists from around the world. It is an international, multi-denominational installation that acknowledges the centrality of women’s voices in the texts of our lives. READ MORE.

Lidia Rosanski, Parashat Mishpatim, created for Women of the Book. Etching. 65 × 42 cm.

Sharon Rosenzweig, Parshat Behar, created for Women of the Book. Acrylic. 50 × 70cm.

*Photo of Shoshana Gugenheim by Rebekah Raleigh

Memory studies and Gender studies link insights

JMEWS 8.1, Special Issue: Gendered Memory in the Middle East and North Africa: Cultural Norms, Social Practices, and Transnational Regimes

While memory studies have long excluded the Arab Middle East, many Arab countries have recently started to come to terms with their violent pasts. This special issue of the Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, entitled “Gendered Memory in the Middle East and North Africa: Cultural Norms, Social Practices, and Transnational Regimes,” presents five case studies from Lebanon, Morocco, and Iraqi Kurdistan, where spaces have opened up for the production of alternative or counter forms of remembering. The papers brought together in this issue tie in with two different fields of research—memory studies and gender studies—linking theoretical insights from both fields to gain a deeper understanding of the ongoing processes of societal and political change in the Middle East and North Africa. The papers explore the tensions and interactions between different forms of memory politics. They seek to answer the question: To what degree did officially controlled efforts to process primary experiences, historiography, public images, and debates into a unified and simplified make-up of narrative, iconic, and ritual elements catered to the wider audience change over time? Introduced and edited by Bettina Dennerlein and Sonja Hegasy, this special issue addresses the broad spectrum of rituals and material manifestations of memory culture, which are a form of representation that gradually changes social orders, particularly in situations of accelerated transformation. Iraq, Lebanon and—the countries dealt with in research articles by Bettina Dennerlein, Susan Slyomovics, Karin Mlodoch, Andrea Fischer-Tahir, and Sune Haugbolle—provide strong examples of how political change is mediated through competing views of the past that always also interpret the present and constitute and prescribe models for the future.

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JMEWS, extremely timely and important

Marcia C. Inhorn, Ph.D,  William K. Lanman Jr. Professor of Anthropology and International Affairs, Yale University is the editor of the Journal of Middle East Womens Studies (JMEWS.) She spoke with us about the journal and its unique scholarly impact.

IU PRESS/Journals: What is it about JMEWS that energizes you the most as a scholar?

Marcia Inhorn: JMEWS is now the major scholarly site for Middle East gender scholars across the globe. The journal publishes the work of senior feminist scholars, as well as many young scholars, who are pushing Middle East gender studies in fascinating new directions. The new work in this area is extremely timely and important, especially given events in the Middle Eastern region during the past decade and, most notably, during the past year.

IU PRESS/Journals: Why do you think JMEWS is an important contribution to the body of scholarly research in your field? What difference does it make? 
 

Marcia Inhorn: JMEWS highlights the importance of Middle Eastern women throughout history and in the contemporary period. In addition, JMEWS is the only journal that actively welcomes contributions on Middle Eastern masculinities and sexualities. So much is changing in the Middle Eastern region, in terms of gender, sexuality, politics, social media, and the like. The gender studies scholars who publish in JMEWS are capturing these transformations in very nuanced fashion. The journal offers its readers a wide spectrum of issues to consider, and is truly eye-opening for those who are unfamiliar with the Middle East region.

IU PRESS/Journals: What influence or impact do you hope that your research has on the world and culture?

Marcia Inhorn: For the past 25 years, I have been following the gender impacts of infertility and the emergence of assisted reproductive technologies, such as in vitro fertilization (IVF), in the Middle Eastern region. I have explored the transformative effects of these technologies on women’s lives, as they search for solutions to their childlessness. In addition, I have explored the impacts of the newest assisted reproductive technologies to overcome male infertility, a condition that is a highly prevalent but hidden across the region. Men’s engagement with these technologies is the theme of my new book, The New Arab Man: Emergent Masculinities, Technologies, and Islam in the Middle East (Princeton UP, 2012), which explores the dynamic transformation of masculinity in conjunction with these new technologies.  The book is a humanizing portrayal of the joys and sorrows of ordinary Middle Eastern men, as they engage in assisted reproduction with the women they love. It debunks many stereotypes of “hegemonic” masculinities in the Middle East, as brought to us by both Western media and some scholars.

IU PRESS/Journals: How would it benefit scholars of different disciplines to read the work of scholars outside their field of expertise?

