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: This article analyses the experiences of Dutch women who became Jewish via a giyur process. While the past decade has seen an increased interest in the ethnographic study of women’s conversion, little is known about the process of giyur from a gender and everyday perspective, which is what this article focuses on. This is based on ethnographic research and interviews with 20 (Orthodox and non-Orthodox) converts. The main focus of this article is on the negotiations of gender and power in the process of giyur. The role of gender difference seemed to be one of the most important experienced differences between Orthodox and Liberal/Progressive forms of Jewish life. Not only is there an impact in the decision to join one or another community, but notions of gender and sexuality also influence the whole process of giyur, from first attraction to continued learning, implementation, and practicing of a “Jewish life.” Women have to deal with the power of the rabbinic court, who eventually can decide whether a candidate is allowed to become Jewish. However, questions of authority and individual choice played a role in different gendered areas as well: the position of women in the synagogue, reflections on the impact of relationships and the implementation of certain commandments in their everyday lives. Analysing these dynamics offers insight into the intersections of gender, power and conversion, as well as the role of gender in contemporary Jewry.
Abstract: This chapter highlights stories of women’s conversion in contemporary Western European contexts. Theorising the connections among religion, storytelling, identity, subject-formation, and conversion, the chapter conceptualises conversion stories as enabling individual subjects to negotiate a terrain of difference and transformation, including multiple dimensions of belonging. On the basis of a critical operationalisation of Wohlrab-Sahr’s (1999) analytical concepts of ‘syncretism’ and ‘symbolic battle’, the analysis focuses on four memoirs written by women who turn to Judaism and Islam, and looks at motivations for conversion, and understandings of the past and present and different selves. The case studies show that the memoirs construct lifeworlds and selves on a continuum of syncretic and symbolic battle scripts. They moreover demonstrate that converts’ experiences need to be situated within the respective religious traditions, as well as within larger discourses about Judaism and Islam in Western Europe. As such, the chapter contributes empirical insights into experiences of religious, social, and gendered trajectories of conversion/transformation. Moreover, it connects empirical converts’ experiences of becoming Jewish or Muslim to theorising the positions of Judaism and Islam as minoritised traditions and communities in Western Europe.
Abstract: This chapter analyses the intersections between Judaism, conversion, belonging, and gender, through the lived material practice of the tallit. Conversion to a religious tradition is not merely a change in mind set, but rather implies the learning, performance and negotiation of a religious habitus. This is especially the case with conversions to Judaism, or giyur, which focuses on the learning of practices and commitment to synagogue life. Such process of ‘self-making’ is directly related to questions of gender and the possibility of taking on certain objects and tasks. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, this chapter traces how conversion materialises in daily ritual practice for women in various Jewish communities in the specific ritual use of the prayer shawl, or tallit. Gender equality has been one of the prime topics by which liberal Judaism came to distinguish itself from orthodoxy in the Netherlands. A symbol of this difference is the use of the tallit by women, both in the local Dutch context as well as internationally. Historically, women have been excluded from Shul life, and wearing a tallit, as is permitted in liberal synagogues, can be revolutionary as a marker of inclusion. For converted women in the Jewish diaspora of the Netherlands, wearing the tallit in service can be a confirmation of their Jewishness, but is more often met with ambivalence. Some don’t practice, because they do not want to disturb the status quo, or because they see value in gender segregation in shul. Others do, for equally varied reasons, from political quests for emancipation, to pious desires for submission and devotion. As a compromise, specific forms of ‘women’s tallit’ have entered the synagogues, worn by women who do so out of pious desire. This chapter starts from these various prayer shawl practices, to trace broader questions of belonging. It asks not only how this object is used, but also which types of gender discourses, pious desires, and notions of agency are expressed through the use (or lack thereof) of a tallit.
