Introduction
Emory’s collection houses a broad range of resources that reflect the multifaceted engagement of Jewish Studies with gender and gender studies. In their historical transformations, Jewish literatures and scholarship developed varying approaches (primarily) to notions of masculinity and (secondarily with) femininity and described and prescribed behaviors that conformed to these notions of gender, while also delineating what constituted transgressions to the social order based on the very definitions of normative gender identities. Since the late nineteenth century, there is an increasing Jewish literary and scholarly interest in topics related to sexual orientation and gender identities gong beyond the purview of traditional Jewish literature. Modern literature, whether religious or secular, addresses Jewish LGBTQIA+ identities, histories, cultures, and religious experiences from ancient times to today across the world. Additionally, it engages with Gender Studies and applies its methods to conduct research on various aspects of Jewish experiences related to gender and sexual orientation. The following small sampling—in separate subdivisions focusing on books, periodicals, and movies pertaining to the study and representation of masculinities, femininities, and LGBTQIA+ identities—illustrates the transforming conceptualization of gender and sexuality and the social constructions of gender roles in texts contributing to Jewish Studies. These include Jewish law’s approach to gender identities and relations, gender in Jewish thought, Jewish gendered and gender politics, discussed in various genres, such as autobiographical works, scholarly and literary writings, and more.
This selection aims to raise interest and offer insights into the rich collection of resources accessible in the library and online.
The Contemporary Torah by ISBN: 0827610424Publication Date: 2010-01-01Offers readers new perspectives on the role gender plays in Bible translation This adaptation of the JPS translation of the Torah (1962) will appeal to readers who are interested in a historically based picture of social gender roles in the Bible as well as those who have become accustomed to gender-sensitive English in other aspects of their lives. Many contemporary Bible scholars contend that the Bible's original audience understood that the references to God as male simply reflected gendered social roles at the time. However, evidence for this implicit assumption is ambiguous. Accordingly, in preparing this new edition, the editors sought language that was more sensitive to gender nuances, to reflect more accurately the perceptions of the original Bible readers. In places where the ancient audience probably would not have construed gender as pertinent to the text's plain sense, the editors changed words into gender-neutral terms; where gender was probably understood to be at stake, they left the text as originally translated, or even introduced gendered language where none existed before. They made these changes regardless of whether words referred to God, angels, or human beings. In preparing this work, the editors undertook a thorough and comprehensive analysis of the Torah's gender ascriptions. The result is a carefully rendered alternative to the traditional JPS translation.
In Scripture by ISBN: 0742547043Publication Date: 2010-01-15Applying psychoanalytic and gender theory to selected Biblical narratives from Genesis to the Book of Ruth, Lefkovitz interprets the Bible's stories as foundation texts in the development of sexual identities. In Scripture is an exploration of the Biblical origins of a series of unstable ideas about the sexes, human sexuality, family roles, and Jewish sexual identities, in particular, and by extension, changing attitudes towards Jewish men and women.
Gender and Jewish History by ISBN: 9780253222633Publication Date: 2010-12-03By revealing the importance of gender in interpreting the Jewish past, this collection of original essays highlights the profound influence that feminist scholarship has had on the study of Jewish history since the 1970s. Gender and Jewish History considers the impact of gender on Jewish religious practices and political behavior, educational accomplishments and communal structures, acculturation and choice of occupations. The book stimulates conversations on such topics as Jewish women's creativity and spirituality, violence against women, Jews' reactions to persecution in the Holocaust, and Judaism as lived religion and culture. Honoring Paula Hyman, one of the founders of Jewish gender studies, this volume shows gender to be an eye-opening entry into realms of Jewish history previously untouched by it.
Gender, families and transmission in the contemporary Jewish context by ISBN: 1443892327Bringing together social science researchers from France, Israel, the United States, Belgium and Switzerland, this book analyses contemporary Jewishness within the constant dialectic between faithfulness to Jewish tradition and culture and adherence to the values of modernity and democracy.
