Paula Hyman and the Engendering of Modern Jewish History: A Defining Scholarly Life

In 1976, two graduate students and a returning B.A. student published The Jewish Woman in America.¹ The book was a call to activism that reverberated through the halls of academe and the pews of synagogue life. As Paula Hyman, Charlotte Baum, and Sonya Michel knew, theirs was not the first book about Jewish women, but it was the first to weave together critical scholarship and feminist scholarship. Today, when I scan my bookshelf, I can see the impact of The Jewish Woman in America in monographs and anthologies that address women, gender, and modern Jewish history. Indeed, over the last five years, four of the most prominent scholars on modern Jewish life have edited volumes on the topic: Deborah Dash Moore, Marion Kaplan, Hasia Diner (along with Shira Kohn and Rachel Kranson, Diner's graduate students at the time), and Riv-Ellen Prell. Why in this historical moment do we find ourselves with such a wealth of scholarship about Jewish women and gender? And what can these three books tell us about the contours of the fields of gender studies and Jewish studies, how they have changed since 1976, and where they might be going? (For the sake of full disclosure, an essay of mine appears in Gender and Jewish History, and I have published a review of A Jewish Feminist Mystique? elsewhere.²)

In significant ways, these three anthologies have very different aims. Prell'sWomen Remaking Judaism examines the intersection of Judaism and feminism and asks, as Prell writes in her lucid introduction, "Why Jewish women who embraced Jewish feminism stayed within a system that they believed oppressed them to transform it rather than leave it" (p. 4). Weaving together literary studies, anthropology, theology, history, and ritual studies, the book argues that the power of feminism came less from its radical break with tradition and more from its ability to work from within tradition and use new interpretations of history to validate feminist claims.

Discussions about Judaism may filter into the other two volumes, Gender and Jewish History and A Jewish Feminine Mystique?, but these books ground themselves in politics and culture. Even so, their aims diverge. Gender and Jewish History documents the accomplishments within a field of study. The editors argue that concomitant with the acceptance of Jewish history in the academy was an investment in chronicling women's experiences, sexuality, and gender relations. The volume travels through time and space to show just how powerfully gender scholarship has shaped the field of Jewish history. In contrast, A Jewish Feminine Mystique? is an attempt to create a new field of analysis. In their provocative introduction, Diner, Kohn, and Kranson write that the standard interpretation of the postwar period in the United States as one of a return to patriarchal gender norms and a period of cultural and political complacency is woefully incomplete. The point of the volume, then, is to bring a new historical interpretation to light through a series of essays, all concentrated on the same time period and same country.

When comparing the table of contents, A Jewish Feminine Mystique? includes a greater proportion of newer scholars and one gets from this book a sense of freshness and, in the case of a few essays, rawness. Gender and Jewish History includes essays from the most prominent Jewish historians, many of whom are revisiting topics they have studied in earlier works or taking the opportunity to ask broad historiographic questions, such as the role that gender plays in Holocaust studies. Thus, one finishes reading Gender and Jewish History with a sense of the great depth of the scholarship about gender and modern Jewish...