Abstract: En France, depuis le début des années 2000, au sein du judaïsme orthodoxe et moderne orthodoxe, de plus en plus de femmes mettent en place différentes stratégies d’« empouvoirement » pour accéder aux textes religieux, les étudier, les interpréter, les enseigner et exercer des fonctions religieuses. Tout en interrogeant leurs différentes mobilisations, l’autrice montre que ces femmes participent à la recomposition du religieux, et ce, en renégociant les frontières entre le public et le privé, et en contribuant à la production de discours religieux et féministes.
Topics: Main Topic: Antisemitism, October 7 2023 attacks + aftermath, Gender, Feminism, Antisemitism, Antisemitism: Israel-Related, Antisemitism: Left-Wing, Antisemitism: Theory, Theory: Critical Theory, Sexism and Misogyny, Intersectionality
Abstract: Antisemitism and Sexism: Ideological Constellations Before and After 7 October analyses the manifold ways in which antisemitism and sexism appear not as isolated ideologies but as intersecting ones, exploring their historical, social, political, economic, and psychological constellations. Drawing on Critical Theory, the book offers a comparative historical analysis of these entanglements from nineteenth-century Europe—particularly Germany and Austria—through National Socialism and its preconditions, to the historical and contemporary formations of Islamism. The sexist antisemitism of 7 October and its aftermath are examined as a contemporary eruption of these enduring ideological patterns, while Critical Theory itself is sharpened in light of these events.
Structured around distinct analytical dimensions, the book opens with a theoretically dense examination of the damaged relationship between human beings and nature under modern labour society, identified by Critical Theory as a key source of both antisemitism and sexism. Subsequent chapters analyse the contradictory constructions of Judaism and femininity, the relation between body and mind, and socially regulated forms of sexuality. Conspiracy myths linking weakness and omnipotence, the psychosocial roots of authoritarian dispositions, and the embedding of these ideologies in specific formations of capitalist modernity and repressive communities are examined in turn. The book also offers a critical examination of intersectional feminist antisemitism in the aftermath of 7 October and advances a proposal to reformulate intersectionality as an ideology-critical framework for a feminist critique of antisemitism.
Abstract: Together we seek to model the redemptive, liberatory, activist, feminist approach to collaborative working to which both authors are committed as teachers, students, rabbis and activists. In our rabbinic chain of tradition (more particularly through other female rabbis) we explore, through the lenses of student and teacher, the 5-year rabbinic course at Leo Baeck College (LBC). We seek to demonstrate how, when working at its best, LBC trains rabbis as activists. Our contention is that the rabbinic education at LBC has the potential to be transformative in creating rabbis as activist leaders, an ideal which ought to transcend the rabbinic training seminary and be taken forward into community.
Abstract: The dissertation explores anti-Jewish racism as a structural phenomenon inherent to Swedish society. While research often has separated the study of anti-Jewish racism/antisemitism from other racisms, this dissertation is located within the field of critical race studies to explore anti-Jewish racism as part of larger social and racialised structures.
The study is theoretically framed by a feminist and antiracist gaze that locates Sweden and constructions of “Swedishness” at the core of the analysis, enabling a perspective on anti-Jewish racism as a relational and dynamic social phenomenon. Methodologically the study is inspired by a qualitative tradition, situated at the crossroads of in-depth interviews with self-identified Jews on experiences of anti-Jewish racism and Jewish identity, discourse analysis of media debates, film analysis, and participant observations.
The dissertation explores the entanglements of anti-Jewish racism with notions of “Swedish exceptionalism”, “Swedish gender equality”, the categories of Protestantism and secularism, and racism against other “Others” within what is referred to as the Swedish racial regime. By doing so, the thesis expands the field of critical race studies in Sweden to incorporate an analysis of anti-Jewish racism as a social phenomenon, but also develops a critical analysis of the Swedish racial regime through a specific focus of anti-Jewish racism.
The study illuminates that migration from the Global South is often portrayed within hegemonic discourses as a racist threat against Jews, obscuring Swedish anti-Jewish racism. At the same time, the important demographical shifts that have occurred in Sweden due to this migration have rendered Jews “whiter” in relative terms, and the pressure to adapt to Protestant-secular norms of Swedish “sameness” has decreased, opening up for demands of recognition and Jewish visibility. However, Protestant-secular norms regulating Swedish society confer the category of Jews to a position of conditional “Swedishness”, with public display of Jewishness creating instances of Swedish white discomfort. Thus, the category of Jews embodies a position of ambivalence in the Swedish racial regime, subjected to processes of racialisation but also relative racial privilege. Moreover, this ambiguity occurs in a context of a dynamic of “care” towards the Jewish “Other”, shaped through the perceived threat of the Muslim “Other”, partly reducing the category of Jews to a position of victimhood, while producing an image of Sweden as a progressive and “tolerant” nation, disavowing the ongoing exclusion of those categorised as “different” from Swedish Protestant secularism.