Systems of family and gender normativity have durably influenced the traditional Jewish universe, but the norms and the institutions that embody them are today shaky. Individualization – the essence of modernity – is at work in the Jewish world, as it is elsewhere, and new identities are emerging and question the transmission of Jewish identities and traditions.
The contributions here highlight the contrasting experiences of societies in the Diaspora and in Israeli society – societies that are different, yet sometimes very close because of tensions around religious and identity boundaries. As such, this book revisits the relationship to the “other” and the conditions for an “alliance” among people, a notion dear to Judaism.
Gender and Jewish Difference from Paul to Shakespeare by ISBN: 0812202554Publication Date: 2013-04-09Although representations of medieval Christians and Christianity are rarely subject to the same scholarly scrutiny as those of Jews and Judaism, "the Christian" is as constructed a term, category, and identity as "the Jew." Medieval Christian authors created complex notions of Christian identity through strategic use of representations of Others: idealized Jewish patriarchs or demonized contemporary Jews; Woman represented as either virgin or whore. In Western thought, the Christian was figured as spiritual and masculine, defined in opposition to the carnal, feminine, and Jewish. Women and Jews are not simply the Other for the Christian exegetical tradition, however; they also represent sources of origin, as one cannot conceive of men without women or of Christianity without Judaism. The bifurcated representations of Woman and Jew found in the literature of the Middle Ages and beyond reflect the uneasy figurations of women and Jews as both insiders and outsiders to Christian society. Gender and Jewish Difference from Paul to Shakespeare provides the first extended examination of the linkages of gender and Jewish difference in late medieval and early modern English literature. Focusing on representations of Jews and women in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, selections from medieval drama, and Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice, Lampert explores the ways in which medieval and early modern authors used strategies of opposition to--and identification with--figures of Jews and women to create individual and collective Christian identities. This book shows not only how these questions are interrelated in the texts of medieval and early modern England but how they reveal the distinct yet similarly paradoxical places held by Woman and Jew within a longer tradition of Western thought that extends to the present day.
Masculinities
Unheroic Conduct by ISBN: 9780520200333Publication Date: 1997-06-13In a book that will both enlighten and provoke, Daniel Boyarin offers an alternative to the prevailing Euroamerican warrior/patriarch model of masculinity and recovers the Jewish ideal of the gentle, receptive male. The Western notion of the aggressive, sexually dominant male and the passive female reaches back through Freud to Roman times, but as Boyarin makes clear, such gender roles are not universal. Analyzing ancient and modern texts, he reveals early rabbis--studious, family-oriented--as exemplars of manhood and the prime objects of female desire in traditional Jewish society. Challenging those who view the "feminized Jew" as a pathological product of the Diaspora or a figment of anti-Semitic imagination, Boyarin argues that the Diaspora produced valuable alternatives to the dominant cultures' overriding gender norms. He finds the origins of the rabbinic model of masculinity in the Talmud, and though unrelentingly critical of rabbinic society's oppressive aspects, he shows how it could provide greater happiness for women than the passive gentility required by bourgeois European standards. Boyarin also analyzes the self-transformation of three iconic Viennese modern Jews: Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis; Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism; and Bertha Pappenheim (Anna O.), the first psychoanalytic patient and founder of Jewish feminism in Germany. Pappenheim is Boyarin's hero: it is she who provides him with a model for a militant feminist, anti-homophobic transformation of Orthodox Jewish society today. Like his groundbreaking Carnal Israel, this book is talmudic scholarship in a whole new light, with a vitality that will command attention from readers in feminist studies, history of sexuality, Jewish culture, and the history of psychoanalysis.
Brother Keepers by ISBN: 1931342253Publication Date: 2010-08-01Brother Keepers: New Perspectives on Jewish Masculinity is an international collection of new essays on Jewish men by academics and activists, rabbis and secularists, men and women, on personal experience and congregational life, gendered bodies and Jewish minds, poetry and prayer, literature and film, and more. Simultaneously particular and universal, all engagingly illuminate how masculinities and Judaisms engage each other in gendered Jewishness.