Abstract: Little is known about the gendered dimension of anti-Semitism. Emerging from a literature review on social identity theory, anti-Semitism, sexism, and Jewish feminism, I demonstrate the urgency of examining the link between gender and experiences of anti-Semitism, using the FRA’s 2018 dataset “Experiences and Perceptions of Antisemitism: Second Survey on Discrimination and Hate Crime against Jews in the EU,” a large-scale survey of Jews in thirteen countries across Europe. The independent variable is gender identity. Five dependent variables relate to experiences of sex/gender discrimination, physical attacks, offensive/threatening comments, offensive gestures/staring, and online harassment. Using five control variables—being identifiable as a Jew in public, country, Jewish identity, education level, and Jewish population in one’s neighborhood—I engage with descriptive statistics and binary logistic regression analysis to analyze my variables. The findings show that while women are more likely to experience gender discrimination, men are significantly more likely to experience anti-Semitism.
Abstract: My thesis is an empirical study of young British Jews, exploring their experience of being Jewish, British, and male in society today given the fluid nature of each of these aspects of their identity. As society has changed over the last half century each of these aspects which had normative monocultural taken-for-granted expressions have been repeatedly deconstructed, examined and re-built, and I argue that in the process they have emerged as fluid entities. It is in negotiating these fluid aspects that today’s young male Jews ask, what does it mean to be a Jew, what does it mean to be British, and what does it mean to be male as they try to make sense of their lives. The method chosen for this study has been the in-depth interview which I conducted with a sample of 16 interviewees chosen to reflect the diverse range of religiosity, age and intellectual ability which is apparent in the heterogenous nature of the Anglo-Jewish community supplemented with a group discussion. I have produced an interview tool of overlapping coloured discs representing the three aspects I am studying as an aid for the interviewee to think and talk about themselves. I have transcribed the interviews and used constructionist thematic analysis to advance my argument. I argue that Jewishness is constructed between extremes of adherence to halachic requirement on one hand and a Jewishness experienced as cultural affinity to history, family, and tradition without recourse to halacha on the other hand. I argue that Britishness is being experienced between varying degrees of nationalistic localism against cosmopolitan liberalism played out against a backdrop of Britain contrasted with the rest of the world and also London against the rest of Britain. With regard to being male, I have rejected the view that masculinity is constructed in the inherently unstable terms of physicality against intellectualism. Instead, I argue that it is better considered as lying in a range between competitive hegemonic masculinity on the one hand against a cooperative model with which physicality and intellectualism can combine to produce a more stable and emotionally satisfying mode of living. I argue that young Jewish men inhabit a fluid three-dimensional matrix being aware of the pitfalls of particularism, xenophobia, and misogyny as they negotiate their relationships with their families, communities, and wider society to construct their Jewish British masculine identity.
Abstract: In current political developments in Europe and the USA, it is striking that a strengthening of nationalism goes hand in hand with certain gender stereotypes, and often this discourse is also linked to moments of antisemitism. Using the example of the Austrian Freedom Party, this chapter analyses this mutual interplay of ideologies and elaborates in particular on the question of how and to what extent an antisemitism that is not expressed openly, can latently be effective in nationalism and antifeminism. Especially against the background of the taboo of manifest and racist antisemitism in the Western, post-national-socialist political public sphere in Germany and Austria, an analysis of this phenomenon is highly relevant. I call this phenomenon the intersectionality of ideologies. It can provide insight into whether antisemitism, as sometimes pretended, has actually been overcome, or whether it is not in fact effective within other ideologies, such as nationalism or antifeminism. The chapter will therefore focus on an analysis of the similarities of antisemitic and antifeminist discourses in the Austrian Freedom Party and their contribution to the strengthening of a nationalist collective.
