Esther Fuchs

Images of Women in Holocaust Films

The question of the role of women in Holocaust Studies has been raised in the last decade with increasing eloquence and urgency. This article considers the role of women in Holocaust films. It argues that in numerous major cinematographic representations of the Holocaust (e.g., The Holocaust, Schindlers List, Europa Europa, Shoah) women are portrayed as vicarious victims of the Holocaust. They suffer as the wives and mothers of men who are directly involved in the war as refugees, camp inmates, or resister. Often female characters are marginalized and stereotyped as sexual objects, or as emotional reflectors. They are often ignorant of or indifferent to the political complexity and the threat of the war. This article questions these stereotypes and the ideology that undergirds them.

Feminist Hebrew Literary Criticism: The Political Unconscious

This article charts the basic outlines of my forthcoming collection on the historical and theoretical evolution of feminist Hebrew literary criticism in the last two decades. In this article, I argue that Hebrew feminist criticism, as an emerging field, is motivated by the desire to change the subject, shifting the almost obsessive concern with politics in the conventional sense of the word to discursive and cultural politics, from a concern with the collective and questions of national survival and security to interpersonal politics, and from the public to the private. My argument is that this shift is political. As I argued in my book, Israeli Mythogynies: Women in Contemporary Hebrew Fiction (1987), this shift has the potential to generate an internal re-evaluation of ethical and aesthetic values as well as a post-Zionist critique of national priorities. Hebrew feminist literary critics then question the canonic and ideological priorities of the critical establishment and use gender as a point of departure for critical assessments of various dichotomies that structure the Zionist narrative. Gender thus becomes a point of departure for reading the national canon, and the politics of literary presentation—differently. The shift away from national politics paradoxically leads back to it, but this time the topic is visited critically from both Zionist and post-Zionist perspectives (e.g., Naomi Seidman, Yael Feldman, Iris Parush, Hannah Naveh, Hannan Hever, and Orly Lubin).

Re-Claiming Biblical Women: Feminist (Jewish) Re-Readings of Hebrew Narratives

In the last three decades, biblical feminist scholarship has proliferated in ways that could not have been imagined by the early practitioners of this theory, myself included. Not only have a number of manuscripts, diction aries, reference works, commentaries, and companions been published, but increasingly feminist criticism has become an acceptable, if not normative, approach among several other leading contemporary approaches to the field of Bible Studies. Hardly a female character in the Hebrew Bible has evaded a contemporary interpretation. The proliferation of monographs in the field has further spawned a diversity of approaches and theories adding to the question of gender the analytic categories of class, nation, race, and culture. Critical approaches taking aim at biblical ideologies of ethnocentrism, monotheism, and androcentrism have routinely been questioned and debated by reconstructive and appropriative approaches, influenced largely by femi nist theological readings, notably Womanist, Latina, Lesbian, and Post colonial readings, which often consider biblical women as models of empowerment rather than embodiments of patriarchal thinking. Jewish scholars have been active in the field of biblical studies, though little has been done to elaborate a theoretical articulation of a distinctly Jewish femi nist approach to the Hebrew Bible. These two books may signal an interesting development of a specifically Jewish feminist scholarship on the Hebrew Bible, though neither one of the authors explicitly identifies her reading in such terms. Schneiders book pays special attention to the double meanings of consonantal Hebrew, taking the grammar, syntax, vocabulary, and Masoretic blocking of the Masoretic Text of Genesis?(parashot rather than later sequencing of chapters).

Review of Laura Donaldson and Kwok Pui-Lan (eds.), Postcolonialism, Feminism and Religious Discourse

Esther Fuchs reviews Laura Donaldson and Kwok Pui-Lan (eds.), Postcolonialism, Feminism and Religious Discourse (New York: Routledge, 2002).

Review of Anders Gerdmar, Roots of Theological Anti-Semitism: German Biblical Interpretation and the Jews, from Herder and Semler to Kittel and Bultmann

Esther Fuchs reviews Anders Gerdmar, Roots of Theological Anti-Semitism: German Biblical Interpretation and the Jews, from Herder and Semler to Kittel and Bultmann (Leiden and Boston, 2009).

Review of Anders Gerdmar, Roots of Theological Anti-Semitism: German Biblical Interpretation and the Jews, from Herder and Semler to Kittel and Bultmann: (Leiden and Boston, 2009)

This massive study of German New Testament interpretation, over a period of two hundred years (1750–1950) since the emergence of modern biblical exegesis, explores the shadow side of Christian theology, especially as it was articulated during the Nazi era. Gerdmar links Protestant theological configurations to the historical context and political ideology that consciously and unconsciously motivated influential thinkers whose work continues to influence contemporary scholarship. Gerdmar begins with a definition of anti-Semitism as a distinct racist movement that emerged in Germany in the 19 century, a movement that sought to legitimize the political disenfranchisement of the Jews based on allegations of inferiority. Gerdmar links this modern movement to traditional religious and cultural manifestations of anti-Judaic polemic, or representations of Judaism as a religious system inferior in some sense to Christianity. Each theologian is analysed as a symptom of a particular time and place, and as an agent influencing both religious and secular attitudes toward Jews and Judaism. Three basic and interrelated questions are posed in each specific analysis: How are Jews characterised or stereotyped? How is Jewish historiography described? Does the theologian under discussion legitimise anti Semitic discrimination and oppression? Though he focuses on modern Christian anti-Semitism, Gerdmar concedes that the problem he investigates can be traced to the earliest origins of Christianity: ‘The perspective that I am writing from is that of a Christian exegete, with a pathos to counter anti-Judaism and antiSemitism as the dark companions of Christianity from the time of the Letter to the Romans until today – an anti-Semitism that has not ceased but is evident in old and new forms (p. 20)’. BOOK REVIEWS

Review of J. Cheryl Exum’s Song of Songs: A Commentary

Esther Fuchs reviews J. Cheryl Exum’s Song of Songs: A Commentary (Louisville: Kentucky, 2005).

Love and Violence: Marriage as Metaphor for the Relationship between YHWH and Israel in the Prophetic Books (review)

Shared by the Tetrateuch and the DtrH” (pp. 101–102), a Bibliography (pp. 103–114), and an Index of References (pp. 115–127). The strengths of this study could have been enhanced by more discussion of the nature of the intertextuality Harvey describes. For example, when he says that “Dtr based the Manoah story of Judg. 13 on Genesis 18” (pp. 38– 39), would he describe this relationship as typology, allegory, or something else? Or, would he avoid such compartmentalization? Some may find his psychologizing of Dtr’s “Torah Consciousness” (Chapter 3) to require more controllable defining. Overall, however, Harvey is to be commended for the remarkable clarity with which he writes and explains complex intertextual relationships. It makes this work both accessible to a wide readership while a challenge to the status quo of scholarly opinion on the issues it addresses. The impression with which a reader is left is that the intertextuality he presents is only the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Harvey’s work opens the door for even more comprehensive treatment of this topic to illuminate our understanding of the history and unity of the Tetrateuch, its use in subsequent texts, and what that reveals about various biblical authors’ views of historiography.

On the Margins of Modernism: Decentering Literary Dynamics (review)

Few writers tum sentences around with Ozicks skill, and fewer still can bring Jewish ideas to the equation. All of which makes The Puttermesser Papers a cause for celebration. It is her fIrst book of fIction since The Messiah ofStockholm (1987) and more than fulfIlls the high expectations readers bring to anything Ozick writes. I Sanford Pinsker Department of Humanities Franklin & Marshall College