Legacy of Rage by ISBN: 1558493034Publication Date: 2001-07-01In books, television programs, and films, Jewish men are often depicted as erudite, comedic, malleable, and non-threatening - somewhere between Clark Kent and the early Woody Allen. Yet as Warren Rosenberg shows in this illuminating study, this widespread cultural image is not only overly simplistic, it is at odds with a legacy of Jewish male violence that goes back to the first chapters of Genesis when Cain slew Abel. From Biblical depictions of heroic wariors like King David to the medieval Jewish legend of the Golem (a fierce man of clay created by Cabalistic magic) to the fictional Alexander Portnoy, Jewish ideas of manhood reflect a simultaneous resistance and attraction to violence. According to Rosenberg, it is an ambivalence shaped by millennia of oppression as well as by the clash of Western ideas of masculinity with Eastern European rabbirical injunctions against violent action. The result has been not only gender confusion, but a suppressed rage evident in a broad range of texts created by Jewish men, from nineteenth-century Yiddish stories to contemporary Hollywood films. Isaac Babel, Henry Roth, Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, David Mamet, Barry Levinson, and
Jewish Masculinity in the Holocaust by ISBN: 9781350008069Publication Date: 2017-10-05This book explores, for the first time, the impact of the Holocaust on the gender identities of Jewish men. Drawing on historical and sociological arguments, it specifically looks at the experiences of men in France, Holland, Belgium, and Poland. Jewish Masculinity in the Holocaust starts by examining the gendered environment and ideas of Jewish masculinity during the interwar period and in the run-up to the Holocaust. The volume then goes on to explore the effect of Nazi persecution on various elements of male gender identity, analysing a wide range of sources including diaries and journals written at the time, underground ghetto newspapers and numerous memoirs written in the intervening years by survivors. Taken together, these sources show that Jewish masculinities were severely damaged in the initial phases of persecution, particularly because men were unable to perform the gendered roles they expected of themselves. More controversially, however, Maddy Carey also shows that the escalation of the persecution and later enclosure - whether through ghettoisation or hiding - offered men the opportunity to reassert their masculine identities. Finally, the book discusses the impact of the Holocaust on the practice of fatherhood and considers its effect on the transmission of masculinity. This important study breaks new ground in its coverage of gender and masculinities and is an important text for anyone studying the history of the Holocaust.
Thou Art the Man by ISBN: 9780812253023Publication Date: 2021-04-30"How do we approach the study of masculinity in the past?" Ruth Mazo Karras asks. Medieval documents that have come down to us tell a great deal about the things that men did, but not enough about what they did specifically as men, or what these practices meant to them in terms of masculinity. Yet no less than in our own time, masculinity was a complicated construct in the Middle Ages. In Thou Art the Man, Karras focuses on one figure, King David, who was important in both Christian and Jewish medieval cultures, to show how he epitomized many and sometimes contradictory aspects of masculine identity. For late medieval Christians, he was one of the Nine Worthies, held up as a model of valor and virtue; for medieval Jews, he was the paradigmatic king, not just a remnant of the past, but part of a living heritage. In both traditions he was warrior, lover, and friend, founder of a dynasty and a sacred poet. But how could an exemplar of virtue also be a murderer and adulterer? How could a physical weakling be a great warrior? How could someone whose claim to the throne was not dynastic be a key symbol of the importance of dynasty? And how could someone who dances with slaves be noble? Exploring the different configurations of David in biblical and Talmudic commentaries, in Latin, Hebrew, and vernacular literatures across Europe, in liturgy, and in the visual arts, Thou Art the Man offers a rich case study of how ideas and ideals of masculinity could bend to support a variety of purposes within and across medieval cultures.