Abstract: In the Netherlands, religions are often positioned as opposite to secular ideals of women’s freedom. While women’s emancipation supposedly grants women their autonomy, religions are suspected of reaffirming gender inequality. In this religion-versus-emancipation dilemma, questions of the body are pertinent, since traditional religions are framed as restricting and regulating women’s bodies. Questions about modesty, sexual relations, clothing and food preparations often come up in such debates. There seems to be a particular tension for women who convert to religions that are often regarded as ‘gender conservative’, and this chapter sheds light on that field of tension. This expands the field of women’s conversion – which has typically focused on Islamic women – by employing a comparative analysis of interviews and participant observation with Jewish, Christian and Muslim Dutch women converts. Joining a religion that one was not raised in is a process of ethical self-fashioning through training and disciplining of both the body and mind. Converts have to learn how to eat, how to pray, how to dress and how to have sex in such a way that it permits them to give shape to their religious subjectivity and pious desires. What I found is that performing authenticity is a central and embodied characteristic of modern-day conversion stories in the ‘age of authenticity’. This performance is often played out through the sexual and gendered body and religious subject transformations were closely related to sexual self-fashioning. In order to understand these links between conversion, sexuality and the body, I focus on experiences and ideas about virginity and marriage, menstruation and homosexuality. In this chapter, I aim to show that sexual embodiments and ethics cannot be understood as either religious or secular, but rather as a new form of religious subjectivity within Europe as a space where authenticity has become the most important mode for selfhood.
Abstract: With Finnish independence in 1917, long-awaited legislative reforms were put in force in the country. Jews gained the right to obtain Finnish citizenship. The same year, the Finnish Parliament implemented the Civil Marriage Act (CMA), allowing the country’s Jewish citizens to marry non-Jews without converting to Christianity. In 1922, the constitutional right to freedom of religion was affirmed in the Freedom of Religion Act (FRA), granting the right to practice religion in public and private and allowing Finnish citizens to refrain from belonging to any religious community altogether. The FRA also addressed the question of children whose parents belonged to different religious congregations or who were unaffiliated. The FRA defined the religious affiliation of children after their father; this was, however, against the Orthodox Jewish law (halakhah) that the local Finnish Jewish communities wished to follow, which traced a child’s religious affiliation matrilineally.
Due to the small size of the Jewish marriage market and to the secularizing tendencies of the Jewish congregations, the number of intermarriages started to grow in the early twentieth century, and soon, they became a characteristic phenomenon of Finnish Jewish realities. This resulted in a growing number of halakhically non-Jewish children. Thus, the communities faced several challenges in terms of their administration and everyday practices.
This article-based dissertation provides an overview of Finnish-Jewish intermarriages from 1917 until the present by analyzing archival materials together with newly collected semi-structured ethnographic interviews. The interviews were conducted with members of the communities who are partners in intermarriages, either as individuals who married out or as individuals who married in and converted to Judaism. The key theoretical underpinning of the study is vernacular religion, which is complemented by relevant international research on contemporary interreligious Jewish families.
The results of the study show that while most informants understand Jewish law flexibly and rarely consider themselves “religious,” the differences between the practices of intermarried men and women are remarkable. Whereas women employ creativity and “do Judaism” to establish practices they consider meaningful for their Jewishness and Jewish identity, men tend to draw on their cultural heritage and often refrain from creative practices. The study also indicates that the adult conversion of women is far more common than that of men, making conversion a gendered phenomenon in the Finnish Jewish communities. Most informants of this study “do Judaism” in various ways and often choose to perform certain traditions to strengthen their connection to Judaism and ensure Jewish continuity through their children. Intermarried members and converts form a large part of the Finnish Jewish communities, and thus the results shed light on patterns that can be assumed to characterize multiple Finnish Jewish households.
