To appeal to both investors and contemporary audiences, many digital streaming TV showrunners revisit a familiar past yet implant anachronistic elements-especially popular feminist characters, plotlines, dialogue, and themes-to make their work more inclusive. Amy Sherman-Palladino's fictional Amazon Prime Video series The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (2017-2023) focuses on the standup comedy career of Jewish American Miriam (Midge) Maisel and her unlikely friendship with her manager, Susie Myerson. The show, set mainly in Manhattan in the late 1950s and early 1960s, incorporates traditional tropes of Jewish humor to create a nostalgic and fantastical vision of Jewish American life. Sherman-Palladino's dependence on retro aesthetics, however, ultimately promotes popular misogyny. The program's use of a transmedia marketing campaign to promote the show also commodifies Jewish humor, ritual and tradition. Retro aesthetics and transmedia marketing impose limitations on inclusive content in revisionist histories, a trend that extends well beyond this particular show.
In the context of increasing attacks against reproductive rights and religious freedom, the National Council of Jewish Women (NCJW) launched the Rabbis for Repro campaign, which currently includes over 1,500 Jewish clergy who have signed a pledge to advocate for reproductive health, rights and justice in the United States. Drawing on Katie Watson's framework of masterplots and counternarratives in U. S. abortion discourses, this article analyzes the way Rabbis for Repro challenges American masterplots about religious opposition to abortion with counter-narratives about Jewish support for abortion rights. On the one hand, as they draw on a collection of Jewish texts to inform their position on abortion, they uphold classical religious authority over abortion decisions. On the other, they maintain a woman's authority over her body by drawing on abortion storytelling, one of the foundational elements of feminist activism.
Abstract: This paper explores the intersection of Jewish identity, feminism and reproductive justice in film, using four case studies of films from the past fifty years that feature Jewish characters/storylines and/or are the product of Jewish writers, directors or actors and that foreground abortion, choice, female reproductive rights and bodily autonomy as issues that "normal," relatable, successful women experience. Taken together, these films present an intersection of Jewish identity, American politics, gender and popular culture, ultimately challenging viewers to reframe their own understanding of abortion through a Jewish feminist lens and demonstrating the role that popular culture has in both shaping and reflecting social values.
Abstract: Religious Jewish-Israeli surrogates embody a double legal consciousness as they endeavor to navigate two bodies of law simultaneously: the Israeli Surrogacy Law, which regulates the surrogacy agreement, and Jewish law—halakhah—which obligates them to follow religious commandments. Legal consciousness is shaped within local cultures and molds not only how people think about law—their ideas and opinions—but also what they do; in the words of Susan Silbey, it is "a type of social practice, in the sense that it reflects and forms social structures." Drawing on narrative interviews with twenty-five Orthodox Jewish-Israeli women who signed fully legal surrogacy agreements to carry babies as gestational surrogates in accordance with the Israeli Surrogacy Law, we suggest that Orthodox surrogates encounter particular dilemmas during surrogacy stemming from their double legal consciousness. Specifically, we address their dilemmas relating to the observance of religious fasts, using the phone on the Sabbath to notify the intended parents that they should come to the hospital, condom use during surrogacy in light of the prohibition of "wasted seed," menstrual impurity during embryo transfer attempts, and embryo reduction and termination of pregnancy. We delineate the different positions women take when the civil agreement imposes obligations that contradict their religious obligations.
This Article outlines a historiography of the topic of medical violence against women in Israeli literature. It suggests three waves of writing on the subject and focuses mainly on the third, a contemporary wave centering on fertility. The first wave includes works by Amalia Kahana-Carmon and Eda Zoritte, among the first women writers of the state generation, who wrote local modernist versions of anti-psychiatry fiction, emphasizing the consciousness of the characters. The second wave is that of the generation of postmodern writers, including works by Lea Aini, Orly Castel-Bloom and Ronit Matalon, who continue to focus on the total institution, but parodically, emphasizing the intersections between medical violence and marginalized social and ethnic groups. The third wave belongs to a generation of contemporary writers who are no longer concerned with the total institution, but rather describe medical violence that takes place in the community, during fertility treatments, fertility preservation and births. Their works in what is defined here as the "mining women genre" are characterized by grotesque realism. This mimetic genre does not draw the reader to doubt the reality of the narrative but allows her to be a partner in resisting the subject's feelings of "medical gaslighting," rooted in the body. The reader becomes a witness to the heroine's story and helps her overcome intertwined feelings of guilt, shame and alienation from the body.
In Mishnah Yevamot 6:6 and in the Babylonian Talmud, Yevamot 65b-66a, we find the rabbis wrestling with who is commanded to have children and what this commandment entails. The dominant rabbinic position, embraced by the Bavli and later halakhists, is that only men are commanded to reproduce, an exclusion that raises important questions: Why construct a law that commands only men? What does this say about how the rabbis understood commandedness and the relationship between law, blessing and gender? This article explores the tensions that arise within the Bavli's male-centered legal discourse when women are excluded from a commandment that cannot be fulfilled without them. Several case studies found in the talmudic material reveal that exclusions offer a productive opening for investigating the ways that reproduction was (and continues to be) a legally fraught issue.
