Does Gender Matter?
This chapter probes the significant contributions to the understanding of the past, which postmodern criticism that has attributed vital importance to women as a historical subject and to gender as a category of critical analysis. It offers a valuable assessment both of inroads already made by women's history and gender analysis into Jewish historical research. It also invokes distinctions drawn by Gerda Lerner, 'the doyenne of women's history', to categorize both achievements and desiderata in the field of feminism. The chapter reviews compensatory history which focuses on women previously ignored, including gender-based adjustment and refinement of interpretation in areas ranging from the Conversos to the shtetl and from the Holocaust to the family. It tackles areas where women's and gender-sensitive history have the power to transform and reshape the fundamental assumptions of European Jewish history.