Marcia Inhorn: At the current historical moment, there is no world region more important than the Middle East. Readers of JMEWS will realize that the Middle Eastern region is not monolithic in its history, languages, religions, cultures, and many other important social attributes.The transformations continuously occurring in Middle Eastern women’s and men’s lives are important, and are part and parcel of the revolutionary protests being enacted across the region today.

IU PRESS/Journals: Who do you hope will read the articles in JMEWS?

Marcia Inhorn: Scholars in Gender Studies, Middle East Studies, Islamic Studies, Anthropology, Sociology, Political Science, Religious Studies, and History. Educated lay readers interested in empirically based knowledge about Middle Eastern gender.

IU PRESS/Journals: Is there anything else you would like to say to students in your area of research that would entice them to explore the articles in the journal?

Marcia Inhorn: JMEWS has a fantastic new website, which provides visitors with excellent entrée into the journal, its editorial board, its authors, and its essays. Find it here: www.jmews.org.

Marcia also has a website: http://www.marciainhorn.com.

Jewish women and gender studies

Conversation with Deborah Greniman about the journal Nashim.

Why do you think Nashim is an important contribution to the body of scholarly research in your field? What difference does it make?

When the idea of creating a journal of Jewish women’s and gender studies first occurred to me, my first thought was that this was such an obvious thing that such a journal must already exist. I checked, and it didn’t. We are still the only print journal in the field.

With our themed issues (an idea that came, if I recall correctly, from Shulamit Reinharz), we are creating important basic collections of articles in many areas relating to Judaism, Jews and gender – collections that can be used in course work or to help frame approaches to researching a particular area. Feminist and gender studies mandate an interdisciplinary approach, and we’ve leveraged that to create useful bodies of material in areas as diverse as spirituality, women in the economy, reproductive politics, book lore, poetry, the visual arts, sexuality, and halakhah. Our collections on Yemenite and Iranian Jewish women shed light on unique cultural worlds and on issues like migration and acculturation.

What influence or impact do you hope that your research has on the world and culture?

Before the advent of feminist studies, Jewish studies was by and large a men’s club, and even the few brilliant women who managed to enter the field found themselves almost exclusively studying the activities and writings of men. Feminist studies in Judaism broadens the field immensely, from the point of view not only of the subject matter but also of the perspectives brought to bear on it. As the leading focused scholarly organ in this field, we insist that the articles we publish reflect the use of rigorous feminist analytic methods and be well grounded in Jewish knowledge. Our goal is to create a useful body of knowledge, for academics in many fields and for Jewish life beyond the academic world.

We take pride in the integration of regular features on Jewish feminist art into our scholarly corpus. We hope thereby to expand the ways of thinking about and looking at the cultural and social issues raised in our pages. We believe deeply in the interaction of scholarship, art, and life, and in the mission of feminist studies not only to broaden the knowledge base, but to open minds, enrich our culture, and create a better world.

How would it benefit scholars of different disciplines to read the work of scholars outside their field of expertise?

If you’re in any field of the social sciences or the humanities, Nashim has probably published something in that field. Conversely, when you find an article in your field, you’ll probably find next to it an article bringing the perspective of another discipline to a related subject. Scholars need discipline to ground their work, but that doesn’t mean hacking the world of knowledge into disciplinary pieces.

*Deborah Greniman is the managing editor of Nashim.

Serious feminist scholarship in religious studies

 

 

Interview with Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion

Why do you think JFSR is an important contribution to the body of scholarly research in your field? What difference does it make?

In the mid 1980s when Prof. Judith Plaskow and I founded the JFSR as a peer-reviewed journal, established theological journals were not interested in publishing intellectual feminist work and feminist journals were not very much interested in serious feminist scholarship in Religious Studies and Theology. JFSR has filled that gap while also changing the field toward recognizing feminist work more broadly. Because of JFSR, feminist scholarship in religion is always visible on library shelves and online. The journal also remains the central cultivator of feminist conversations in diverse scholarly and praxis arenas. Because of our long history, we also serve as an archive, conveying the richness of feminist scholarship in religion to the next generation of scholars and activists.

From the beginning we invited critical contributions from feminists in different religions and global religious contexts as well as critical reflection on feminist practices. We invite not only scholarly contributions but also knowledge and reports of feminist arguments and praxis in different religions around the world. Thus the journal is not beholden to a specific academic discipline or religious community. JFSR’s conversation spans the disciplines and religious life around the globe. We hope to make diverse feminist scholarship available to American and international audiences.