Masculinity and the Making of American Judaism by ISBN: 9780253026361Publication Date: 2017-03-13An examination of how early twentieth-century American Jewish men experienced manhood and presented their masculinity to others.How did American Jewish men experience manhood, and how did they present their masculinity to others? In this distinctive book, Sarah Imhoff shows that the project of shaping American Jewish manhood was not just one of assimilation or exclusion. Jewish manhood was neither a mirror of normative American manhood nor its negative, effeminate opposite. Imhoff demonstrates how early twentieth-century Jews constructed a gentler, less aggressive manhood, drawn partly from the American pioneer spirit and immigration experience, but also from Hollywood and the YMCA, which required intense cultivation of a muscled male physique. She contends that these models helped Jews articulate the value of an acculturated American Judaism. Tapping into a rich historical literature to reveal how Jews looked at masculinity differently than Protestants or other religious groups, Imhoff illuminates the particular experience of American Jewish men."There is so much literature--and very good scholarship--on Judaism and gender, but the majority of that literature reflects an interest in women. A hearty thank you to Sarah Imhoff for writing the other half of the story and for doing it so elegantly." --Claire Elise Katz, author of Levinas and the Crisis of Humanism"Invariably lucid and engaging, Sarah Imhoff provides a secure foundation for how religion shaped American masculinity and how masculinity shaped American Judaism in the early twentieth century." --Judith Gerson, author of By Thanksgiving We Were Americans: German Jewish Refugees and Holocaust Memory
Eros and Tragedy by ISBN: 1936235854Publication Date: 2014-03-15Between 1920 and 1922, hundreds of members of the Hashomer Hatzair youth movement left the defunct Habsburg Monarchy and sailed to Palestine, where a small group of members of the movement established Upper Bitania, one of the communities that laid the foundation for Israel's kibbutz movement. Their social experiment lasted only eight months, but it gave birth to a powerful myth among Jewish youth which combined a story about a heroic Zionist deed, based on the trope of tragedy, with a model for a new type of community that promised no less than a total, absolute elimination of all physical and mental barriers between isolated individuals and their fusion into one entity. This entity was named "the erotic community." In its quest for human regeneration, Upper Bitania embarked on a journey into a highly specific variant of modern life that, at its core, tried to combine the most profound Nietzscheanism with the insights of Sigmund Freud, all in an anti-capitalist quest for an organic community of "new men." The quest for a "new man" was to compensate for a crisis of manliness and betrays an obsession with masculinity and male bonding, and their effects on the ideal man and woman.
Carrying a Big Schtick by Call Number: DS143 .M67 2024ISBN: 9780814349625Publication Date: 2024-05-31For twentieth-century Jewish immigrants and their children attempting to gain full access to American society, performative masculinity was a tool of acculturation. However, as scholar Miriam Eve Mora demonstrates, this performance is consistently challenged by American mainstream society that holds Jewish men outside of the American ideal of masculinity. Depicted as weak, effeminate, cowardly, gentle, bookish, or conflict-averse, Jewish men have been ascribed these qualities by outside forces, but some have also intentionally subscribed themselves to masculinities at odds with the American mainstream. Carrying a Big Schtick dissects notions of Jewish masculinity and its perception and practice in America in the twentieth century through the lenses of immigration and cultural history. Tracing Jewish masculinity through major themes and events including both World Wars, the Holocaust, American Zionism, Israeli statehood, and the Six-Day War, this work establishes that the struggle of this process can shed light on the changing dynamics in religious, social, and economic American Jewish life.
Feminities
Gender Issues in Jewish Law by ISBN: 1571812393Publication Date: 2000-11-01Published in Association with the Solomon B. Freehof Institute of Progressive Halakhah General Editor: Walter Jacob
The Femininity Puzzle by ISBN: 9783837658217Publication Date: 2022-11-01In the Hobsbawmian long 19th century, gender and processes of sexualization and feminization have been crucial in the construction of the »Jewish Other«. Ulrike Brunotte explores how these processes came about by addressing imaginative, aesthetic, and epistemological questions. She analyzes how literature, psychoanalysis and the performing arts traverse and react to the ambivalence of racialized stereotypes. The »femininity puzzle« presents itself in two ways: first in the role of effeminization of the male Jew in antisemitic discourse, and then in the transgressive forms of femininity connected to Jewish women, especially the allosemitic orientalization in the figure of the »Beautiful Jewess«.
