Mothers in the Jewish Cultural Imagination ed. by Marjorie Lehman, Jane L. Kanarek, and Simon Bronner (review)

Mothers in the Jewish Cultural Imagination, the fifth volume of Jewish Cultural Studies by the Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, fills a scholarly void well beyond this reviewer’s imagination. An interdisciplinary collection of chapters, Mothers in the Jewish Cultural Imagination is an impressive anthology that spans time, place, voice, perspective, relationships, genres, fiction and nonfiction, texts, and images to produce a work that offers both breadth and depth. In short: it brings multiple worlds in conversation with each other. According to editors Marjorie Lehman, Jane L. Kanarek, and Simon Bronner, the collective endeavor sought to “enhance the visibility of mothers and call attention to them as an analytic category essential for narrating Jewishness.” (vii) As such, and at this juncture in contemporary life, this book represents a unique and acutely relevant work. Although the volume as a whole is best suited for graduate students and advanced readers, the dedicated educator could adopt select chapters in an undergraduate course and the students would benefit enormously from being introduced to the innovative analyses therein.

The authors succeed at upending much of what scholars thought we knew about mothers, mothering, and motherhood while simultaneously looking toward a future that includes change from within. Jewish mothers have a long history of being the focus of many stereotypes and the butt of many jokes. Without a doubt, they are lampooned to an extent and in ways that no other individual perhaps of any ethnic or religious background has endured during the history of humankind. The self-sacrificing immigrant Yiddishe Mama may have earned some of her reputation, but as Joyce Antler already proved in You Never Call, You Never Write, there is much more to her than meets the eye. Paula Hyman, z”l, complicated the simplistic narratives earlier in Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History. Now we are fortunate to have seventeen authors and their capable editors to thank for putting a new array of tints on the artist’s palette that takes seriously Jewish maternal portraiture. Collectively they teach an important lesson: rather than one cultural icon of Jewishness there are, in fact, many.

Shaped by second-wave feminist scholarship, the book’s premise that culture transcends natural givens and its application to Jewish mothers is ground breaking. This framework enables the volume to cast a wide net and reel in much more dynamic and multidimensional representations of a figure that had been relegated to family life. Now, however, the Jewish mother can be understood as operating at the very heart of Judaism, Jewish culture, and transmission of Jewish identity rather than as merely an accessory to them. The organized parts, “Idealized Mothers,” “Constructions and Contestations of Mothers,” “Activist Mothers,” “Re-embodying Mothers,” and “Recasting Mothers” move the reader along from how ideas about Jewish mothers and motherhood are drawn and redrawn to cast Jewish women in particular ways as wives and/or mothers. The result is both a reification of certain ideals, marriage, and procreation, and at the same time a reinterpretation that reclaims such elemental things for Jewish continuity as the Hebrew language and Torah.

The scope of this particular volume is truly impressive. Beginning with the idealization of Jewish motherhood in children’s books as a form of early-childhood education about gender roles in books that won the Sydney Taylor Award, to nineteenth-century Hungarian Neolog women’s prayer books in which women’s responsibility for young children is actually for the entire Jewish people, and on to how the binary associations of mother-bread and father-meat served as a metaphor for the Afghani Jewish family in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. Analysis of some talmudic sources yield new insights about the high esteem for mothers relative to women more generally by sages in Ottoman Jewish society. A clustering of rabbinic narratives yields complexity...