Sylvia Barack Fishman

Gender in American Jewish Life

Diverse communities construct gender roles—the complex fabric of behaviors, attitudes, and expectations that societies weave around biological sexual differences—in different ways, producing widely varying ideas of normative “maleness” and “femaleness” and what constitutes a “family.” Changes in gender role construction are often precipitated by historical, economic, social, and political changes (Scott 1988). Evolving—and sometimes reversed—assumptions about maleness and femaleness have transformed many aspects of American—and American Jewish—religious life and culture in an American environment characterized by increasingly porous boundaries in general (Amato and Booth 1997). Researchers have examined these transformations in religions, relationships, families, and American society (Williams 2003, pp. 470–487) using frameworks such as gender theory, social scientific theories about marriage, families and sexuality, rational choice theory, signaling and economic theories, and even evolutionary biology. Few if any, however, have “connected the dots” and examined critical intersections between gendered changes in Jewish religious culture and gendered changes in Jewish personal and familial patterns.

Don’t Underestimate the Hybridity of America’s Orthodox Jews

This chapter discusses the ways in which American Orthodox Jews, particularly the Modern Orthodox, share many characteristics with their non-Orthodox co-religionists. For example, while nearly all Haredi Jews are married by age 29 and 70 % of Modern Orthodox by that age, nearly one-third of them remain single in their 30s and 40s, a pattern that more resembles the non-Orthodox population.

Integrating Jewish and Feminist Educational Goals

Recent research has emphasized the central role of Jewish education in forming and maintaining a strong Jewish identity. This essay examines several approaches which integrate intensive Jewish education and feminist goals. While focusing upon specific curricular objectives—women in Jewish history and female biblical figures—, the essay also stresses the use of feminist analysis and contemporary womens scholarship as means to a more gender-equal Jewish educational environment. The challlenges of merging Jewish and feminist educational aims are thus addressed.

Triple play: Deconstructing jewish lives

Following the lead and example of Marshall Sklare, this paper uses the tools of quantitative and qualitative social science analysis along with literary analysis to explore changing behaviors and attitudes of Jewish women, and manifestations of connectedness to and alienation from Judaism, the Jewish people, and Jewish institutions among them.