The journal publishes the work of feminist scholars in the academy as well as teachers and activists. It understands itself as a forum for discussion and dialogue between wo/men from different religious and diverse feminist perspectives. We look for contributions that employ, not only gender critical- but also a race, class, and colonial critical-perspectives. We believe we are accountable not only to the academy but also to wo/men in religious communities around the world. We thereby hope to engender a critical constructive discussion about religion not only among feminist intellectuals but also among the wider public.

What influence or impact do you hope that your research has on the world and culture?

Since religion and culture are intertwined, critical feminist scholarship in religion seeks to change people’s mindsets internalized in and through cultural customs, religious education and preaching. It does so not only by critically analyzing malestream texts and scholarship but also by articulating religious visions and actions for social-cultural-religious change. In articles, roundtables, and special sections the JFSR attempts to open up new ways of thinking and new scholarship on religion. At the same time it seeks to give wo/men the intellectual tools to question established religious authorities that deny full citizenship to wo/men in religion.

How would it benefit scholars of different disciplines to read the work of scholars outside their field of expertise?

Since the JFSR is interdisciplinary we hope that feminist scholars in other disciplines will seriously engage the work done in feminist studies in religion. Millions of wo/men around the world define their identity and work in terms of their religion. Feminist scholars in other disciplines can no longer overlook this. At a time when religion is in the news every day, feminist scholarship may no longer ignore the work done by their feminist colleagues in religion. Any serious discussion on religion in classrooms across the country needs to seriously engage the research of scholars in religion. The JFSR seeks to be a bridge between feminist scholars in other disciplines and those in religious and theological studies.

Women in the Responsa Literature

NASHIM NO. 21: Women in the Responsa Literature, Consulting Editor: David Golinkin

The responsa literature – compilations of legal opinions written by rabbis in response to specific queries or cases – is one of the largest branches, if not the largest branch of Jewish literature. With their descriptions of actual cases that came before the rabbis, starting from about 500 CE and continuing right up to the present day, responsa are a fount of information about Jewish women on a host of topics, such as marriage, divorce, agunot (women who remain “chained” to missing husbands in the absence of a religious divorce), widows, fertility issues and child-rearing, women in the synagogue and women in business. This issue of Nashim includes articles about women in the responsa literature, focusing on a broad topic, a specific geographical area or a specific set of responsa. How are women portrayed? What can we learn about their lives? How were they viewed by rabbis and by their societies? Can we hear their own voices in the testimony they gave before religious courts (batei din)? How did and do these rulings affect their lives?

The articles that appear in this issue of Nashim can be conveniently divided into four categories. The first two articles, by Debby Koren and Julie Lieber, analyze responsa by two famous meshivim (responders): Rabbi David b. Solomon ibn Abi Zimra (Spain, Israel and Egypt, 1479–1573), in a case of a woman who had lost her get (writ of divorce) as a result of the expulsion from Spain; and Rabbi Eleazar Horowitz (Vienna, 1803–1868), in two very unusual cases of women who had sex with men other than their husbands but claimed it was innocent (sic!).

The next three articles deal with the participation of Jewish women in public rituals and Torah study in the modern era. My own article is a timeline of 41 events related to this topic from 1845–2010, offering seven general conclusions that can be derived from it. Norma Joseph translates and analyzes a well-known 1976 responsum by Rabbi Moshe Feinstein (Lithuania–New York, 1895–1986) regarding the permissibility of women wearing prayer shawls in the synagogue.  Jessica Rosenberg analyzes and compares three more recent teshuvot by Rabbis Mendel Shapiro, Gidon Rothstein and Shlomo Riskin regarding aliyot for women.

The following section features two debates relating to sensitive issues in the realm of medical ethics: abortion, and the use of hormones for religious rather than medical purposes. Alan Jotkowitz responds to a Hebrew article by Ronit Ir-Shai about abortion and maternal need in the responsa literature, with a brief response from Ir-Shai. Tova Ganzel and Dina Zimmerman write about the ethics of using hormones to delay ovulation in order to overcome “halakhic infertility” caused by the observance of the laws of nidah, with a response by Rabbi Haviva Ner-David.

Finally, Michael Pitkowsky offers a preliminary study relating to the effect of the internet on the responsa literature as a whole, by comparing the number and type of questions which women asked of Rabbi Moshe Feinstein, of the Sefardic responder Rabbi Hayyim David Halevi (Israel, 1924–1998) and of the Hebrew website www.kipa.co.il.