Women and Gender in Early Jewish and Palestinian NationalismISBN: 0813026180Publication Date: 2003-05-31Drawing on a variety of source materials, ranging from popular print media to poetry, film, political treatises, and biographies and autobiographies, this work examines the ways in which gender operated in forming the political identities of Palestinian Arabs and Jewish Zionists. By exploring both gender definitions and their expressions in the everyday lives of two contesting peoples, it provides an understanding of how gender affects the discourse of conflict between two competing national movements. Through this balanced discussion of the histories of Jewish and Palestinian women during Palestine's formative years, it makes a contribution to scholarship in Middle Eastern and women's history. Through a discussion employing the materials and methods of history, sociology, literary criticism, and anthropology, this study provides an examination of identity formation in Palestine during the first half of the 20th century and an analysis of both Palestinian and Jewish women in their respective national movements, highlighting gender as a lynchpin of international conflict.
Feminist Perspectives on Jewish Studies by ISBN: 0300060289Publication Date: 1994-12-28This book is the first to evaluate the development of feminist scholarship in various fields within Jewish studies. Eminent scholars in biblical studies, rabbinics, theology, history, literature, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, and film studies assess the state of knowledge about women in each field, analyze how this knowledge has affected the mainstream of the discipline, and propose new questions and concepts to pursue. The authors - Joyce Antler, Lynn Davidman, Tikva Frymer-Kensky, Judith Hauptman, Paula E. Hyman, Sonya Michel, Judith Plaskow, Susan Starr Sered, Naomi Sokoloff, Shelly Tenenbaum, and Hava Tirosh-Rothschild - consider a range of fascinating issues. Among them are: whether Jewish culture is as patriarchal as is typically assumed; how gender arrangements in Jewish life are shaped by the structures and culture of the larger societies in which Jews live; the different ways in which changes in Jewish families over time and place are experienced by women and by men; whether womenor men have been more reluctant to assimilate; and how segregation of the sexes has affected women's autonomy in different periods and locations in Jewish history. Together, the articles present a strong argument for the inclusion of gender as a category of analysis in all fields of Jewish studies.
On Being a Jewish Feminist by ISBN: 9780805238372Publication Date: 1987-01-01"In gathering the essays that eventually became On Being a Jewish Feminist, I sought self-consciously feminist interpretations that would address topics only rarely, if ever, discussed in print in those days – such as wife abuse in the Jewish community, Jewish lesbian identities, the gendered language for God in our liturgies, and theologies." The Author, Susannah Heschel
Israeli Women's Studies by ISBN: 0813536154Publication Date: 2005-08-10Israeli women do not enjoy the equality, status, and power often attributed to them by the media and popular culture. Despite significant achievements and progress, as a whole they continue to earn less than their male counterparts, are less visible and influential in the political arena, do not share equal responsibilities or privileges in the military, have unequal rights and freedoms in family life and law, and are less influential in shaping the nation's self image and cultural orientation. Bringing together classic essays by leading scholars of Israeli culture, this reader exposes the hidden causes of ongoing discrimination and links the restrictions that Israeli women experience to deeply entrenched structures, including colonial legacies, religious traditions, capitalism, nationalism, and ongoing political conflict. In contrast, the essays also explore how women act creatively to affect social change and shape public discourse in less ostensible ways. Providing balanced perspectives from the social sciences and the humanities, this comprehensive reader reflects both an emerging consensus and exciting diversity in the field. It is the definitive text for courses in Israeli women's studies.
Jewish Women in the Early Italian Women's Movement, 1861-1945 by ISBN: 9783030977887Publication Date: 2022-07-01This book is the first epoch-spanning study on Jewish participation in the Italian women's movement, focussing in a transnational perspective on the experience of Italian-Jewish protagonists in Liberal Italy, during the First World War and the Fascist dictatorship until 1945. Drawing on ego-documents, contemporary journals and Jewish community archives, as well as records by the police and public authorities, it examines the tensions within the emancipation process between participation and exclusion. The book argues that the racial laws from 1938 did not represent the sudden end of an idyllic integration, but rather the climax of a long-term development. Social marginalization, the persecution of Jewish rights, and the assault on Jewish lives during fascism are analysed distinctly from the perspective of Jewish women. In spite of their significant influence on the transnational orientation of the Italian women's movement, their emancipation as women and Jews remained incomplete.