Abstract: Dr. Henry Morgentaler was a Holocaust survivor whose civil disobedience, in conjunction with the feminist pro-choice movements, was at the heart of the successful campaign to overturn Canada's abortion law. Throughout decades of struggle, he was the subject of antisemitic invective that commingled Holocaust denial and blood libels against Jewish abortion providers. This article traces the role of antisemitism in opposition to the struggle for abortion rights in Canada and considers how both Morgentaler and his critics invoked the lessons of the Holocaust to justify their advocacy.
This paper is based on a critical narrative reading of Israeli rabbinical court rulings issued between the years 2015 and 2023 that deal with constructing grounds for divorce based on spousal physical violence. It investigates fundamental gendered assumptions and values that underlie the rulings, and how gender is established in legal-halakhic texts. We focus on a feminist epistemological critique of the methods of knowledge production and interpretation in rabbinical courts. Knowledge is shaped by the backdrop of social power relations and thus tends to overlook the voices and life experiences of marginalized populations who did not take part in its construction, such as women. Our narrative reading demonstrates how rabbinical court rulings do not take into account the real-world dynamics of domestic violence, relying instead on unfounded assumptions. As a result, women survivors of domestic abuse face systemic barriers to achieving justice in rabbinical courts.
Beginning in the early twentieth century, Jewish-American women who were members of Zionist women's organizations traveled to Palestine to assist in their respective fields. Some intended to introduce American methods in professions perceived as feminine in the United States, such as teaching, nursing and librarianship. This article focuses on the impact of American librarians on the development of libraries and librarianship in the Yishuv (the organized modern Jewish community in Palestine) and the State of Israel from 1920 to 1975, in the context of the contentious clash between the American method of librarianship and the central European method, commonly known as the German method, used in the Yishuv and the early state. The focus of my study is Sophie Udin, an influential American librarian whose life story is intertwined with the history both of the American Jewish community and of the State of Israel.
Abstract: In order to be eligible for a marriage or divorce in Israel, one must meet the requirements of the relevant religious institution—which, for Jews, whether or not they are religiously observant, is the Rabbinical Court system. Although both men and women are equally required to prove their Jewish status within this system, the question of "who is a Jew" is really a question of "who is a Jewish woman," since, according to rabbinic law, Judaism is passed from a mother to her children. In recent years, the Israeli religious establishment's growing requirements for "proof of Judaism," especially towards FSU immigrants and their descendants, has led to media attention, social protest and petitions to the civil courts, raising legal questions regarding the authority of the Rabbinical Courts when they conduct investigations into Jewish status and the extent of private information the court can use as part of such an investigation. Investigations into Jewish status take place mostly at lifecycle events, such as marriage and divorce. The verdict is given by an all-male Rabbinical Court, yet the verdict impacts women more than men, because of the implications for their offspring and for some rights in the case of a Jewish divorce. Women in general, and women whose Jewish identity is in doubt in particular, do not belong to the hegemony that controls the religious establishment. This article will aim to understand the jurisprudence of Israel's rabbinical courts on this issue and its implications for women. After reviewing when proof of Judaism is required by the rabbinical court, with examples of Rabbinical Court rulings on this issue that affect women, it will strive to understand how a gender analysis and feminist perspective could impact on the age-old question of "who is a Jew" for matters of "proof of Judaism."
Jews were excluded from the common (Christian) poor relief in Lutheran Sweden until 1899. The law stated that the Jewish communities had to provide for their own poor. One recipient of poor relief was Rachel Marcus, n & eacute;e Raphael (1803-1849). Neither her nor her husband's businesses were able to provide for their family. I examine the nineteen letters she wrote to the directors of the community, seeking relief. As a mother responsible for the moral upbringing of her children, with a husband unable to provide and thus failing in his gender role as breadwinner, Rachel Marcus reflects the ideal poor relief recipient in the view of Swedish society at the time. This article explores her letters and shows how she worked tirelessly to provide for her family, thus providing insight into gendered ideals and the relationship between an impoverished individual and her community's poor relief.
Abstract: Today, in Israel, state actors glean information on Israeli Jewish citizens and centralize that information in a computerized database; they cross-examine citizens about their beliefs, religious habits and sexual activity; they target new immigrants, requiring them to prove that they are Jewish; and they blacklist persons as ineligible to marry, including children whom they suspect were born of kinship relations deemed illicit according to biblical law (henceforth: mamzer , pl. mamzerim ). All this un-civil activity operates under the aegis of the state's rabbinical courts and Chief Rabbinate and functions way beyond the boundaries of a courtroom, forming a complex extrajudicial, semi-prosecutorial state apparatus that violates principles of equality, solidarity, liberty and fairness—harming women in particular and Israeli society in general. Because of the size and bureaucratic nature of this apparatus and how it makes use of state power to dominate, invade and sometimes even destroy the private lives of individuals, I refer to it as the "Israeli Inquisition," a word I use purposefully in order to "scandalize" it and underscore the need for tikkun olam , civil repair, as I will discuss in the Conclusion. And while complications from the entanglement of state and religion in Israel certainly were predictable from the outset, I posit, with a tongue-in-cheek nod to Monty Python, that this inquisition was not anticipated. No one expected it. The thinkers and politicians who legitimated and institutionalized the Chief Rabbinate and its courts at the beginning of the state did not and could not have foreseen the girth and breadth of the mechanisms that have flourished since the year 2000. This paper is about the growing power of Israel's Chief Rabbinate and rabbinical courts, and how the state's secular Supreme Court has been complicit in this phenomenon. It is about a grave episode wherein Israel society has not been able to sustain moral outrage, and wherein its regulatory institutions have not only failed to act and to execute badly needed civil repairs, but have sadly exacerbated egregious, un-civil practices.
