Masculinity and the Making of American Judaism by Sarah Imhoff (review)

Sarah Imhoff suggests that Jewish masculinity in the United States has been almost entirely overlooked by scholars. Despite their more than forty-year engagement with the study of the lives of American Jewish women, barely a handful of such studies exist for Jewish men. Beyond the scholarship on “roles” and activities, the study of gender as a dynamic force in American Jewish life is similarly focused on women rather than men or masculinity. In its “unmarked,” role, to use a linguistic term, Jewish masculinity is the norm of American Jewish political, cultural, and organizational life, and it has escaped significant analysis.

Imhoff argues that, rather than seeking a generic American Jewish masculinity in the early twentieth century in the United States, she is interested in one crucial part of that population. She chose to study “acculturated” Jewish men in order to understand how they were shaped by a set of concepts and ideas that were different from Christians or Eastern European Jewish immigrants of the time. Similarly, she argues that understanding the lives of ordinary, rather than exceptional, men will more effectively provide an understanding of the ideas that shaped Jewish masculinity.

That ideas that grounded American Jewish masculinity for acculturated Jewish men were “universalism” and “rationality.” They were more than a variation on Christian ideas of the time, particularly diverging from the significance of physical prowess for Christian manhood. Just as Christians linked their notions of male virtue to Christianity, so did acculturated Jewish men believe that what they most prized as masculine was central to the principles of the Reform Judaism with which they most likely identified. Therefore, Imhoff’s analysis of American Jewish masculinity simultaneously offers an analysis of the development of Reform Judaism. American Judaism was constructed simultaneously with American Jewish masculinity, she argues. The two were mutually constitutive. Her serious attention to ideation and religious construction through a lens of a gender analysis is an important contribution.

Imhoff builds her case for the mutual construction of Jewish masculinity and Reform Judaism by an analysis of the American Reform thinkers. They viewed Judaism as built on the ideas of rationality and universalism, and envisioned its modern formulation as vastly superior to the other Judaisms of various forms of Orthodoxy. This ennobling message of Judaism could speak to all, Jewish or not. As Imhoff argues, these principles have deep roots in very Western notions of masculinity, and thus Judaism was simultaneously religious, American, and masculine. However, in contrast to American Protestantism of the era, it did not depend on a “muscular” or hyper-masculine vision. Nor did it reject the presence of women or minimize their place in the synagogue.

Nevertheless, the Jewish male body did play a role in the ideology of Jewish masculinity. Imhoff draws on and analyzes a number of interesting examples that reveal the importance of a healthy body. Indeed, it is her close reading and unexpected juxtapositions of movements, cultural analogies, and ideas that are a real strength of this book. For example, the Galveston Movement, which directed Jewish immigrants to live away from cities in the West, offers a well-developed example of how ideas about a healthy male body, physical labor, a connection to the land, and perhaps surprisingly, a modern Judaism were all critical to acculturated Jews’ aspirations for Eastern European Jewish immigrants. The Galveston Movement was brief (1907–1914), but Imhoff effectively and imaginatively demonstrates that it was a paradigm of this vision. Acculturated Jewish leaders who differed on Zionism could agree on the importance of directing immigrant Jews away from the city and to land and the West. Israel Zangwill and Jacob Schiff, among others, envisioned a new American Jewish life on the land for immigrants who needed to be transformed through physical labor into exemplary American men. They worked with a...