Abstract

This essay examines the figure of the New Jewish Woman in Yeshiahu Bershadsky’s nearly forgotten novel Neged hazerem (Against the Current; 1901). Whereas most Hebrew literature at the opening of the twentieth century turned to the smaller genres of the sketch, short story, or novella, Neged hazerem took on the expansive form of the novel to represent the larger social and spiritual transformations of the 1880s and 1890s, namely, the decline of the Haskalah movement, the undermining of Jewish tradition, and the rise of the Zionist Hibbat Tsiyon movement. The novel also diverges from much Hebrew literature of the period by drawing on the modernist figure of the New Woman, together with contemporaneous discourses on female sexuality, as the central vehicle for exploring the conflicts of Jewish modernity. This essay considers how Bershadsky adopts the figure of the New Woman from modernist discourse within a Jewish context to illustrate how the questions of secularization and the conflict between assimilation and tradition are presented as a drama that plays out around these female figures. It also considers how the New Jewish Woman is central to the novel’s representation of the national idea, where fantasies of the female body become imbricated within the national vision that the novel both constructs and explores. This essay argues that Neged hazerem draws on this figure and fantasies about her to engage in an intertextual dialogue with early Zionist texts, from Abraham Mapu’s Ahavat tziyon and Hibbat Tsiyon poetry, to the Zionist utopias that began to flourish at this time. Bershadsky, who did not join the Zionist movement, and remained critical of it, employs these New Jewish Woman figures to offer a vision of Jewish modernity that runs counter to the emerging national narrative, and points to the city in the Diaspora as the privileged locus for the reformulation of modern Jewish gendered identities.

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