The Jewish Woman in Contemporary Society (review)

Book Reviews 137 If Bridges to an American City is not a meticulously prepared work of scholarship, it is still unquestionably an important and thorough description of the vigorous and variegated community created by Jews in Chicago. In this, the author is to be commended for envisioning and fulfilling his goal of characterizing a world he had once known, a way of life he had himself experienced. Sorkin's efforts will benefit researchers and readers that are personally or professionally interested in ethnic identity. Hannah Kliger Department of Communication University ofMassachusetts, Amherst TheJewish Woman in Contemporary Society, by Adrienne Baker. New York: New York University Press, 1993. 234 pp. $42.50. This book is meant to serve as an introduction to contemporary Jewish culture through the perspective of women's experiences. Jewish culture, that is, as understood by the population of Jews who share the Anglican and American experiences of the 300,000 Jews in the United Kingdom and the six million Jews in the United States. While such a comparison serves well to show that the eclectic nature of Jewish identification moves beyond religiosity and observance, it is simultaneously limiting and too broad. To talk of contemporary Jewish identity within these two countries from primarily the historical background of each is to miss the very important place that Israel holds in the reconfiguration of identity among both the British and the Americans. Furthermore to speak of Britain and the United States as if we could identifY a monolithic identity of process within each is to miss the complexities in both historical and contemporary settings that contribute to identity formation. Baker acknowledges that coming to Britain and the United States must have resulted in very different Jewish identity experiences and formation for Jews. The former was a settled homogeneous society and the latter "a nation of immigrants." However, while acknowledged, the implications of these differences are never pursued. Having just reviewed the book American]ews of tbe West, I am reminded of how geocentric our biases are when we write ofJews in the United States. The sbtetl culture so much at the roots of New York CityJewish identity virtually disappears when we examine the second most populousJewish city in the country, Los Angeles. 138 SHOFAR Spring 1995 Vol. 13, No.3 Such problems of comparison are only compounded when we move to countries. While I applaud the interdisciplinary approach Baker uses and her many sources-feminist, Jewish, literary, psychological, sociological, and historical-the end result of such eclecticism may be a primary weakness ofthe book. The reader is often distracted by the preliminary introductions to each chapter which depend heavily on abstract discussions with no easy transitions to women's real-life experiences. For example, the discussion ofJewish law and conversion in the chapter on difficulties with intermarriage and the belabored discussions of feminism in several of the other chapters leaves the reader without a sense ofthe book's avowed purposewhat does it mean to be a Jewish woman today? The focus on contemporary women, their voices, feelings, beliefs, and practices, are lost to the abstract discussion of the ways in which myths and stereotypes about them are perpetrated. It is not enough, for example, to note that simultaneously we are witnessing one-third ofJews marrying out and a return to traditional Judaism among others. The scope and the gendered meaning of each is lost without real-life examples. In part, the purpose of a feminist model is to make women's voices audible and their lives visible. Baker does not use enough examples from the women she interviewed (parenthetically, a methodology section or an appendix would have helped, since the reader knows little about how the sample was obtained, what the interview schedule was like, or of whom the interviewees are representative) or from other primary research sources on contemporary Jewish women. For instance, grounding her theoretical discussions of deBouvoir and Heschel in contemporary data would have helped her flesh out the complexities and nuances of identity formation among traditional Jewish women. I found, for instance, in my own research (Rachel's Daughters, Rutgers University Press, 1991) some remarkable recasting of ritual among orthodox Jewish women around the births...