Women in Judaism: A Multidisciplinary Journal
http://wjudaism.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/wjudaism
WOMEN IN JUDAISM: A MULTIDISCIPLINARY JOURNAL is an academic, refereed journal published exclusively on the Internet, and devoted to scholarly debate on gender-related issues in Judaism. The ultimate aim of the journal is to promote the reconceptualization of the study of Judaism, by acknowledging and incorporating the roles played by women, and by encouraging the development of alternative research paradigms. Cross-methodological and interdisciplinary, the journal does not promote a fixed ideology, and welcomes a variety of approaches.Women in Judaism: A Multidisciplinary Journalen-USWomen in Judaism: A Multidisciplinary Journal1209-9392All rights reserved. The textual, graphic, audio and audiovisual material is protected by Canadian copyright law and international treaties. You may not copy, distribute, or use these materials except as necessary for your personal, non-commercial use. Any trademarks are the property of their respective owners. This document is provided for informational purposes only. The recipient assumes the entire risk as to the accuracy and the use of this document, which may be copied and distributed subject to the following conditions: 1. All text must be copied without modification and all pages must be included; 2. This document may not be distributed for profit. It is intended for personal use only. Any commercial distribution requires the written approval of the publisher, Women in Judaism, Inc.“I Thought I Could Endure Him But Now I Cannot” – Gendered Sensory Landscapes in MKetubot 7.7-10 and Parallels
http://wjudaism.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/wjudaism/article/view/26330
<p>Four consecutive <em>mishnayot</em>, Mishna Ketubot 7.7-7.10, concerning the rights of men and women to end marriage and betrothal are examined through the lens of two overlapping theoretical frames, anthropology of the senses and legal aesthetics, in the process expanding traditional scholarly methodologies used to examine early rabbinic halakhah and the culture in which it emerged through the use of interdisciplinary theory. Using these theoretical frames, as yet unexploited as far as rabbinic halakhah is concerned, this study highlights the intersection of sensory experience and gender in rabbinic ideologies of marriage, through analysis of the language, rhetoric and formal structure of early rabbinic halakhic texts. </p>Natalie C. Polzer
Copyright (c) 2016 Women in Judaism: A Multidisciplinary Journal
2016-01-312016-01-31121Jewish Women and Positive Time-bound Commandments: Reconsidering the Rabbinic Texts
http://wjudaism.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/wjudaism/article/view/26331
<p>The starting point of this article is that Jewish law defined the difference between the sexes and created a gender hierarchy through a broad generalization (accompanied by a long list of exceptions) which created a link between halakhic obligation, gender and time. It argues that there is no coincidence that the halakhic starting point on this issue depends on a time-bound definition. From its inception, Judaism has dealt with the formation of a uniquely Jewish conception of time, different from that of its surroundings, including both linear and circular characteristics, a concept of time widely expressed already in the Bible. After the destruction of the second Temple this Jewish concept of time had an additional challenge to deal with – the structuring of Jewish time as a central component of Jewish identity, which both preserves and protects it. Women were perceived as both belonging and not belonging, capable and incapable, only partial partners in the great cultural and spiritual Jewish challenge. The definition of women’s partial partnership through time is therefore well suited to the place and importance of time in the Jewish concept of the world in general, and the rabbinical one in particular. </p>Anat Israeli
Copyright (c) 2016 Women in Judaism: A Multidisciplinary Journal
2016-01-312016-01-31121Elderly Swedish Jewish Men and Egalitarianism: A Narrative Study
http://wjudaism.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/wjudaism/article/view/26332
<p>This work is based on interviews with four elderly Jewish men, members of a Swedish congregation who advocate egalitarianism. A narrative analysis found that the participants’ perception of egalitarianism was connected to their own life experiences and to emotionally significant turning points in which the participants became aware how women were excluded. They perceived egalitarianism as a reassurance for a future Jewish life and described the development and preservation of traditions as intermingled rather than as opposed to each other. Gender equality in this study should not be viewed as specifically related to younger congregants and/or women but as connected to life experiences of the individual concerned. </p>Elisabeth Punzi
Copyright (c) 2016 Women in Judaism: A Multidisciplinary Journal
2016-01-312016-01-31121Chava Rosenfarb’s Early Life Writing: “Bergen-Belsen Diary, 1945”
http://wjudaism.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/wjudaism/article/view/26333
This essay analyses Chava Rosenfarb’s Bergen-Belsen diary as a work of life writing that pays meticulous attention to details of voice, craft, and narrative development. Suffering gave her a subject and Rosenfarb turned to the diary as a means of recording and coming to terms with a life irrevocably altered by tremendous loss. That artistry shaped a work produced in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust confirms that Rosenfarb was first and always a writer. Moreover, that her writerly persona—not her actual person—emerged intact and mature from the unmitigated trauma of the death camp is evidence that writing was a source of solace and hope that helped carry her through to survival.Ruth Panofsky
Copyright (c) 2016 Women in Judaism: A Multidisciplinary Journal
2016-01-312016-01-31121Home and the Female Scholar: Re-visiting the Salamans’ Archives
http://wjudaism.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/wjudaism/article/view/26334
