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Reviewed by:
  • Jews and Shoes
  • Eric K. Silverman
Jews and Shoes, edited by Edna Nahshon. Oxford: Berg Press, 2008. 226 pp. $34.95.

This eclectic volume lives up to its wonderful alliterative and rhyming title. At first blush, the topic may seem utterly obscure, if not downright bizarre. Some postmodern silliness! But I feel confident in stating that all readers will [End Page 219] find something insightful and relevant in this collection which—dare I say it, treads on new intellectual territory.

Edna Nahshon’s opening chapter, “Jews and Shoes,” broadly surveys shoes throughout Jewish history. She discusses shoes as physical objects and also as metaphors; shoes worn, and shoes removed, hurled, and destroyed; erotic shoes and artistic shoes; the shoemaker as a Jewish profession; and shoes that stand as mute memorials to the Holocaust. Neither the Introduction nor any essay in the volume establishes a conceptual framework, or engages seriously contemporary theoretical debates. Hence, the book is best read as a series of case-studies that, as in all good work in cultural studies, illuminate significant meanings in what otherwise passes unnoticed.

In “The Biblical Shoe: Eschewing Footwear: The Call of Moses as Biblical Archetype,” Ora Horn Prouser discuss Ancient Israelite shoes and barefootedness— alas, only in five disappointing pages that cite less than a dozen scholarly references. She straightforwardly traces the paradigmatic instance of biblical shoelessness to the divine command to Moses before the burning bush.

Catherine Hezser’s chapter, “The Halitzah Shoe: Between Female Subjugation and Symbolic Emasculation,” focuses on a long-vexing biblical gesture that follows upon a man’s refusal to fulfill his leviratic duty and inseminate a deceased brother’s childless widow. Thus snubbed, the widow removes the brother-in-law’s shoe, expectorates in his face, and utters a brief statement. Hezser surveys select interpretations of this gesture, but oddly offers no analysis herself. She then reviews rabbinic thought on the rite and its performance in medieval and modern society, but not the continuation of the ceremony in some Orthodox communities today.

Rivka Parchiack’s fascinating, creative essay on “The Tombstone Shoe: Shoe-Shaped Tombstones in Jewish Cemeteries in the Ukraine” probes a funerary enigma that will surely be as new to many readers as it was for me. These shoe-shaped tombstones first appeared in the mid-nineteenth century, and then faded in the 1980s. Parchiack was unable to locate any substantive documents on this unique practice. She thus offers the intriguing and plausible thesis that these tombstones materialized a moment of heightened messianism by evoking Exodus 12:11, when the Israelites were ordered to pull on their shoes in readiness for redemption. Alternatively, Parchiack anchors the funerary sculptures to the Hasidic-Kabbalistic notion that metaphoric shoes protect the deceased from demons and pollution.

Orna Ben-Meir’s essay on “The Israeli Shoe: Biblical Sandals and Native Israeli Identity” is equally terrific. As a named category, “biblical sandals” emerged at the time of World War II. But Ben-Meir traces the history of this “invented tradition” to early Zionist ideology, specifically, the wider aims of [End Page 220] the Second Aliyah. Sandals allowed Jews symbolically and physically to walk upon and thus to reclaim the land. The sandals, too, conjured proletarian labor and agrarian asceticism, and so allowed rural Jews to dress against the urban bourgeoisie. Ben-Meir also contextualizes the Israeli sandal in early twentieth-century Zionist dress codes and gender.

In “The Shtetl Shoe: How to Make a Shoe,” an elderly father, Mayer Kirshenblatt, reminisces to his daughter, the well-known scholar Barbara Kirshenblat-Gimblett, about shoes and shoemaking—really, about a bitter-sweet family history—before the Shoah. Robert A. Rothstein’s essay, “The Folkloristic Shoe: Shoes and Shoemakers in Yiddish Language and Folklore,” focuses on Yiddish vocabulary, innuendo, proverbs, and metaphors.

Jeffrey Feldman’s compelling essay, “The Holocaust Shoe: Untying Memory: Shoes as Holocaust Memorial Experience,” elegantly explores the different roles of shoes in Holocaust memorials and discourses—as evidence, commemoration, and metaphor—and their emotional evocations and entanglements. Feldman deftly weaves emotional resonance with scholarly analysis. I was pleased to see that Feldman addressed a wider body of scholarship, including the Eyes Wide Open memorial of the...

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