Introduction

In November 1971, the Hunterian Library at the University of Glasgow held a special exhibition on Women and Books. The exhibition, samples from which can still be seen on the Internet ( http://special.lib.gla.ac.uk/exhibns/women/women.html ), featured books under the following subheadings—an impressively comprehensive list:

Books by women. Suffragette literature. Books compiled by women. Books translated by women. Books for women. Books about women. Biographies of women. On women’s education. Owned by women. Illustrated by women. Published by women.

It took a long time for Jewish Studies to turn its attention to this same range of subtopics under the heading of Women and Books. Only in the late 1980s and 1990s did one really begin to see publications dedicated to this theme.¹ And here we are in Fall 2008, offering the second of two special issues of Nashim dedicated to the subject of Women and Books. Given the years that have elapsed since the second wave of feminism urged studying the contributions of women to society, arts, literature and the sciences, what new issues have emerged? What did we, the editors of these issues, hope to uncover, and how have our contributors aided this endeavor?

In large measure, the intellectual inspiration behind these two issues, as reflected in the Call for Papers, was Iris Parush’s pathbreaking book Reading Jewish Women.² Parush’s book helped redirect thinking about Jewish women and books in several critical ways. Until that point, feminist Hebrew literary studies had focused almost exclusively either on the representation of women in literature (mainly by men) or on Hebrew women writers—why for so many centuries we had none, what led to the emergence of Hebrew women’s writing, what were its unique themes, and so forth. Women’s absence from the tradition of Hebrew literature, we understood, was in large measure the result of their secondary status in Judaism. Parush’s research into the reading practices of east European Jewish women in the nineteenth century broadened the scope of this inquiry, finding advantages where we had formerly seen only disadvantages. Parush showed that the exemption of women from mandatory Torah study left them free to learn foreign languages and even Hebrew more systematically than their male counterparts. The indifference toward women’s education enabled them to read world literature and be disseminators of the Haskalah in their families and communities. Parush’s research helped reconfigure and reshape many of the questions we would come to ask about Jewish women and books.

For this reason, it is a special pleasure to feature Parush’s essay “Gender, Penmanship and the Primacy of Speech over Writing in the Jewish Society of Galicia and Eastern Europe in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century” in this second issue. Here Parush extends her research into women’s reading to ask new questions about the gendered nature of Jewish written and oral culture. She argues provocatively that the traditional valorization of Torah shebe‘al peh (the Oral Law) meant that boys often were not taught penmanship and writing, whereas girls were. Although Parush emphasizes at the end of her article that women did not initially use this “advantage” to pursue creative work, she points to it as an additional, potential benefit of Jewish female marginality. Once again, Parush challenges us to look in new ways at women’s and men’s relationship to books and writing.

Hagit Cohen’s essay on women’s Yiddish reading circles among American and Canadian Jewish immigrants in the 1920s and 1930s is in certain respects an intellectual descendant of the work of Iris Parush. Like Parush, Cohen points to the ways in which women’s reading influenced the values, cultural predilections and literary output of the larger community. In creating Yiddish reading circles, women supported Yiddish writers (male and female) while shoring up their own ethnic, secular Jewish identity, which they endeavored to pass on to their children. Cohen’s essay demonstrates the relevance and revelatory power of studying the history not only of women writers, but also of women readers.

Recently, other scholars, notably Shemuel Feiner and Tova Cohen (whose...