In the last four decades hundreds of books and essays have been published on women, gender, and Jewish Studies. However, much of this scholarship has not been adequately theorized or contextualized. A frequent complaint in Jewish Women’s Studies addresses the lack of dialogue and communication with women’s and gender studies in general. This book considers Jewish Women’s Studies...

In an anthology entitled Judaism Since Gender the editors claim to have inaugurated a new era in Jewish Studies, one that considers gender as a primary category of Jewish identity.1 The editors present their collection as a theoretical breakthrough in Jewish Studies, a field they describe as positivist,...

In this chapter, I will focus on the ways in which the liberal frame of reference has defined, constrained, and limited the transformative potential of Jewish feminist scholarship. This frame, as I discussed in the introduction, is based on what de Lauretis identified...

Jews and Feminism: The Ambivalent Search for Home is the first and so far only book-length attempt to come to theoretical terms with Jewish...

In this chapter I will outline what I consider to be the current masculinist framing of Jewish feminism in what has come to be known as the new Jewish Studies. Unlike disciplinary Jewish Studies scholars, the new scholars acknowledge and even claim feminist positions explicitly, impugn both traditional patriarchal self-privileging...

Gender entered Holocaust studies in its essentialist sense as a reference to (all) “women” in contradistinction to (all) “men.” This meaning dating back to the mid-1980s when the first theoretical articles began to appear was taken for granted by scholars who began to search for differences between the...

androgyny, 131, 138

Esther Fuchs served as assistant professor of Hebrew literature in the Department of Oriental Studies (Hebrew) at the University of Texas at Austin (1979–1985), and as associate and full professor in the Near Eastern Studies and Judaic Studies Department at the University of Arizona in Tucson (1985–2010). She is the author...

Feminist Studies and Sacred Texts makes available innovative and provocative research on the interface of feminist studies and sacred texts. Books in the series are grounded in religious studies perspectives, theories, and methodologies, while engaging with the wide spectrum of feminist studies, including women’s studies, gender studies, sexuality studies, masculinity studies, and...