Literature and Medicine II

6 Works such as Iris Parush’s Reading Jewish Women: Marginality and Modernization in Nineteenth-Century Eastern European Jewish Society,[2]Parush, Iris. Reading Jewish Women: Marginality and Modernization in Nineteenth-Century Eastern European Jewish Society. Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press, published by University Press of New England, 2004. which suggests the sometimes paradoxical ways Jewish women’s reading practices at once isolated and connected them with respect to European societies, and Paula Hyman’s Gender and Assimilation in Modern Judaism: Roles and Representation of Women[3]Hyman, Paula. Gender and Assimilation in Modern Judaism: Roles and Representation of Women. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995., which demonstrates how differences in geography meant significant differences in Jewish women’s relationships with non-Jewish society, capture the wide variety of sometimes contradictory ways in which Jewish women have encountered modernity. Thus a volume such as Gender, Memory, and Judaism that preserves or creates tensions among its essays mirrors its complex and often conflicted subject. But this volume’s unevenness—in terms of article length, tone, clarity of translation, and academic contribution—also becomes its most significant liability. The essays vary widely with respect to the amount of original research and the strength of their interpretations of that research. While many of the authors provide close reading and insightful analysis, others simply recount historical or biographical events without discussion of their meaning in context or importance for other scholarship. The articles also assume widely varying degrees of familiarity with Judaism, gender theory, and Hungarian history. For this reason, although the volume offers some excellent confrontations with issues of Jewish women and history, nonspecialists may have difficulty understanding the relationships among these issues.

7 Another concern lies in the volume’s conflation of the concept “gender” with the concept “women.” Although this does not detract from the information contained in the volume itself, the repetition of the equation “gender = women” can be used to perpetuate the stereotype that only women have gender or that only women should concern themselves with understanding how sexual difference is constructed. Although the authors and editors of the volume certainly do not espouse such a view, the work could nevertheless suggest to a reader without a background in gender studies that gender is an academic topic—or that feminism is a movement—that is solely for and about women.

8 Despite the liabilities of the volume’s uncompromising commitment to diversity and its theoretical language, the editors have created a highly provocative and challenging work. Its diverse authorship and media offer a model for all scholarship that seeks an element of activism.

Notes

• 1) Rosen, Ilana. Hungarian Jewish Women Remember the Holocaust: An Anthology of Life Histories. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2004.
• 2) Parush, Iris. Reading Jewish Women: Marginality and Modernization in Nineteenth-Century Eastern European Jewish Society. Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press, published by University Press of New England, 2004.
• 3) Hyman, Paula. Gender and Assimilation in Modern Judaism: Roles and Representation of Women. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995.