The dissertation suggests that challenging the demands for Swedish “sameness” and the dismantling of hegemonic and racist notions of “Swedishness” would open up for greater possibilities of lives beyond racism.
Abstract: Jewish and Muslim women seeking to claim certain rights in the religious realm in France today, such as access to religious study, ritual space and public religious roles, are confronted with obstacles to gender justice both in Orthodox Judaism and in mainstream Islam. In this article, I begin by taking a brief look at strategies used by women in other countries to curtail male monopolies while remaining inside Orthodox Judaism and mainstream Islam: creating all-female spaces, partnering with men and advancing from within hegemonic institutions. These have produced new religious functions for women, including women imams and female Orthodox rabbis, Jewish and Muslim female spiritual guides (maharat, murshidat), women experts and counselors in Islamic and Jewish law (alimat, yo‘atzot halakhah), Jewish legal advocates (to‘anot rabbaniyot) and female judges (qadiya) in shari‘a courts. I then survey the situation in France, where few such innovations have taken hold. I conclude by suggesting some explanations for their absence (in Orthodox Judaism) or their very slow evolution (in Islam) in the French context.
Abstract: Cet article vise à analyser les raisons pour lesquelles des femmes françaises et juives libérales ont été ordonnées rabbines tardivement, en 1990, malgré un principe d’égalité en vigueur depuis 1846, et en si petit nombre. Cette question sera abordée dans une perspective féministe, à l’aide d’approches et de concepts issus de la sociologie des
organisations et du travail. Nous tenterons de comprendre les mécanismes de « plafond de verre » (Laufer, 2004) et de vitrail (de Gasquet, 2009), qui freinent l’accès de ces femmes aux postes de pouvoir et à la fonction de rabbin selon l’approche « Genre – Organisation – Système » (Fagenson, 1990), approche non encore employée dans les études des institutions religieuses juives. Nous verrons alors que le poids du patriarcat systémique, un rabbinat organisé selon des valeurs, des modèles et une gestion masculine, ainsi que l’autocensure des femmes et l’enfermement des hommes dans des stéréotypes genrés, ont contribué à la construction d’un plafond de vitrail qui a eu raison des principes égalitaires.
Abstract: Thema dieser Dissertation sind die Strukturverwandtschaften und gesellschaftlichen Funktionsähnlichkeiten von Antisemitismus und Antifeminismus. Der Schwerpunkt der Analyse liegt auf der gesamtgesellschaftlichen Makroebene, wo die Intersektionen sich sowohl über die Korrespondenzen als auch über die Eigenheiten und Differenzen beider Kategorien manifestieren. Aus der Perspektive soziologischer, politischer, ökonomischer und geistesgeschichtlicher Erklärungsansätze wird der Frage nachgegangen, wogegen sich Feindschaft und Abwehr im Antisemitismus und Antifeminismus richten und was der jeweilige Gehalt von Konstrukten des Jüdischen und des Weiblichen ist, die beide im Bereich des Phantasmagorischen und Ideologischen anzusiedeln sind. In sie geht die gesellschaftliche Vorstellung von Natur ebenso ein wie die Überhöhung von Stärke bei gleichzeitiger Abwertung von Schwäche.
Geschlechterbilder und -normen spielen dabei eine bedeutsame Rolle. Nach einer analytischen Auseinandersetzung mit den gesellschaftlichen, historischen, ökonomischen und politischen Fundierungsverhältnissen von Antisemitismus und Antifeminismus werden anhand des antisemitischen und frauenfeindlichen Bildarchivs der Moderne, zumal jenes des Fin de Siècle, die Intersektionen von Antisemitismus und Antifeminismus einer genaueren Betrachtung zugeführt. Auffallend sind vor allem die deutlich gegenderten und rassisierten Imagines des Juden und der Frau, denen gleichermaßen eine Transgression der Geschlechtergrenzen immanent ist.
Sie alle gruppieren sich um einen antiemanzipatorischen Gestus. Diese Imagines sind als performative Akte des Antisemitismus und des Antifeminismus zu fassen, und werden somit nicht bloß als Ausdruck diskriminierender und unterdrückender Diskurse und Strukturen der Gesellschaft analysiert,
sondern als diese Strukturen selbst beständig (re)produzierend. Sie tragen damit zu einer kaum mehr durchdringbaren weil verselbständigten Institutionalisierung von Antisemitismus und Antifeminismus bei. Dieser Institutionalisierung wird in einem Abschnitt über den Umgang mit dem Nationalsozialismus gesondert nachgegangen. Ein weiterer Abschnitt ist der Durchsetzung von Antisemitismus und Antifeminismus auf der Mikroebene des doing difference gewidmet, wo der erlebnisanalytische Aspekt von Juden- und Frauenfeindlichkeit anhand einer Auswertung qualitativer Interviews im Zentrum steht.