It took me just one month in the Salaman archives of Cambridge University Library to accumulate hundreds of digital images relating to the life of a female Hebrew scholar born at the fin de siecle, Nina Salaman, a Sephardic Jew of rare beauty who died young. It has taken several years to revisit and analyse the resonance I experienced at that time. In reading the Salamans’ lives I felt like I had fallen among interesting friends and I wanted to enter the rich diversity of their artistic and scholarly lives. The sheer volume of material in the archives attracts several historians, and that led me to question why I was working beyond my own scope and practice. The Salamans had deep roots in England. Their intellectual networks dipped into a dozen disciplines, touching many lives, questioning greater minds, gathering grass roots support for causes that were feminist, Zionist, and often far to the left. They shared my ancestors’ ethnicity and even attended the same synagogue in London, but the similarity ends there. One branch of my family has no recorded legacy, as though all our creativity sprang up spontaneously. The Salamans’ writing is often evocative auto ethnography, transparent and poignant, particularly the letters and unpublished memoir of patriarch Dr. Redcliffe N. Salaman and the books and memoirs of his daughter-in-law, Esther Polianowski. Nina Salaman’s heart beat is in her translations of medieval poetry from the tragedy of the Arabic-Spanish period (S. Litman, 1957). What interested me was the way Nina’s Jewish spirituality mapped out family life, education and expectations. At a time when my own family had lost one another through the death of my grandmother aged just 33, the Salamans were consolidating around the thing we denied: Jewishness. Yet both Redcliffe Salaman and Esther Polianowski were agnostic as were so many others in the family, and their passion for Zion was a cultural and political yearning. In returning to explore the personal lives of the Salamans I constructed a Foucault’s genealogy of family and home itself, to explore its hegemonic power and the cost and beauty of its perpetuation. In this work I regard myself as a Foucauldian Detective discovering the family values of my own lost tribe.Ann Lazarsfeld-Jensen
Copyright (c) 2016 Women in Judaism: A Multidisciplinary Journal
2016-01-312016-01-31121Chalmers, Beverly. Birth, Sex and Abuse: Women’s Voices Under Nazi Rule. Surrey, UK: Grosvenor House Publishing Ltd., 2015
http://wjudaism.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/wjudaism/article/view/26336
Rachel E. Silverman
Copyright (c) 2016 Women in Judaism: A Multidisciplinary Journal
2016-01-312016-01-31121Gindin, Thamar E. The Scroll of Esther: Behind the Mask (Megillat Ester: Me-’ahorei ha-masekhah), Zeresh Publications, 2015.
http://wjudaism.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/wjudaism/article/view/26337
Rachel Adelman
Copyright (c) 2016 Women in Judaism: A Multidisciplinary Journal
2016-01-312016-01-31121Dunlap, Annette B. The Gambler’s Daughter: A Personal and Social History. Albany, NY: Excelsior Editions, 2012.
http://wjudaism.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/wjudaism/article/view/26338
Jennifer Lander
Copyright (c) 2016 Women in Judaism: A Multidisciplinary Journal
2016-01-312016-01-31121Goodman, Pearl. Peril: From Jackboots to Jack Benny. Dundas, Ontario: Bridgeross Communications, 2012.
http://wjudaism.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/wjudaism/article/view/26339
Susan Landau-Chark
Copyright (c) 2016 Women in Judaism: A Multidisciplinary Journal
2016-01-312016-01-31121Abraham-Klein, Dahlia. Spiritual Kneading Through the Jewish Months: Building the Sacred through Challah. [n.p.] Shamashi Press, 2015. PDF.
http://wjudaism.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/wjudaism/article/view/26340
Rebecca K. Scheckler
Copyright (c) 2016 Women in Judaism: A Multidisciplinary Journal
2016-01-312016-01-31121Zarchi, Nurit. In Her Shadow. Tel-Aviv: Miscal – Yediot Ahronoth Books and Chemed Books, 2013. [Hebrew]
http://wjudaism.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/wjudaism/article/view/26341
Nitza Keren
Copyright (c) 2016 Women in Judaism: A Multidisciplinary Journal
2016-01-312016-01-31121Govrin, Michal. Love on the Shore, A Novel. Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2013. [Hebrew].
http://wjudaism.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/wjudaism/article/view/26342
Nitza Keren
Copyright (c) 2016 Women in Judaism: A Multidisciplinary Journal
2016-01-312016-01-31121Anton, Maggie. Rav Hisda’s Daughter, Book 1: Apprentice: a Novel of Love, the Talmud, and Sorcery. New York: Plume, 2012.
http://wjudaism.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/wjudaism/article/view/26343
David B. Levy
Copyright (c) 2016 Women in Judaism: A Multidisciplinary Journal
2016-01-312016-01-31121Gillis-Carlebach, Miriam. “Each Child is My Only One: Lotte Carlebach-Preuss, The Portrait of a Mother and Rabbi’s wife.” Translated by Dorothea Shefer Vanson. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2014.
http://wjudaism.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/wjudaism/article/view/26344
Beverley Chalmers
Copyright (c) 2016 Women in Judaism: A Multidisciplinary Journal
2016-01-312016-01-31121Moskowitz, Nathan. Kuzmino Chronicles: Memoirs of Teenage Holocaust Survival (Kindle Edition), 2015. E-book.
http://wjudaism.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/wjudaism/article/view/26345
Merle Carrus
Copyright (c) 2016 Women in Judaism: A Multidisciplinary Journal
2016-01-312016-01-31121The Fevered World: A Poetry Review Essay
http://wjudaism.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/wjudaism/article/view/26346
This poetry review covers selected poems from eight collections of poetry.Edith Covensky
Copyright (c) 2016 Women in Judaism: A Multidisciplinary Journal
2016-01-312016-01-31121Dreaming of Mashiach
http://wjudaism.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/wjudaism/article/view/26347
Ricky Rapoport Friesem
Copyright (c) 2016 Women in Judaism: A Multidisciplinary Journal
2016-01-312016-01-31121