Introduction

Feminist scholarship has had an indelible impact on the field of Jewish Studies and on the pages of this journal. Yet, though Jewish Social Studies has published groundbreaking scholarship in women's, gender, and sexuality studies, this journal has not, until now, created a space for a careful thinking through of the imbricated development of Jewish Studies, on the one hand, and feminist approaches to scholarship, on the other.

In issuing invitations to this roundtable, the editors did not define feminist studies for our contributors. We asked an inter-disciplinary collection of scholars, instead, to assess the development of feminist scholarship within Jewish Studies over the past four or five decades, encouraging them to identify the most important accomplishments of this literature—and also its shortcomings. Additionally, we posed a series of questions: How might feminist contributions to Jewish Studies be identified and honored? To what extent have feminist scholars of Jewish Studies pushed the field into dialogue with cognate fields, including women's history, gender studies, queer theory, and more? Finally, we invited our contributors to reflect on their own evolution as feminist scholars. Why, we asked each of them, did you decide to become a scholar, and how did you choose your area of expertise? For those who self-identify as Jewish, did your experience or identity as a Jew play a role in your feminism? And how did feminism change your self-understanding as a Jew or as a scholar?

The contributions to this roundtable suggest that a variety of historical genealogies have linked feminist studies and Jewish Studies together. Historians of American labor, Alice Kessler-Harris and Susan Glenn among them, will trace one set of causal linkages and scholastic precedents, historians of early modern Europe, including Natalie Zemon Davis, another. Holocaust Studies has its own genealogy, delineated here by Marion Kaplan, as does Mizrahi and Sephardi Studies, outlined here by Shir Alon. Similarly, as Mara Benjamin and Sara Imhoff teach us, the study of Judaism has experienced its own revelations and blind-spots when it comes to feminist studies.

For Natalie Zemon Davis and Alice Kessler-Harris—scholars who blazed a trail in feminist Jewish history—a common thread is that they did not perceive themselves as Jewish historians. In the era that Susan Glenn calls the "the first 'now' period in the production of feminist knowledge about Jews—roughly the mid-1970s to the early 1990s," which she links to "an explosion of interest in women's class and labor radicalism," Kessler-Harris found that her personal history and a love of Yiddish led her to an abiding interest in American labor—a movement that was not coincidentally peopled with outspoken Jewish women participants and leaders. Harris's passion bonded her to other Jewish women historians "for whom Jewishness surely play[ed] a role but [was] not the central thread in their work." Similarly, Davis was an early modern Europeanist, not specifically a scholar of either Jews or women, but in developing an early course on gender and society, she found in Glickl Hamel a Jewish subject who would "become a model from which we started our gender voyage rather than a marked side case." For both Kessler-Harris and Davis, Jews proved compelling cornerstones upon which work about larger themes (society, sex, labor, class) could be built.

Later generations of feminist scholars, including Susan Glenn and Marion Kaplan, built on the innovation of their own teachers—but still their pioneering research (into the fields of American immigration and Holocaust history, respectively) showed that Jewish women and gender remained overlooked subjects. This is true in some fields more than others. Shir Alon unpacks the striking paucity of scholarship that contends with gender in the arena of Mizrahi and Sephardi Studies. And Mara Benjamin, in her contribution to this roundtable, writes about how, as a graduate student, she "gazed longingly from the sidelines as this proliferation of scholarly work on women and gender emerged in other areas of Jewish studies. With a few exceptions, modern Jewish thought remained largely untouched by the remarkable developments that have become, if not fully integrated, then...