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: Most academic research on Jews in Germany addresses the past, culture, and religion. If the present is discussed, researchers mainly focus on antisemitism. Ina SCHAUM breaks this pattern. Her research needs to be located in a transdisciplinary framework. In her work, she introduces individual lives, and expressions of agency, indicating the divide between the diversity of Jews, and their experiences, and how they are perceived by non-Jews. Boldly, she uses case studies to depict what "doing being Jewish" means for young Jews in connection to their intimate love relationships. The outcome is refreshing; it does full justice to Jewish life-worlds in Germany. By way of presenting two young Jews in Germany in depth, SCHAUM lifts the lid on the underlying diversity of Germany's Jewish population. She contrasts constructions of Jews with real living Jews, revealing that Jewishness is but one aspect in their quest for love, and that the researcher of the bespoke Jew is indeed also an implicated subject. SCHAUM's work needs to be appreciated as a harbinger in the country where she is based. Informed by English-language anthropology and sociology, she pushes methodological boundaries, consistently questioning the line between researcher and researched from late 1960s onwards. Jews are her case study; yet her theoretical considerations and methodological reflections extend much further.
Abstract: À travers un retour sur nos terrains ethnologiques respectifs, nous nous proposons de comprendre comment se construisent les espaces du culte dans les rapports de genre. Ces terrains sont situés dans la périphérie parisienne, à Sarcelles, qui a connu une concentration importante de « populations juives », émigrées d’Afrique du Nord, depuis une ou deux générations; à Marseille et dans sa périphérie, première région où les « populations musulmanes » émigrées se sont installées en métropole, qui aujourd’hui sont majoritairement d’origine maghrébine et comorienne. Mais ils sont essentiellement circonscrits par des pratiques juives et musulmanes qui peuvent être multisituées et plurielles davantage que par des sites particuliers.
Nous souhaitons entrer dans les rapports de genre autrement qu’à partir des rapports constitués, ceux qui attribuent, en particulier dans l’univers religieux, des places différentes aux hommes et aux femmes contribuant à construire des positions et des identifications sexuées, conscientes ou non. Nous interrogeons donc les positions affichées, montrant la dynamique des relations, des jeux, des non-dits, prenant en compte les interactions entre les deux positions sexuées. De même, tenant compte de la façon dont les sujets construisent l’espace du culte, nos contributions respectives portent sur une ethnologie du quotidien, privilégiant l’étude des interstices et des entre-deux établissant ainsi une comparaison entre nos deux terrains par l’analyse d’axes transversaux.
Nous entendons « espace du culte » au sens d’un espace, qui sans être nécessairement construit à cet effet, est cependant institué et clairement défini spatialement et temporellement. Nous ne restreignons pas l’espace du culte à celui de la synagogue ou de la mosquée, d’une part parce que les édifices officiels sont trop étroits pour contenir la masse des fidèles qui investissent d’autres lieux ; d’autre part, parce que dans le judaïsme, comme en islam, les femmes ne sont pas obligées de fréquenter les lieux de culte au même titre que les hommes. Nous analysons donc plusieurs types d’espace – intermédiaire, interstitiel, privé mais sacralisé par des rituels – ainsi que les modalités de leur investissement. Ceux qui sont officiellement dédiés au culte doivent leur caractère religieux à la pratique collective permettant au groupe de faire communauté le temps d’un office. Mais ces lieux sont investis aussi par des relations sociales profanes et marqués par une alternance de temps religieux et de temps ordinaires. La multifonctionnalité des espaces du culte induit des spatialités mobiles liées aux diverses temporalités. Les temporalités, dans les espaces du culte, alternent temps ordinaires et temps religieux. Il arrive que des interactions sociales liées aux temps ordinaires interviennent dans les temps religieux et inversement. Les temporalités ne sont donc pas fixes mais aussi fluctuantes que les espaces sont poreux.
Au delà des règles dogmatiques légiférant l’accès des observantes juives ou musulmanes aux espaces du culte et qui contribuent à assigner un statut différencié aux femmes, nous verrons que la position et les identifications sexuées se construisent aussi dans l’interaction à l’autre.
