Women and Gender, Past and Present: A Jewish Studies Story

When it comes to gender equality, Jewish Studies has a long way to go. All-male conferences, overwhelmingly male editorial boards, sexist condescension, and implicit bias still plague the field. It is still possible to publish an article that ignores women or a book that implies that women had no substantive role in the making of Jewish history. But that does not mean that the field has gone untouched by feminist scholarship—far from it.

In addition to calling for inclusive representation at conferences and in publications, feminist scholarship has intellectual lessons for Jewish Studies too. The field has learned some of these, but others it has learned only incompletely or not at all. I see the fields of women's and gender studies as two of the intellectual legacies of feminist studies, and scholarship in these fields has brought insights to academic disciplines across the field of Jewish Studies—to name just a few, that women play crucial roles in historical change and development; that masculinity and femininity are not essences but rather regulatory ideals constructed by people and cultures; that ideas about gender structure social systems even beyond the presence of women or men; and that men have gender too, which means that men and masculinity should be studied with respect to the construction of gender.

This last point hints at the development of gender studies out of women's studies; it also hints at the subtle tensions within women's and gender studies. These fields suggest on the one hand that scholars should pay more attention to women and on the other hand that scholars should also pay more attention to men, masculinity, and manhood. In order to challenge masculine hegemony, we must study men more. But we must study men as men, not as the default representatives of humanity or of Jewishness. We must center women in our scholarly narrative, but we must also include men in our scholarship about gender. Women still appears as an entry in the index of most mainstream works in Jewish Studies, whereas men does not. This demonstrates that women are still a special topic, one the scholar can isolate from the rest of the story, but men are so integral they cannot be isolated in this way. Gender is still so often taken to mean only women. In the 2010 edited collection Gender and Jewish History, for example, only one of the 21 essays focuses on men or masculinity.¹ At first glance, this seems like the flip side of the problem I marked at the outset: scholarship focuses too much on women. And yet, a closer look suggests that perhaps it is more a matter of the scholarship on women and gender being marginalized and isolated as a special interest. Are these two currents a case of women's studies versus gender studies, a conflict over the legacy of feminist scholarship?

To answer this, we need a robust understanding of the history of feminist scholarship in Jewish Studies. How did we get here, and where do we go from here? Here I will discuss the multiple origins of feminist studies in Jewish Studies, describe two major conceptual moves that women's and gender studies have advocated, and suggest why pursuing these two conceptual moves can be a difficult yet ethically important balancing act.

Multiple Origins

When the editors of Jewish Social Studies approached me about contributing to this discussion, they asked me to write about feminist contributions to Jewish Studies in order to honor the first generation of Jewish women's historians. At first I didn't notice the subtle move from feminist contributions to the specific field of history, but upon reflection, it makes good sense: many of the elder stateswomen of Jewish Studies are or were historians. Hasia Diner, Paula Hyman, Marion Kaplan, Deborah Dash Moore, and a dozen other women scholars line a section of my bookshelves. Hyman, Charlotte Baum, and Sonya Michael co-wrote The Jewish Woman in America in 1976. Kaplan published The Jewish Feminist Movement in Germany in 1979. These were some of the pathbreakers of the...