Jews and Feminism: The Ambivalent Search for Home (review)

Book Reviews 159 and cultural life-one that is likely to transform as well as strengthen American Judaism." And what of the rabbinate itself? Here, too, Rabbi Zucker is sanguine. "Simon Schwartzfuchs has written that the 'history of the last thousand years, and even more that ofthe last century, shows that no Jewish community has ever endured for a lengthy period if deprived ofthe services of the rabbi. The nature ofpostexilic Judaism makes survival impossible without a teacher and a guide. ' The rabbis will continue to be both those teachers and those guides." As a congregational rabbi ofalmost forty years, I was heartened and reassured to read my colleague's closing words, "Rabbis have the opportunity of working with and helping in every area of Jewish concern. Rabbis are in a position to influence the future of Judaism." For a revealing and absorbing study of the American rabbinate, the reader is urged to read Rabbi David J. Zucker's American Rabbis: Facts and Fiction. An exhaustive bibliographical section, including numerous references to fictional and non-fictional works about the rabbinate, will also be helpful to the reader who desires to delve further into the subject. Rabbi Samuel Weingart Temple Israel West Lafayette, Indiana Jews and Feminism: The Ambivalent Search for Home, by Laura Levitt. New York: Routledge, 1997. 224 pp. $20.99. In her original and important book Laura Levitt writes: "I too have wanted to pass into feminist study unmarked as just another white woman. I have found it impossible to do that. I could not lose my Jewish self in that graduate classroom, nor can I do it now as a professor" (p. 129). Levitt places that inescapable reality of her Jewishness at the center ofher deconstruction ofthe meaning of"home" for American Jewish feminists. It is her very "homelessness" as a Jew and a woman which does not allow her to retreat from a critical evaluation ofthe meaning ofJewishness and Judaism for women in the twentieth century. To the contrary. Levitt provides the intellectual grounding for a discussion of identity that forswears "home" in favor of connection, respect, and relationship. She constructs an account of the foundation of American Judaism and Jewishness that is, therefore, utopian and critical simultaneously. Jews andFeminism is to its creditnot an easy book to categorize. Levitt writes with equal ease about feminist and cultural theory, Jewish theology, philosophy, and history. She draws on a series oftexts that include the BabylonianKetubbah, Eugene Borowitz's covenantal theology, Irena Klepfisz's poetry, and feminist thought on identity. In reading these as well as several other works oftheology and political thought with and against one another, Laura Levitt carefully establishes the snare created by the link between classical liberalismandpost-Enlightenment Judaismthathas been enticing and 160 SHOFAR Fa112000 Vol. 19, No.1 problematic for women in particular. It is in her exploration ofthe relationship between citizenship, liberalism, and marriage that she is particularly effective in revealing how the Enlightenment widened Jewish horizons only to dramatically constrain and limit the lives of Jews. Jews and Feminism lays out its textual dialogues in three sections. The first explores the foundations of Jewish views of marriage and sexuality in relationship to citizenship in order to understand the illusions ofmutuality in citizenship, contracts, and marriage. The second section is a particularly astute discussion of the key debates concerning identity among some key feminist thinkers. Levitt uses Jewish identity in particular to interrogate these debates. Her analysis of how these theorists include and exclude Jewishness and antisemitism from these discussions allows Levitt to establish her own vision of how to embrace "difference" that refuses to demand similarity or universal equivalence. Instead Levitt calls for respect for "specific social locations" from which activists and scholars can call for social transformations that are broadly inclusive. And finally, in her third section Levitt reads a variety ofpoetic forms, particularly the poetry ofIrena Klepfisz, to establish a vision for a "homeless" Jewish feminist life that embraces contradiction, impermanence, and political commitment. In the journeys established in each section, Levitt's critique of the dangerous seduction ofliberalism remains central. Indeed, on one ofher most interesting paths of inquiry she reveals the deeply disturbing misogyny of the rabbis...