Women and Gender, Past and Present: A Jewish Studies Story

Abstract

When it comes to gender equality, Jewish Studies has a long way to go. All-male conferences, overwhelmingly male editorial boards, sexist condescension, and implicit bias still plague the field. It is still possible to publish an article that ignores women or a book that implies that women had no substantive role in the making of Jewish history. But that does not mean that the field has gone untouched by feminist scholarship—far from it. In addition to calling for inclusive representation at conferences and in publications, feminist scholarship has intellectual lessons for Jewish Studies too. The field has learned some of these, but others it has learned only incompletely or not at all. I see the fields of women's and gender studies as two of the intellectual legacies of feminist studies, and scholarship in these fields has brought insights to academic disciplines across the field of Jewish Studies—to name just a few, that women play crucial roles in historical change and development; that masculinity and femininity are not essences but rather regulatory ideals constructed by people and cultures; that ideas about gender structure social systems even beyond the presence of women or men; and that men have gender too, which means that men and masculinity should be studied with respect to the construction of gender.