Gender in Israel - A Field Guide - UW Stroum Center for Jewish Studies

Gender in Israel – A Field Guide

Here’s a roundup of JewDub’s favorite recent media and scholarly publications surrounding the role of religion and gender in Israeli society. For more commentary, see Sarah Zaides‘ post on Israel’s Rosa Parks Moment.

Media:

Israeli’s Facing a Seismic Shift Over Role of Women (New York Times) New York Times’ coverage of the Channa Maayan case. While Professor Maayan “bit her tongue…others have not.”

Lechery, Immodesty, and The Talmud (New York Times Op-Ed) Rabbi Dov Linzer argues that gender segregation actually hyper-sexualizes and objectifies women, and argues that the Talmud “places the responsibility for controlling men’s licentious thoughts about women squarely on the men.”

Exclusion of Women in Israel-Significant Trend? (www.Jewdub.org) University of Washington’s Professor Noam Pianko poses several questions, urging us to be critical consumers of all the available information surrounding the recent events in Israel.

Academic Press:

Being Israeli: The Dynamics of Multiple Citizenship (Gershon Shafir and Yoav Peled) Critical Sociologists Gershon Shafir and Yoav Peled offer an excellent, historically-grounded examination of the Israeli state-building project and the consequences of citizenship and identity among the diverse social groups coming to live in Israel.

Judicial Power and National Politics: Courts and Gender in the Religious-Secular Conflict in Israel (Patricia J. Woods) Professor Patricia J. Woods’ monograph is a legalistic history of the state-religion relationship in Israel after Independence in 1948.

Women in Israel: Race, Gender, and Citizenship (Nahla Abdo-Zubi) An important contribution to the gender/citizenship debate in Israel vis-a-vis a comparative study of Palestinian, Ashkenazi, and Mizrahi women in Israel.

No Room of Their Own: Gender and Nation in Israeli Women’s Fiction (Yael S. Feldman) This study traces the emergence of women’s writing in Israeli public discourse, using a combination of gender and psychological theories. A comprehensive introduction to Israeli female writers and the complex role of gender in Zionist thought.

Women’s Voices:

The Jewish Daily Forward’s Sisterhood Blog check what actual women have to say about these issues and others!

Lilith Magazine “Independent, Jewish, and Frankly Feminist,” and, for the latest conversations on Judaism and gender be sure to follow them on twitter @lillithmagazine

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By Sarah Zaides|2017-09-04T22:43:00-07:00March 10th, 2012|Categories: Israel & Hebrew Studies|Tags: Gender, Israel, Politics, Sarah Zaides|0 Comments

About the Author: Sarah Zaides

Sarah Zaides is a PhD Candidate in the Department of History at the University of Washington. She holds the Charlotte W. Newcombe Fellowship from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, was previously the Stroum and Althea Stroum Graduate Fellow and the Titus Ellison Fellow from the Jackson School of International Studies, and has been a recipient of fellowships from the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s Vidal Sassoon Center, and the US Department of State. She is currently at work on a dissertation titled "Tevye’s Ottoman Daughter: Sephardi and Ashkenazi Jewries in the Shatterzones of Empire 1882-1923," which follows the saga of Russian Jews in Constantinople and Western Anatolia on the eve of Turkish and Soviet statehood. When Sarah isn't writing her dissertation, you can find her chasing vitamin D or working toward her life goal of being able to play (at least) the first movement of each of Beethoven's 32 piano sonatas.