The Unknown History of Jewish Women Through the Ages by ISBN: 9783111043913Publication Date: 2023-05-22The Unknown History of Jewish Women--On Learning and Illiteracy: On Slavery and Libertyis a comprehensive study on the history of Jewish women, which discusses their absence from the Jewish Hebrew library of the "People of the Book" and interprets their social condition in relation to their imposed ignorance and exclusion from public literacy. The book begins with a chapter on communal education for Jewish boys, which was compulsory and free of charge for the first ten years in all traditional Jewish communities. The discussion continues with the striking absence of any communal Jewish education for girls until the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and the implications of this fact for twentieth-century immigration to Israel (1949-1959) The following chapters discuss the social, cultural and legal contexts of this reality of female illiteracy in the Jewish community--a community that placed a supreme value on male education. The discussion focuses on the patriarchal order and the postulations, rules, norms, sanctions and mythologies that, in antiquity and the Middle Ages, laid the religious foundations of this discriminatory reality.
LGBTQIA+ Identities, Cultures, and Histories
Uncle Feygele by ISBN: 1935514865Publication Date: 2011-02-01Yermiyahu Ahron Taub's new collection of poems is rich with intimacy and longing, culled from the dual influences of both contemporary gay culture and timeless Jewish tradition. The speakers in Taub's poems find themselves squarely displaced between these two extremes, between the obligation to duty and the surrender to pleasure, the lightness of daily foibles and the darkness of long-held secrets and shame. The poems-bold, unfettered-are draped around the reader like "a necklace of whispers"-as objects both of beauty and of restraint. Taub is a poet in whose hands I feel moved and informed, comforted and implored. Charles Jensen Author of The First Risk This book is a dazzler for any of us who live between cultures and find it hard to negotiate between absolute identities. In poems more urgent than well-mannered, Taub cuts to the bone again and again, making lyrical incisions through history, memory and myth in a spirit of comic melancholy and lament. "Rosa, Rosa, how did it come to this?" he asks, as if speaking for all of us who have emerged from the last century complicated, thinking and feeling too much. Here is a mind embodied enough to imagine the resiliency of "a foreskin ... spontaneously sprouted " Julia Spicher Kasdorf Author of The Body and the Book: Writing from a Mennonite Life Uncle Feygele is a funny, insightful, and amazingly humane collection of poems. While the poems cleverly connect the seemingly disparate identities of being openly queer and an Orthodox Jew, they also manage something much bigger-illuminating the tiny struggles and tricks of memory that are a part of all human experience. T. Cole Rachel Author of Surviving the Moment of Impact Switching back and forth from English to Yiddish, Yermiyahu Ahron Taub's poetry is at once socially engaged and sexy. The collection as a whole, which includes poems in honor of the social democrat Rosa Luxemburg and the Hebrew poet Rahel, and the "unnamed and unremembered," is beautifully crafted. His poems on men ... sizzling. David Shneer Author of Through Soviet Jewish Eyes: Photography, War, and the Holocaust
Listen here as Taub reads from his book at the Library of Congress: https://www.loc.gov/item/2021688694/.
Homosexuality, Transsexuality, Psychoanalysis and Traditional Judaism by ISBN: 9781315180151Publication Date: 2019-03-04Homosexuality, Transsexuality, Psychoanalysis and Traditional Judaism explores the often incommensurable and irreconcilable beliefs and understandings of sexuality and gender in the Orthodox Jewish community from psychoanalytic, rabbinic, feminist, and queer perspectives. The book explores how seemingly irreconcilable differences might be resolved. The book is divided into two separate but related sections. The first highlights the divide between the psychoanalytic, academic, and traditional Orthodox Jewish perspectives on sexual identity and orientation, and the acute psychic and social challenges faced by gay and lesbian members of the Orthodox Jewish world. The contributors ask us to engage with them in a dialogue that allows for authentic conversation. The second section focuses on gender identity, especially as experienced by the Orthodox transgender members of the community. It also highlights the divide between theories that see gender as fluid and traditional Judaism that sees gender as strictly binary. The contributors write about their views and experiences from both sides of the divide. They ask us to engage in true authentic dialogue about these complex and crucial emotional and religious challenges. Homosexuality, Transsexuality, Psychoanalysis and Traditional Judaism will be of great interest to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists as well as members and leaders of Jewish communities working with LGBTQ issues.
