Paradoxical Politics: Gender Politics Among Newly Orthodox Jewish Women in the United States

2019 ◽  
pp. 349-366
Author(s):  
Debra Renee Kaufman
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Gender Politics ◽  
The United States ◽  
Orthodox Jewish ◽  
Jewish Women

Domesticity and the Home (Page): Blogging and the Blurring of Public and Private among Orthodox Jewish Women

Jews at Home ◽  
2010 ◽  
pp. 257-282
Author(s):  
Andrea Lieber
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Orthodox Jewish ◽  
Jewish Women ◽  
Home Pages ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
Daily Diaries ◽  
Internal Conflicts ◽  
The Many

This chapter turns a feminist lens on blogs as the literary voice of Orthodox Jewish women in England and the United States, but finds that these women's productions defy easy categorization. They are extensions of home because their content typically relates the woman's responsibility for family and home. They are ‘home pages’ where these women can voice their frustrations and joys, but unlike conversations, in which they can control who listens, these daily diaries are public. The chapter scrutinizes the many non-Jewish reporters drawing attention to the blogs and their surprise that what they assumed to be an isolated, pre-modern group would log on from computers in a ‘traditional’ Jewish household. At the same time, it reveals internal conflicts within the group about how their communications can be reconciled with halakhah, and their potential to change the role of women.

Raanan Rein, Fútbol, Jews and the Making of Argentina, trans. Marsha Grenzeback. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014. 166 pp.

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Jewish Identity ◽  
The United States ◽  
Orthodox Jewish ◽  
Literary Representations ◽  
Stanford University ◽  
Common Theme ◽  
American Jews ◽  
The Common ◽  
The One

This chapter reviews the books Fútbol, Jews and the Making of Argentina (2014), by Raanan Rein, translated by Marsha Grenzeback, and Muscling in on New Worlds: Jews, Sport, and the Making of the Americas (2014), edited by Raanan Rein and David M.K. Sheinin. Rein’s book deals with the “making” of Argentina through football (soccer), while Muscling in on New Worlds focuses on the “making” of the Americas (mainly the one America, called the United States) through sports. Muscling in on New Worlds is a collection of essays that seeks to advance the common theme of sport as “an avenue by which Jews threaded the needle of asserting a Jewish identity.” Topics include Jews as boxers, Jews and football, Jews and yoga, Orthodox Jewish athletes, and American Jews and baseball. There are also essays about the cinematic and literary representations of Jews in sports.

scholarly journals JEWISH LAW, STATE, AND SOCIAL REALITY: PRENUPTIAL AGREEMENTS FOR THE PREVENTION OF DIVORCE REFUSAL IN ISRAEL AND THE UNITED STATES

2018 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-88
Author(s):  
Amihai Radzyner
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Jewish Woman ◽  
Main Tool ◽  
The United States ◽  
Western World ◽  
Jewish Law ◽  
State Law ◽  
Jewish Women ◽  
The Common ◽  
Official Status

AbstractRabbinical courts in Israel serve as official courts of the state, and state law provides that a Jewish couple can obtain a divorce only in these courts, and only strictly according to Jewish law. By contrast, in the Western world, especially the United States, which has the largest concentration of Jews outside of Israel, the Jewish halakha is not a matter of state law, and rabbinical courts have no official status. This article examines critically the common argument that for a Jew committed to the halakha, and in particular for a Jewish woman who wants to divorce her husband, a state-sponsored halakhic system is preferable to a voluntary one. This argument is considered in light of the main tool that has been proven to help American Jewish women who wish to obtain a halakhic divorce from husbands refusing to grant it: the prenuptial agreement. Many Jewish couples in the United States sign such an agreement, but only a few couples in Israel do so, primarily because of the opposition of the rabbinical courts in Israel to these agreements. The article examines the causes of this resistance, and offers reasons for the distinction that exists between the United States and Israel. It turns out that social and legal reality affect halakhic considerations, to the point where rabbis claim that what the halakha allows in the United States it prohibits in Israel. The last part of the article uses examples from the past to examine the possibility that social change in Israel will affect the rulings of rabbinical courts on this issue.

