Introduction

In June 2010, a conference focusing on gender and Jewish identity was hosted by Brandeis University's Hadassah-Brandeis Institute and by the Fanya Gottesfeld Heller Center for the Study of Jewish Women, the Gender Studies Program, and the Ruth and Emanuel Rackman Center for the Advancement of Women's Status at Bar Ilan University. Conference papers examined the intersections between gender and Jewish identity across disciplinary boundaries. This issue of Nashim is a product of that event, along with some additional studies that joined our conversation.¹

Ethno-religious identity has been a key topic of exploration in the social sciences. Identity groups have been defined in different ways, with some scholars emphasizing formal definitions of religious orders, sects, and, in some cases, kinship or tribal groups, and, in other cases, defining clusters of co-existing attributes in looser and less formal ways. While some study identity from the individual vantage point, others insist on the primacy of the social network or community, pointing out that individuals are embedded in a series of social circles, and these circles define values and "worthwhile" behaviors. Thus, although individuals (especially in contemporary Western democracies) may think of themselves as rugged individualists, their attitudes and life choices are likely to be profoundly influenced by the communities they encounter.²

At the same time, individuals influence the group: Personal affinities are reflected by communities, such as religious communities, national groups and economic alliances, and those communities reproduce and symbolize individual values. Identity studies have sought to explain how groups—both self-defined and those defined by others—produce, reflect and reproduce their values and themselves.³

Within Jewish Studies, the subject of "Jewish identity" has been conceptualized in many ways; to some, it may mean belonging to a specific geographical location or to a people sharing a common history, destiny or language; to others, it means practicing specific religious rules and/or participating in Jewish culture. Religion has had a central place in defining the Jewish community, vis à vis outsiders and in relation to different Jewish groups, as have the tensions between national and religious identities.

Hybridity—the existence of multiple identities simultaneously—is one important aspect of contemporary identity that has received much scholarly scrutiny of late, with explorations of the intersections of ethnicity, religion, class and social standing, to mention just a few.⁴ Moreover, scholars recognize that identities are often fluid. Individuals and communities understand and express their identities according to the specific circumstances in which they find themselves, whether these situations are given or self-chosen. These variations, which are related both to self-definition and to the way ethnic and religious groups are defined by others, are central to understanding how communities function within the cultural contexts in which they are situated. The way people see themselves is often different from the way others see them, and as a result, the relationship between these two perceptions can also be of great interest and import.⁵

Although the word "identity" suggests similarity and affinity, the definition of any kind of identity contains within it difference and separation. Identity is constructed by drawing boundaries and creating distinct categories. Jews throughout history have done so by calling upon religious codes and norms, by uniting around ideological and theological principles, and by using a variety of definitive languages, such as Hebrew, Ladino and Judeo-Arabic. Jewish writing has used canonic texts and mythic constructions to produce literature that has been defined as Jewish over time, and the changing nature of these definitions is evidence of the social and cultural changes that Judaism has undergone. Looking at identity and searching for ways to define identities is inevitably partial. Recent scholarship has discussed connections and inclusions more than boundaries and has sought to complicate identities rather than to flatten them or reduce them to binaries.⁶

Gender scholarship, in both the social sciences and the humanities, shares many interesting parallels with identity studies, and it has been an especially salient and productive area of research within the various fields of Jewish Studies over the past three decades. The first wave of studies on...