Jewishness and Gender: Rethinking Social Scientific Constructions

106 SHOFAR Fall 1995 Vol. 14, No.1 JEWISHNESS AND GENDER: RETHINKING SOCIAL SCIENTIFIC CONSTRUCTIONS by Riv-Ellen Prell Riv-Ellen Prell, an anthropologist, is Associate Professor of American Studies at the University ofMinnesota. She is the author of Prayer and Community: Tbe Havurah in AmericanJudaism (Detroit: Wayne State University Press) and Fighting to Become Americans: Jewish Women and Men in Conflict in the Twentieth Century (New York: Basic Books, forthcoming) Over the course of this centuryJews have thought of themselves, and been thought of, as a race, religion, culture and ethnic group. Each category has been embedded within American society's conceptions of cultural differences, and within the conceptions that its leaders and scholars advocated as they addressed these differences. Since World War Two, Jewish historians and social scientists have settled upon an understanding ofJews as American ethnics who share a religion, although Jews are bound to one another by more than shared religious doctrine. These scholars have studiedJewish economic mobility, marriage patterns, and the maintenance of cultural uniqueness. Studies in the last twenty years have been more likely to compareJews with other ethnic groups to understand varying strategies for Americanizing.1 However, none of these categories IThomas Kessner, The Golden Door: Italian aruijewish ImmigrantMobility in New York City, 1880-1915 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977); Joel Perlmann, Ethnic Differeru::es: Schooling arui Social Structure Among the Irish, Italians, jews, arui Blacks in an American City, 1880-1935 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Andrew Heinze, Adapting to Aburuiaru::e: jewish Immigrant Mass Culture arui the Search for American Iderltity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990); Judith Smith, Family Connections: A History ofItaliarl aruiJewish Immigrant Lives in Provideru::e Rhode Islarui 1900-1940 (Albany: SUNY Press, 1985); and Susan Glenn, Daughters ofthe Shtetl: Life arui Labor in the Immigrant Gerzeration (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990). Rethinking Social Scientific Constructions 107 has attended to internal differentiation among Jews, most obviously by gender. None of these frameworks asks what American Jewish experience looks like if we think ofJews as men and women. None of these studies has explored in any depth what the category "Jewish" means to the people who identify themselves as such. Nor have most of these studies considered how self-definition as "Jewish" is integrated with other self-definitions , such as gender or nationality, although most have paid attention to social c1ass.2 Preceding and paralleling scholarly studies about American Jews are Jews' own innumerable ways of expressing perceptions of themselves. These expressions, in striking contrast to scholarship, pay close attention to differences between Jewish men and women and attribute blame and virtue very systematically to each.3 Indeed, all dimensions of Jewish culture-music, film, theater, and literature-not only include men and women, but make relationships between men and women central.4 In these works, Jewish culture is dynamic. The conflicts and relationships between Jewish men and Jewish women change over time, and change in response to a variety of factors, including their economic positions. Fundamental definitions of Jewish manhood and womanhood, and of parents and children, shift dramatically from decade to decade, from urban settings to suburban ones, and from one sort of definition of Jewish religious practice to another. In contrast, those who study Jews as an ethnic group assume that its members constitute a single "interest group." They see internal stratification , whether by class or gender, as less compelling than Jews' difference 2More recent studies have dealt with gender, although they assume that "Jewishness" does not require investigation; it is simply group membership. For examples, see Glenn, Daughters; Heinze, Adapting; and Smith, Family Connections. ~In her work on emancipation in the nineteenth and early twentieth century in the U.S. and Europe, Paula Hyman discusses why women are portrayed first as parochial, and then as irresponsible in the handling of their children's Jewish educations. See her Gender and Emaru:ipation (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995). 'Phyllis Chock calls for an anthropology of ethnicity in the United States which locates "scholarly discourses on ethnicity in their relationship with indigenous discourse." See her "The Landscape ofEnchantment: Redaction in a Theory ofEthnicity," CulturalAnthropology 4 (1989): 163. 108 SHOFAR Fall 1995 Vol. 14, NdDIi...