Dans cette contribution, nous n’avons pas cherché à neutraliser le genre des chercheures pas plus que celui des sujets. Les situations vécues ont des effets sur l’ethnologue qui l’amènent à négocier et reconstruire constamment sa posture. Elles sont décrites ici comme des situations interstitielles, « d’entre-deux » ; comme des révélateurs de la construction sociale des genres, d’enjeux de statuts et de pouvoir qui nous informent sur le contexte « minoritaire » de l’islam et du judaïsme dans la société laïque française.
Abstract: Cet ouvrage, issu d’une recherche originale, présente une approche comparative, qui reste encore peu étudiée, sur les pratiques religieuses contemporaines des femmes juives et musulmanes. Chaque chapitre, rédigé « à quatre mains » par un(e) spécialiste du judaïsme et l’autre de l’islam, met en lumière convergences et divergences dans une analyse croisée de thématiques communes ayant trait au féminin. Les textes posent les questions de l’accès des femmes juives et musulmanes à l’espace du culte (mosquée, synagogue) et aux textes religieux (Torah, Coran, Talmud, Hadith), à leur étude et à leur interprétation, donnant lieu à de nouvelles exégèses féminines et à l’émergence de nouvelles fonctions religieuses (imams musulmanes, femmes-rabbins et autres rôles rituels) ; les débats sur le droit de la famille (mariage et divorce) et les stratégies de contournement de certaines normes ; les problématiques liées à la sexualité, la pureté, l’homosexualité féminine, l’avortement et la reproduction médicalement assistée, dans les textes sacrés et les pratiques des femmes dans l’islam et le judaïsme aujourd’hui.
Abstract: In this article, I examine how contemporary Finnish Jewish women understand their roles and identities as women in a small Orthodox Jewish community, on the one hand, and as members of a tiny minority in largely secular and predominantly Lutheran/Christian Finland, on the other. How do Finnish Jewish women negotiate their identities in relation to their community, strongly organised along gender lines, and in relation to Finnish society and especially its equality ideals and norms? I divide my article into four sections. First, I give a short overview of the theory of intersectionality, concentrating on its possibilities and limitations for the study of religion and gender in general, and for the study of Judaism, specifically. Second, I focus on my informants’ views of the gendered practices of their Orthodox Jewish community, which, by many standards, is a very specific form of Orthodoxy, which could be called ‘Finnish Orthodoxy’. Third, I analyse my informants’ views on how they perceive being Jewish women in contemporary Finland. The intersection of the last two broad themes will highlight the realities of Finnish Jewish women in contemporary Finland. Fourth, I discuss possibilities and limitations of intersectional theorising in the light of my data.
Abstract: Im Zentrum des Dissertationsprojektes steht die empirisch verankerte Erarbeitung einer intersektionellen, feministischen Theorie von Liebe und Liebesbeziehungen als Orte des Doing Gender in Verschränkung mit Doing Being Jewish (Jüdischsein) bzw. mit Doing Being German (Deutschsein). Was Jüdischsein und Deutschsein bedeutet und wie es konzeptualisiert werden kann, soll durch die Erhebung narrativer Interview empirisch rekonstruiert werden.
Die Dissertation hat zwei Ausgangspunkte. Der erste ist, sich Liebe als eigenständigem Forschungsgegenstand feministischer Analyse zuzuwenden. In Liebesbeziehungen – als verkörperlichte Erfahrungen von Liebe und Begehren, Macht und Dominanz – werden Geschlechterverhältnisse und andere Ungleichverhältnisse und damit zusammenhängend vergeschlechtlichte Arbeitsteilungen von care work und emotional work (re)produziert, verändert, aufgehoben oder legitimiert. Der zweite Ausgangspunkt ist die Feststellung von Kurt Grünberg in seiner Studie „Liebe nach Auschwitz“ (2000), dass Liebesbeziehungen den wohl intimsten Kontakt zwischen Nachkommen von Überlebenden der Shoah und Nachkommen von Täter*innen, Mitläufer*innen und Nazi-Sympathisant*innen im Land der Täter*innen und Opfer bilden. Vor dem Hintergrund der Shoah und der Nürnberger Gesetze von 1935, welche das sogenannte „Blutschutzgesetz“ und das Verbot von Eheschließungen und Geschlechtsverkehr zwischen Juden/Jüdinnen* und Nicht-Juden/Jüdinnen* umfassten, ist zu fragen, welche Gefühlserbschaften und Erinnerungen (active memory) an die Folgegenerationen weitergegeben werden und wie intime Beziehungen und Liebesbeziehungen davon (nicht) beeinflusst werden. Die beiden Ausgangspunkte sollen miteinander verknüpft werden, um eine kritische, intersektionelle feministische Analyseperspektive in Bezug auf Liebesbeziehungen als auch auf die komplexen Differenz- und Identitätskonstruktionen von Jüdischsein und Deutschsein einzunehmen.