Wrestling with God and Men: Homosexuality in the Jewish TraditionISBN: 1282269321Publication Date: 2004-01-01For millennia, two biblical verses have been understood to condemn sex between men as an act so abhorrent that it is punishable by death. Traditionally Orthodox Jews, believing the scripture to be the word of God, have rejected homosexuality in accordance
Magnus Hirschfeld : and the origins of the gay liberation movement by ISBN: 1583674381Magnus Hirschfeld (1868-1935) was one of the first great pioneers of the gay liberation movement. Revered by such gay icons as Christopher Isherwood and Harry Hay, founder of the Mattachine Society, Hirschfeld's legacy resonates throughout the twentieth-century and around the world. Guided by his motto 'Through Science Toward Justice,' Hirschfeld helped found the Scientific Humanitarian Committee in Germany to defend the rights of homosexuals and develop a scientific framework for sexual equality. He was also an early champion of women's rights, campaigning in the early 1900s for the decriminalization of abortion and the right of female teachers and civil servants to marry and have children. By 1933 Hirschfeld's commitment to sexual liberation made him a target for the Nazis, and they ransacked his Institute for Sexual Research and publicly burned his books. This biography, first published to acclaim in Germany, follows Hirschfeld from his birth in the Prussian province of Pomerania to the heights of his career during the Weimar Republic and the rise of German fascism. Ralf Dose illuminates Hirschfeld's ground-breaking role in the gay liberation movement and explains some of his major theoretical concepts, which continue to influence our understanding of human sexuality and social justice today.
German, Jew, Muslim, Gay: The Life and Times of Hugo Marcus by ISBN: 0231551789Hugo Marcus (1880–1966) was a man of many names and many identities. Born a German Jew, he converted to Islam and took the name Hamid, becoming one of the most prominent Muslims in Germany prior to World War II. He was renamed Israel by the Nazis and sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp before escaping to Switzerland. He was a gay man who never called himself gay but fought for homosexual rights and wrote queer fiction under the pen name Hans Alienus during his decades of exile.In German, Jew, Muslim, Gay, Marc David Baer uses Marcus’s life and work to shed new light on a striking range of subjects, including German Jewish history and anti-Semitism, Islam in Europe, Muslim-Jewish relations, and the history of the gay rights struggle. Baer explores how Marcus created a unique synthesis of German, gay, and Muslim identity that positioned Johann Wolfgang von Goethe as an intellectual and spiritual model. Marcus’s life offers a new perspective on sexuality and on competing conceptions of gay identity in the multilayered world of interwar and postwar Europe. His unconventional story reveals new aspects of the interconnected histories of Jewish and Muslim individuals and communities, including Muslim responses to Nazism and Muslim experiences of the Holocaust. An intellectual biography of an exceptional yet little-known figure, German, Jew, Muslim, Gay illuminates the complexities of twentieth-century Europe’s religious, sexual, and cultural politics.
Disobedience by ISBN: 0141002298Publication Date: 2001-10-01Alice Notley has earned a reputation as one of the most challenging and engaging radical female poets at work today. Her last collection, Mysteries of Small Houses, was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize in poetry and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Structured as a long series of interconnected poems in which one of the main elements is an ongoing dialogue with a seedy detective, Disobedience sets out to explore the visible as well as the unconscious. These poems, composed during a fifteen-month period, also deal with being a woman in France, with turning fifty, and with being a poet, and thus seemingly despised or at least ignored.