What is halakhah? Why does it matter to modern Jewish discourse-feminist, queer or otherwise? What challenges does it pose to us, and how should we go about addressing them? This essay is addressed to those of us for whom halakhah, however understood and defined, remains a salient component of our Judaism and Jewish living, and to those who view the grip of halakhah on Jewish practices and beliefs as considerable enough (even in "non-halakhic" spaces) that it must be confronted (and reformed). Robert Cover's works, and most particularly his essay "Nomos and Narrative," have been among the most recurring and productive resources to which scholars engaged in seeking an expression of halakhah that is feminist and queer-affirming have turned. In the main part of this article, I shall survey the value and uses of Cover's work for a number of thinkers, including Rachel Adler, Gordon Tucker, Laynie Soloman and Russel G. Pearce of the Trans Halakhah Project, Tamar Ross, Ronit Irshai and Tanya Zion-Waldoks. In the conclusion, I shall note some of the challenges that may follow, including those posed (explicitly and implicitly) by the works considered herein to each other.
Abstract: Schlomith Flaum, a kindergarten teacher in the early days of the Yishuv, traveled the world, met with celebrities, wrote, drew, lectured, and published articles and books. Unconventional in her ambitions and pursuits, she remained misunderstood and ridiculed throughout her life. Flaum’s othering found intense expression in Truda Schein, a character in Dov Kimhi’s 1934 novel On the Seven Seas . Focusing on the characterization of Flaum’s literary double, I take my clues from the novel’s human color palette and its account of Truda’s use of photography to argue that the narrative’s excessive ridicule of her character serves to counter what has been considered Kimhi’s position on the power of the Zionist ethos inculcated into the sabra generation in the Land of Israel. Truda’s wanderlust and colorful femininity leave an indelible mark on the novel’s male sabra characters, challenging what is portrayed as their desire to take hold and establish roots in the Land.
Abstract: This essay focuses on the different editions of one of the first educational Siddurim (prayerbooks) published in Eretz Israel during the British Mandate period. The Siddur was created and edited by Annie Landau (1873–1945), longtime headmistress of the Evelina de Rothschild School for Girls, and a close study of these early editions reveals that, in editing them, Landau made meaningful decisions regarding content, language, pedagogy and of course gender: Which parts of the daily prayers would be recited at school, and which would be left out? How should the Siddur reflect the feminine identity of its users? And to what extent should it reflect her own religious values? Examining the slight yet meaningful differences between the school’s first three Siddurim (as well as a fourth one, published after Landau’s death) sheds light on Landau’s character as a headmistress and editor, but also on the unique nature of the school she led and the challenges of creating regular prayers for Jewish girls in Mandatory Jerusalem. Finally, Landau’s initiative is examined in comparison to a number of other educational Siddurim published in Eretz Israel during this period, which differed from her own in more than one respect.
Malke Berlant, one of three Jewish professional midwives active in Vilna in the first half of the nineteenth century who left their mark on the Jewish public life of that period, was the author of Di gliklikhe mutter (Vilna 1836), the first modern Yiddish printed guidebook for pregnant women, mothers of newborns and young children. This article explores the general historical and cultural background and context in which the guidebook was authored and published. It presents the phenomenon of academic institutions (mainly in Vilna) open to Jewish women at this early stage, with the intention of training qualified midwives. Berlant's book includes new insights regarding pregnancy, childbirth, baby care and child-raising. Some of these rules negated widely accepted norms and traditions. The main purpose of the book was to expose the lay female reader to the advantages of modern medicine and persuade her to avoid the traditional "experts" and their healing methods.
This article examines the attitude toward gender affirmation surgeries expressed in a particular work of Jewish law (halakhah), Dor tahpukhot (A generation of radical change, 2004) by Idan Ben-Efrayim, an ultra-Orthodox rabbi of Sephardi origin. By following the hermeneutical maneuvers used by the author to accept transgender people, post factum, into the religious community, our against-the-grain reading of Dor tahpukhot reveals that the Orthodox halakhic approach is more complex and empathetic than might be expected. In our reading, Dor tahpukhot reinforces the notions that genitals are not the essential sign of gender, that the classification of persons as of one gender or another does not always work, and that the concept of gender in religious tradition is a more flexible concept than has commonly been thought. This analysis contributes to the growing field of transfeminist religious studies as well as to scholarship on Jewish religious feminism, by demonstrating that where there is a rabbinic will, gender essentialism can be overlooked.