Außerdem sollen forschungsethische Überlegungen in Hinblick auf Theoriebildungsprozesse, Methodenentwicklung und Ergebnisdarstellung im Kontext der „negativen deutsch-jüdischen Symbiose“ (Diner 1986) einerseits und einer feministischen Epistemologie des „situierten Wissens“ (Haraway 1988) andererseits entwickelt werden, da die individuelle, familiäre und soziale Verstrickung mit dem Nationalsozialismus keine Position der Unbeteiligtheit zulässt und eine reflektierte und selbstkritische Positionierung von mir als Forscherin verlangt.
Abstract: Au carrefour des études de genre, de la sociologie des religions, et de la sociologie politique, cette recherche explore la dimension locale des conflits religieux sur le genre à partir du cas du judaïsme français des années 2000 et la fabrique organisationnelle du genre et de l'identité juive dans les synagogues non orthodoxes en France, qui se caractérisent notamment par l'ouverture du rituel aux femmes. L'approche ethnographique permet d'analyser les dispositifs de socialisation (comme l'organisation de l'espace, du rituel, de la prise de parole, de la formation religieuse, de la mobilisation pour le développement de la synagogue) qui contribuent à la production locale du genre. En particulier, cette thèse montre comment la perception de la division sexuée du travail dans l'organisation, l'appropriation des débats religieux sur le genre, la légitimité de mobilisations locales pour la participation des femmes au rituel, dépendent de la position de chaque organisation dans les concurrences religieuses. Dans une configuration où la place des femmes dans l'espace religieux est utilisée comme marqueur symbolique entre courants religieux en concurrence pour la définition de l'identité juive (configuration que l'on propose d'appeler plus généralement politisation religieuse du genre) la participation répétée au rituel et aux activités de la synagogue engendre un intérêt pratique pour le genre, qui se traduit notamment par une fierté égalitaire masculine et par une injonction féminine à la justification. Si les travaux sur genre et religion ont surtout abordé les contextes religieux conservateurs, cette recherche explore la normativité des contextes religieux égalitaires
Abstract: Feminist research into the position and participation of women in contemporary fundamentalist and traditionalist identity movements shows how essentialist ideologies of sexual difference are often deployed in critique of western secular liberal feminism. In this article the author draws a comparison between discourses of belonging according to studies of ba'alot teshuvahin the USA (female “returnees” to an Orthodox Jewish lifestyle), and her own interviews with “frumfrom birth” women (raised as haredi) in the strictly Orthodox Jewish community of Antwerp, Belgium. Whereas for the former, a rhetoric of choice, essentialism, and religious ideologies of female superiority appeared important, for the frum-born women, gender is more a question of orthopraxis and religious role equivalence. Nevertheless, the author argues that for the strictly Orthodox Jewish diasporic community in question, an increase in gender conservatism, with particular notions of female sexuality and modesty, goes hand in hand with isolationism vis-à-vis the surrounding secular society.
Abstract: From the Introduction by Rosalind Peston (Chair of the Task Force): Since the publication of Women in the Jewish Community in 1994
I have been asked on numerous occasions, ‘What happened to your
report and its many recommendations?’.