Abstract: This paper specifies and describes the main four stages and strategies of intercultural and memory survival of Sephardic women in Bosnia in the past (during the interwar period) and in the contemporary world (before, during, and after the collapse of Yugoslavia). The first strategy, named here as a (manu)script and orality/textuality one, is illustrated by a study Sephardic Woman in Bosnia (1932) by Jewish Sarajevo feminist Laura Papo Bohoreta (1891–1942). The second one, labeled as a translation and print strategy, is connected with the activity of Muhamed Nezirović (1934–2008), especially his translation of Papo’s book from Ladino into Bosnian (2005). The third one, recognized here as a cultural transfer strategy, is represented by the novels The Scent of Rain in the Balkans (1986) and The Ballad of Bohoreta (2006) by contemporary Serbian female writer Gordana Kuić (1942). And—last but not least—the fourth strategy of digitizing manuscripts and archival texts by Laura Papo is represented by Edina Spahić, Cecilia Prenz Kopušar, and Sejdalija Gušić, a team who prepared and has recently edited three collected books with Papo’s manuscripts (2015–2017
Abstract: This article is a discussion on my research that examines the social and musical aspects of orthodox women’s Rosh Chodesh groups. These groups, both past and present, are not a widespread phenomenon and have remained very much on the periphery of Jewish practices which, apart from communities based in Israel, already operate on the periphery of non-Jewish societies. As such, my research has required a broad, international focus. My discussion is largely based on groups in North America and Europe (specific locations examined include New York, Montreal, Amsterdam, Berlin, and London, which is also the site for fieldwork on the relatively recent phenomenon called the ‘Partnership Minyan’). I also conducted preliminary fieldwork with the much-discussed group Women of the Wall (WoW) based in Jerusalem.
Abstract: Agnieszka Graff’s piece was presented at the panel “Polish Jewish Women and Leadership: Then and Now” which took place in the scope of the Bet Debora conference in Wroclaw, September 1-4 2016. She chronicles how she arrived at understanding the ways in which feminism and Jewishness are interconnected. In the early days of her career as a feminist, Agnieszka Graff did not attribute much importance to the fact that she had a Jewish father and thus a Jewish name. When she returned to Poland after studying in the United States, she had begun identifying as a feminist but would not recognize that many other Polish feminists including her fellow campaigners Bożena Keff and Kazimiera Szczuka were also Jewish.
In 2005, the year that marked the first resurgence of nationalism in Poland since 1989, Graff realized that a number of the persons she had labelled as homphobic, conservative and mysogynistic in her first publication World Without Women (2001) were in fact also anti-semitic.
After several interviews with prominent second wave feminists and a visit to Israel in 2010, Agnieszka Graff came to the realization that Jewishness and gender were interlinked in complicated but undeniable ways, and she was alerted to the historical interconnectedness of anti-semitism and mysogyny that extended to Poland in the present day. She found the most profound correlation, however, to exist in Jewishness’ and feminism’s history of hate, oppression and fear.
Abstract: This thesis casts new light on the immigrant experience, focusing on one extended Scottish Jewish family, the descendents of Rabbi Zvi David Hoppenstein and his wife Sophia, who arrived in Scotland in the early 1880s. Going further than other studies by exploring connections and difference through five generations and across five branches of the family, it uses grounded theory and a feminist perspective and draws on secondary sources like census data and contemporary newspaper reports with the early immigrant generations, oral testimony with the third and fourth generations and an innovative use of social networking platforms to engage with the younger generation. It explores Bourdieu’s theories relating to cultural and economic capital and the main themes are examined through the triple lens of generational change, gender and class. The thesis draws out links between food and memory and examines outmarriage and ‘return inmarriage’. It explores the fact that antisemitic and negative reactions from the host community, changing in nature through the generations but always present, have had an effect on people’s sense of their Jewish identity just as much as has the transmission of Jewish identity at home, in the synagogue, in Hebrew classes and in Jewish political, educational, leisure and welfare organisations. It makes an important link between gendered educational opportunities and consequent gendered intergenerational class shift, challenges other studies which view Jewish identity as static and illustrates how the boundary between ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ is blurred: the Hoppenstein family offers us a context where we can see clearly how insider and outsider status can be self-assigned, ascribed by others, or mediated by internal gatekeepers.
