The Scholar as Daughter: Growing up in a Rabbinical Family

In this memoir, the author considers how her childhood in Hamilton, Ontario as the daughter of an American-born Reform rabbi and his wife shaped her career and research choices. She believes that her consciousness of otherness—as the child of Americans in a Canadian setting, as a Jew in overwhelmingly gentile society, and as a Reform Jew in a more traditionally oriented Canadian Jewish community—led to her scholarly interests in how both Jews and women have been perceived as anomalous in various times and places. Baskin also discusses how growing up as the daughter of community leaders and as a representative Jew in a place where Jews were a small minority prepared her to be a public person and an expositor of Jewish beliefs and traditions for both Jewish and non-Jewish audiences.