Feminist Jewish Studies and the Academy

Review Essays 141 Jewish Masculinity," Hoberman does allude to this question. But, as the title of Hoberman's essay hints, this is not his main subject.) Jews and Gender, which otherwise makes such important contributions to uncovering scientific and popular constructions ofgender and race as well as the gendered and racialized construction of knowledge, comes up short on the subject of "the" Jewish woman. Perhaps, then, a more accurate title for the anthology would have been MaleJews and Gender? Feminist Jewish Studies and the Academy by Cynthia M. Baker Department of Religion Duke University Feminist Perspectives onJewish Studies, edited by Lynn Davidman and Shelly Tenenbaum. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994. 281 pp. $28.50. Gender andJudaism: The Transformation ofTradition, edited by T. M. Rudavsky. New York: New York University Press, 1995. 330 pp.' $45.00 (c); $18.95 (P). Two recently published anthologies together provide a sense of the myriad possibilities-realized and not yet realized-of"engenderingJewish knowledges." The choices made by the editors and contributors about the form, content, and context of their work vividly reflect the unsettled (and fundamentally unsettling) questions raised by the intersection ofJewish, feminist, and feminist Jewish studies in the academy. The editors of Feminist Perspectives onJewish Studies have chosen, for their part, to situate their several representative "perspectives" neatly within the bounds of established academic disciplines. As Davidman and Tenenbaum state in their introduction, "Each author evaluates the level of integration of feminist scholarship and perspectives in her discipline. The subjects vary in the amount of feminist scholarship produced, how much it has been read by other scholars in the field and incorporated into their 142 SHOFAR Fall 1995 Vol. 14, No.1 teaching and research, and its impact on the dominant paradigms in the discipline. Most of our authors report that there has been little integration of feminist knowledge" (p. 3). This last observation comes as no surprise to those of us who work in these fields, and to the extent that this collection represents a "report card" on feminism's impact on Jewish studies within various academic disciplines, it is of limited interest. That said, it remains a fascinating volume, not so much for its substance (although a number of the essays are of high quality) as for its underlying assumption: that disciplinary structures can (should?) sustain such feminist "integration" while continuing to exist intact. Equally interesting is each author's articulation of her owndisciplinary location: its near and distant boundaries, whom she engages as potential allies and interlocutors within and outside "the field," and the direction she would like that field to take. Judith Plaskow, for example, begins her essay on Jewish feminist theology by noting that it is "a triple outsider to Jewish studies" (p. 62). However, instead of assenting to that relative position, Plaskow places herself and her work at the center of a much broader conversation that includes an array ofJewish, feminist, academic, and activist communities, and she is unequivocal in her use of explicitly feminist frames of reference in shaping that conversation. Whereas other feminists (including most ofthe contributors to this volume) seem to stand outside closed or half-open doors, demanding recognition and admission, Plaskow somehow gives the impression of already occupying the most desirable ground and waiting-none too patiently-for others to arrive. At the opposite end of the spectrum, with a very different agenda, is Hava Tirosh-Rothschild, who places herself squarely within the tradition of Enlightenment universalism. She seeks the aid of Kant and "Western philosophy" to "help feminism (especiallyJewish feminism) avoid the trap of militant dogmatism" (p. 85), wean itself from its preoccupation with· "women's (or anyone else's) particular experiences, emotions, needs, and aspirations-those concerns that constitute the core of feminism" (p. 87), and mature to a point where feminist philosophers will "aspire to make assertions that are universally valid" and "join their male counterparts in the attempt to understand the human condition per se" (p. 95). Frankly, it is difficult to imagine a less feminist"feminist philosophy" than the one Tirosh-Rothschild describes-but then, liberating feminism from itself seems to be precisely her aim. A somewhat different and more nuanced stance is taken by...