Women and Gender in Jewish Philosophy

Editor’s Introduction

‰ Hava Tirosh-Samuelson Editor’s Introduction: Jewish Philosophy in Conversation with Feminism ‰ Toward a Conversation Feminism has thoroughly transformed contemporary Judaism. After centuries of being excluded, Jewish women have ¤nally become active interpreters of their own tradition as rabbis, teachers, academic scholars, and communal leaders. Feminism has also transformed the academic discipline of Jewish studies. The ¶ourishing of the ¤eld of Jewish studies in North America in the 1970s coincided with and was in¶uenced by the emergence of women’s studies and black studies. The discipline of Jewish studies was transformed in response to a simple question—what about women? In the attempt to answer this question, all aspects of Jewish Studies—Bible, rabbinics , history, Hebrew literature, political science, sociology, ethnography, and other sub-¤elds such as Holocaust studies, Israel studies, and ¤lm studies—have been profoundly changed.1 Of all the disciplines within Jewish studies, Jewish philosophy has been least affected by feminism. Although several women, including Colette Sirat, Sarah Heller-Willensky, Sara Klein-Braslavy, and Rivkah Horwitz, are well-known historians of Jewish philosophy, their scholarship has not been informed by feminism in general or by feminist philosophy in particular. They have instead been in¶uenced by the standards and conventions of the 2 hava tirosh-samuelson academic study of Judaism. Aware of this situation, in 1986 Heidi Ravven published an essay titled “Creating a Jewish Feminist Philosophy.”2 She challenged Jewish women philosophers “to contribute to the philosophic de¤nition and analysis of the central beliefs and praxis of women,”3 and argued that “women’s ethical, social, erotic, and spiritual expressions ought to in¶uence the choice of a philosophic approach to integrate them into Jewish philosophy.”4 Ravven proposed the Hegelian notion of “concrete universality ” as an overarching principle within which feminists could ¤nd “a systematic way of integrating their experiences and formations of Judaism into Jewish philosophy.” In the late 1980s and 1990s, a few (male) scholars of Jewish philosophy did take note of feminism and acknowledged its potential in¶uence on the ¤eld, but even these sympathetic voices have had but a limited familiarity with feminist philosophic literature.5 Their less sympathetic colleagues have simply ignored feminist philosophy, presumably because they regard it as irrelevant or philosophically inconsequential.6 In 1994, I (then writing under the surname “Tirosh-Rothschild”) attempted to account for this state of affairs in an essay titled “‘Dare to Know’: Feminism and the Discipline of Jewish Philosophy.”7 To introduce the reader to the discipline of feminist philosophy, this essay summarized the main strands of feminist philosophy and attempted to explain why the¤eld has failed to make an impact on Jewish philosophy. I argued that the failure re¶ects a debate about the meaning of philosophy. Practitioners of Jewish philosophy have not taken either feminist philosophy or Jewish feminism seriously because they have not regarded it as philosophy proper. Rather, feminism has been viewed as a political ideology or a social theory that is either irrelevant to Jewish philosophy or that does not have philosophical merit. Furthermore, my essay noted that the indifference to feminist philosophy arises from the fact that Jewish philosophy is committed to the very modernist assumption about knowledge, the so-called Enlightenment Project, which feminist philosophy has challenged. Conversely, feminist philosophers were paying no attention to Jewish philosophy, re¶ecting the marginal status of Jewish philosophy among practitioners in the academy. The essay went on to show that Jewish philosophy and feminist philosophy have much in common: both believe that philosophy must take into consideration the identity of the knower; both philosophize on the basis of concrete, space-time bound experiences; and both critique the totalizing, presumably universalistic claims of Western philosophy. Given the shared ground, the essay called on Jewish philosophers, Jewish feminists , and feminist philosophers to enter a conversation that could transform all three discourses. Such conversation could potentially correct some 3 Jewish Philosophy in Conversation with Feminism of the excesses in feminist philosophy, broaden the scope of Jewish philosophy , and deepen the vision of Jewish feminism. To date, however, the discourse of Jewish feminism has been theological and hermeneutical rather than philosophical.8 Feminist Jewish theologians such as Judith Plaskow and Ellen Umansky exposed the gender biases of traditional Judaism and gave rise to a distinctive feminist spirituality and midrash.9 While Jewish feminism brought creative innovations to Jewish religious life in North America, the Jewish feminist academic...