The Death and Life of a Jewish Judith Shakespeare: Rebecca Goldstein's Mazel

This essay argues that Rebecca Goldstein's Mazel calls upon Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own not only to provide feminist critical memory of the shtetl experience but also to challenge feminist narratives that essentialize Orthodox Judaism. In Mazel, Goldstein presents us with a Jewish Judith Shakespeare figure who could find no outlet for her genius in the oppressively traditional shtetl. However, Mazel is a narrative of three generations, and in the third generation, Goldstein makes good on the promise that ends A Room of One's Own and re-embodies her Judith Shakespeare in the form of Phoebe, a baalot teshuva who resides in a Modern Orthodox community and who professes mathematics at Princeton. By imagining Phoebe as Fraydel's transhistorical double, Goldstein allies Woolf's vision of the future with Jewish conceptions of a soul's transmigration. Moreover, Phoebe's life challenges feminist assumptions that Orthodoxy is the practice of ethnic and gender chauvinism. By adopting and adapting Woolf's narrative of a woman of genius, Goldstein creates a Jewish feminist classic all her own, one in which feminist desire serves as a bridge rather than a battleground for intra-Jewish difference.