Bearing Witness

2007 ◽  
pp. 324-336
Author(s):  
Joanna B. Michlic
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Prose Poetry ◽  
Orthodox Jewish ◽  
Jewish Family ◽  
Bearing Witness ◽  
Central Poland ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The Village

HENRYK GRYNBERG was born in Warsaw in 1936 into an Orthodox Jewish family, and raised in the village of Radoszyna near Mińsk Mazowiecki in central Poland. He survived the Holocaust in hiding with his mother. He left for the United States in 1967 in protest at the Polish government’s antisemitic practices and the censorship of his writing. He is the author of some thirty books of prose, poetry, drama, and essays, and his work has been translated from Polish into many languages. Titles. translated into English include ...

Group Size, Social Class, Religion, and Politics

2017 ◽  
pp. 31-51
Author(s):  
Chaim I. Waxman
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
York City ◽  
Jewish Population ◽  
Religion And Politics ◽  
The United States ◽  
Orthodox Jewish ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
The Core ◽  
Jewish Demography

This chapter focuses on determining the size of the Orthodox Jewish population in the United States and difficulties related to the problem of estimating the Jewish population as a whole. It analyses the acceptance of the notion of the 'core Jewish population' among social scientists and Jewish communal professionals. It also looks at major debates relating to significantly different estimates of population size among those specializing in Jewish demography. The chapter addresses questions as to whether belonging to an Orthodox synagogue makes one Orthodox, or whether being Orthodox entails matters of faith and behaviour. It cites the UJA-Federation of New York, which estimated the total Orthodox population in New York City at 493,000 in 2013.

Notes on Oscar Wilde's Transatlantic Gender Politics

2012 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 155-169
Author(s):  
MICHÈLE MENDELSSOHN
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Gender Bias ◽  
Gender Politics ◽  
The United States ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Institutions ◽  
Women's Culture ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Gender Boundaries ◽  
Lecture Tour

For decades now, Oscar Wilde has been celebrated in academic and popular circles as a transgressor of gender boundaries and a devotee of the woman's world and an “appreciative inheritor of women's culture.” What has been underappreciated, however, is that Wilde also acted as an advocate of gender binaries in ways that significantly challenge this reputation. This article argues that Wilde's writings reveal a traditionalist critique of American gender politics that reflects his concern over the management of cultural institutions and values, and the increasingly precarious place of men within them. Rather than locating these anxieties in Britain, Wilde displaced them onto the United States, a country whose cultural institutions he had become intimate with during a year-long lecture tour in the early 1880s. By exposing and problematizing Wilde's response to the late nineteenth-century crisis in masculinity and his disappointment at the failure of American men to take their place in society as arbiters of taste, this article underscores the need for a nuanced reassessment of Wildean gender politics. At stake here are fundamental questions about how a transgressive politics sits alongside traditionalism, and how a conservative gender bias in transatlantic fin de siècle culture operated even in the period's progressive circles.

A Delicate Subject: Clemencia López, Civilized Womanhood, and the Politics of Anti-Imperialism

2013 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 199-233 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura R. Prieto
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Family Background ◽  
Gender Politics ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
American Gender

In 1902, Clemencia López journeyed to the United States to work for the liberation of her imprisoned brothers and for Filipino independence. She granted interviews, circulated her photograph, and spoke in public under the sponsorship of American anti-imperialists and suffragists. López argued that Filipinos like herself were already a civilized people and thus did not need Americans' “benevolent assimilation.” Her gender and her elite family background helped her make this case. Instead of presenting her as racially inferior, published accounts expressed appreciation of her feminine refinement and perceptions of her beauty as exotic. Americans simultaneously perceived her as apolitical because of her sex. López was thus able to take advantage of American gender politics to discuss the “delicate subject” of autonomy for the Philippines in ways that anti-imperialist Filipino men could not.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document