These new studies barely scratch the surface of the topic of “women in the responsa literature,” but it is hoped that they will serve as a catalyst for future articles, dissertations and books on this neglected corpus, which can serve as a goldmine for Jewish women’s and gender studies.

David Golinkin is President of the Schechter Institute of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem, where he holds the Jerome and Miriam Katzin Chair in Jewish Studies and is also director of the Center for Women in Jewish Law. He has published some 40 monographs and edited volumes and 200 articles, including his book The Status of Women in Jewish Law: Responsa (Hebrew) and the volume Za‘akat Dalot: Halakhic Solutions for the Agunot of our Time (Hebrew), of which he is co-editor.

Sexuality and Eroticism in Black Film

Black Camera Vol. 2, No. 2, Beyond Normative: Sexuality and Eroticism in Black Film, Cinema, and Video provides a collection of essays that assesses the way some black filmmakers have used the camera to disrupt representations of normative sexualities and Western ideals of eroticism. Contributing scholars include Greg Thomas, Terry Rowden, L.H. Stallings, Samuel Park, Marlo D. David, Matt Richardson, Babacar M’Baye, and Oliver Bartlet.  These critics engage the work of filmmakers Djibril Diop Mambéty, Bill Gunn, Kathleen Collins, Rodney Evans, Cheryl Dunye, Tina Mabry, and Joseph Gaye Ramaka, as well as subjects such as black women's ecstasy and eroticism, black masculinity in gay porn, documentary filmmaking and sexuality, visual aesthetics and black eroticism, queer interracial desire, and eroticism and modernity in African cinema. In addition to critical essays, the issue also has an interview conducted with black lesbian filmmaker Tina Mabry, and a poster section with commentary and reviews on recent films and book.

BLACK CAMERA: Call for Papers

Precious and the Novel Push/Fall 2012

Afrosurrealism in Film/Video/Fall 2013

For details on submitting to these special issues see more on our blog at this page: http://iupjournalsblog.iupress.org/inscribe_journal/2010/11/black-camera-call-for-papers.html.

Ethics in Psychiatry: IJFAB 4.1

The International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics
IJFAB VOLUME 4 ISSUE 1: FEMINIST PERSPECTIVES ON ETHICS IN PSYCHIATRY

Psychiatric patients represent one of the most marginalized groups in modern society, while psychiatry itself is one of the most contested fields of medical care. Bioethics, however, rarely addresses the special, even unique, ethical features of psychiatric practice and theory. At a time when mental illness is being redefined and reassessed around the globe, this issue of the International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics applies a critical feminist lens to the concepts and clinical contexts of psychiatric care.
Directly engaging the current revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual in Psychiatry, the authors demonstrate from several directions the importance of making gender central to these debates. This feminist critique reveals the need for an analysis of power relations in psychiatric practice, as well as the way gender norms and other contingent cultural norms determine research, diagnosis, and practice. Thus, this feminist critique has implications for psychiatric practice and theory in general. 
The analysis of psychiatric concepts and theories through a feminist lens also has general results for ethics itself. As the essays in this issue demonstrate, this critique calls for a “moral ‘particularism’ that acknowledges contextual differences and is inimical to the principle-based approaches dominating much of traditional bioethics.” The authors demonstrate the need for an ethics of care, as well as a need to reformulate the concept of autonomy as relational.
Including leading scholars in the field, such as Carol Gould, Lisa Cosgrove, and Gwen Adshead, as well as younger scholars, the issue provides an indispensable intervention into current debates about psychiatric illness and practice, as well as an important contribution to the redefinition of bioethics itself.

SUBSCRIBE to IJFAB: http://www.jstor.org/r/iupress
For more information on Feminist Approaches to Bioethics: http://www.fabnet.org

2011 JMEWS Distinguished Lecture and Research Workshops

The the 2011 Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies Distinguished Lecture and Research Workshops will take place on Friday, April 15 at Yale University and will explore the topic of “Gender and the Middle East Uprisings.” The Distinguished Lecturer will be Dr. Diane Singerman, Associate Professor in the Department of Government at American University. Dr. Singerman’s research interests focus on political change from below, particularly in the Middle East, and more specifically in Egypt; her work examines the formal and informal side of politics, gender, social movements, globalization, public space, protest, and urban politics. Following Dr. Singerman’s lecture, afternoon research workshops around the conference theme will be held.  READ MORE.