Movies
Eytan Fox, יוסי וג'אגר Yossi & Jagger (2002) Based on a true story, Yossi & Jagger portrays the love affair of two Israeli officers in a remote army base on the Israeli-Lebanese border. They are commanders, they are in love, and they try to find a place of their own in an oppressing and rigid system, which sends them to defend a cause they do not necessarily believe in.
Eytan Fox, הסיפור של יוסי Yossi (2012) Yossi, Fox's fifth feature film, is a sequel to the director's breakthrough work Yossi & Jagger (2002). The plot takes place a decade after the events in that previous film. It follows the title character, a closeted gay cardiologist who struggles to find meaning in his life while overcoming the loss of his lover and reconciling his past with his future.
Ofir Raul Graizer, האופה מברלין Der Kuchenmacher (The Cakemaker) (2017) Thomas, a young German baker, has an affair with Oren, a married Israeli man. After Oren unexpectedly dies in a car crash, Thomas travels to Jerusalem seeking answers about his death. Under a fake identity, Thomas enters the life of Anat, his lover's newly widowed wife. There, he begins to work for Anat, baking pastries that bring her cafe to vibrant life. Thomas becomes deeply involved in her life beyond his own expectation and stretches the lie about himself to a point of no return.
Haim Tabakman, עיניים פקוחות Eyes Wide Open (2009) Aaron, a butcher and devout family man in Jerusalem's ultraorthodox Jewish community, has his quiet life interrupted when Erzi, a handsome, young Yeshiva student, happens on his shop. Intrigued by the young man, Aaron offers Erzi a job and becomes his friend and mentor. The two grow closer, and soon other feelings surface. As their forbidden sexual desire grows, Aaron begins to neglect his business and his family. When Aaron and Ezri begin spending time together, Aaron is quickly ostracized within the Orthodox community. But guilt, torment, and pressure from the community lead him to make a radical decision.
הבועה The Bubble (2006) Three young Israelis, two guys, Yali and Noam, and a girl, Lulu, share an apartment in Tel Aviv's hippest neighborhood. Noam meets and falls in love with a Palestinian man and he and his friends conspire to help Ashraf stay on in Tel Aviv illegally.
הסודות The Secrets While studying at a women's religious seminary in Safed, Naomi and her new friend explore the complexities of a religious lifestyle in a vibrant environment of youth, rebellion, and desire as they befriend a beautiful, mysterious older woman.
Disobedience (2017) A woman returns to the community that shunned her for her attraction to a childhood friend. Once back, their passions reignite as they explore the boundaries of faith and sexuality.
Periodicals and Additional Resources
Jewish women : a comprehensive historical encyclopedia / Jewish Women's Archive is an online encyclopedia documenting Jewish women's life and work.
Nashim: A Journal of Jewish Women's Studies & Gender Issues provides an international, interdisciplinary, and scholarly forum in Jewish women’s and gender studies, and is the only one of its kind. It creates communication channels within the Jewish women’s and gender studies community and brings forth that community’s work to a wider audience. Each thematic issue is produced in consultation with a distinguished feminist scholar, and includes articles on literature, text studies, anthropology, archeology, theology, contemporary thought, sociology, the arts, and more. Nashim is a joint publication of the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute at Brandeis University, the Schechter Institute of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem, and Indiana University Press.
Jewish Woman Magazine provides resources than can enhance a woman's Jewish identity, personal spirituality and lifestyle choices.
Women in Judaism: A Multidisciplinary Journal explores women's voices and topics relating to woman history, religiosity and female identities and representation.
Bridges = Gʹsharim = Gesharim = Brikn = Briḳn = Puentes = Pue̓ntes "A journal for Jewish feminists and our friends," 1990–2004; "A Jewish feminist journal," 2005-2011.
The American Jewess, edited by Rosa Sonneschein, between 1896–99, this periodical was "The only Jewish periodical for women." and "Devoted to social, religious and literary subjects.
Hadassah Magazine is the magazine of Hadassah the Women's Zionist Organization of America.
Digest is the Newsletter of the World Congress of Gay and Lesbian Jewish Organizations
Related:
Gay Theological Journal: Homosexual Hermeneutics on Religion and the Scriptures