Jewish Studies, Gender, and the Performance of Pedagogy

Review Essays REVIEW ESSAYS Jewish Studies, Gender, and the Performance of Pedagogy by Moshe Re'em University of Wisconsin-Madison 135 The Jewish Women's Studies Guide, compiled by Sue Levi Elwell. 2nd ed. New York: Biblio Press, 1987. 146 pp. $8.00 (P). Gender and Jewish Studies: A Curriculum Guide, edited by Judith R. Baskin and Shelly Tenenbaum. New York: Biblio Press, 1994. 168 pp. $12.95 (P). Pedagogy: The Question of Impersonation, edited by Jane Gallop. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. 176 pp. $24.95 (c); $12.95 (P). In Bitter Milk: Women and Teaching (1988) Madeleine R. Grumet raises a question that has been taken seriously by teachers in Jewish Women's Studies: "What would thinking back through our mothers mean to us, we the women who educate?" (p. 191). Two recent collections of syllabi in Jewish Women's Studies which range from undergraduate and graduate courses to adult and continuing education courses provide the reader with a variety of approaches to the study of gender and Jewish studies. The first to be published chronologically, TheJewish Women's Studies Guide, Second Edition-1987, compiled by Sue Levi Elwell, organizes eighteen different syllabi submitted by male and female teachers under three headings: University Courses in Jewish Women's Studies, Integrating Jewish Women's Studies into the University Curriculum, and Adult and Continuing Education Courses. The second and more recent bibliographical volume is Gender andJewish Studies: A Curriculum Guide, edited by Judith R. Baskin and Shelly Tenenbaum. This book arranges its thirty-seven syllabi according to subject categories such as Bible and Rabbinics, General History, Women in Jewish History, Women and Religion, literature, and 136 SHOFAR Fall 1995 Vol. 14, No.1 Social·Science. In addition, Gender and Jewish Studies: A Curriculum Guide includes three essays which focus more specifically on the method of teaching in an adult education setting. Here we learn more about how the "audience" attending adult education courses and women's study groups differs from other academic settings, the details of how to organize a women's study group, and suggestions for a more aesthetic, creative, and multicultural way of presenting material. Together these two books serve as excellent bibliographical tools for teachers wishing to organize courses on Women and Jewish Studies in a number of different settings: undergraduate, graduate, continuing education, and informal education. But while providing teachers and students with much-needed material for courses on Women and Jewish Studies, what these collections of syllabi lack is an approach to Jewish Studies that is informed by feminist pedagogy. While these resources provide valuable content for teachers wishing to include the voices of women who have been historically silenced, with the exception of the last twelve pages of Gender andJewish Studies: A Curriculum Guide, they fail to address the important issue of pedagogy. How courses on Women and Jewish Studies are taught is as important as what they contain. Jewish studies needs to draw on and struggle over the important pedagogical issues raised in recent years by postmodern and feminist studies. One recent work that merits the attention of teachers and students in Women and Jewish Studies is Pedagogy: The Question ofImpersonation, edited by Jane Gallop. Although the list of educational work that is informed by postmodern and feminist theory is quite long, few have raised the question of how teaching as performance functions in the classroom. Fewer still have addressed the sensitive issue of the relationship between students and teachers. What difference does the identity of the teacher and student make in the context of the classroom? In what way does the personal itself mask the constructed nature of classroom actors? Can one"put on" a race, a sex, or an ethnicity as part of the performance of pedagogy? Is there an authentic self that can be brought into the institution or is any talk of "authentic" selfbood merely illusory? Jane Gallop's Pedagogy: The Question ofImpersonation addresses these questions and many mOJ;e. It lays bare the multiple layers of impersonation that are involved in the pedagogical process. Evolving out ofa 1993 conference entitled Pedagogy: The Question of the Personal, the volume opens with David Crane's reflection on how the book...