In 2008 I approached the Board of Deputies of British Jews with a
view to re-visiting the work we had carried out a decade and a half
earlier. It soon became apparent that we had to broaden the scope
of our original project, reaching out not just to those women who
contributed to the ideas in our 1994 report and whose lives had
now moved on, but to a whole new generation of younger Jews.
The intervening fifteen years had seen many changes in family
structure and attitudes to personal relationships, in the economic
climate and above all in the ways in which we communicate through
new technologies. How had these changes impacted on women’s
lives, on their approaches to their Judaism and on their sense of
Jewish heritage? How had they influenced women’s perception
of community?
One of the most exciting elements of the 2009 Review was our
on-line survey facilitated by SurveyMonkey. Through this survey
along with our focus and discussion groups, Facebook site,
questionnaires and face to face meetings we elicited the views
and opinions of almost a thousand Jewish women.
We decided to let the women speak for themselves and this report
Connection, Continuity and Community: British Jewish Women
Speak Out is the result. We believe it represents the authentic
voice of female Jewry in Britain today. Women are very articulate
about their desire for a cohesive, dynamic, inclusive community.
We sincerely hope they will be listened to and that the leadership
of the community, across the religious spectrum, will heed their
concerns and their hopes.
Abstract: It seems clear that the UK Jewish community makes it hard for the kind of high achieving and well educated women who thrive in secular life to take on leadership responsibilities within it. In contrast to the wider ‘third sector’, Jewish charitable organisations have very few women in leadership roles despite exceptionally high levels of achievement and education. Four-fifths of a large sample of both men and women in the British Jewish community surveyed in February and March 2012 demanded change in the gender balance of our organisations, statistically signifying clear support for a pro-active and long-lasting agenda for change now proposed in this report by the Commission on Women in Jewish Leadership (CWJL). Evidently this state of affairs resonates strongly with our community. The Commission takes this and other research data from both organisations and individuals as a broad mandate of support from across the community, and it now looks to leaders and to our organisations for implementation. The CWJL was set up by the JLC in early 2011 to recommend ways of advancing more women to senior paid and voluntary roles in the community. It now calls on the community publicly to acknowledge that the current state of affairs is unsustainable, to pledge to make changes that will create equal opportunities for women and men and to act to promote more women to leadership positions. The CWJL accepts the reality that our community, being relatively conservative, prefers evolution to revolution, and that it would prefer to move slowly. The recommendations seek to work within this reality, while noting that the gender imbalances in our leadership are a pressing matter of equality and social justice. There is also a compelling need to address the issues raised by this inquiry before another generation, particularly of young women, becomes alienated, and their talents are lost to the community. The Commission limited the scope of its attention to voluntary (‘lay’) and professional leadership roles in Jewish communal organisations. The terms of reference were tightly defined in order to be realistic about opportunities for change. Some other, related issues which were relevant only to certain sections of the community were frequently raised by members of the public and acknowledged in the Commission’s deliberations (such as helping women back into work, men and leadership, women and reading from the Torah) but have purposely not been followed through with specific recommendations in this report as they fall outside the remit of the CWJL. The issues of women leading synagogue boards and educating children about gender equality form a recommendation for future work as they are key to meeting our remit long term but are beyond our specific brief or expertise. Other areas of diversity and equality, such as age or disability, were not part of our remit. The CWJL’s recommendations cover Governance, Personal Development, Networking, Communications and Other (comprising ideas which do not fall into any of the other four categories). At the heart of the recommendations is a recognition that change needs to come from women themselves, both individually and collectively; from the Jewish community’s organisations and institutions and also, from schools and youth organisations. Before change can take place in organisations, they need to recognise where and when there is indeed a problem.To drive the specific recommendations under the five headings introduced above, the Commission recommends the establishment of a group of lay leaders, to be known as the Equality Support Group (ESG), housed in an
existing organisation, which will monitor progress and ensure that we move forward on this vital issue. The focus is
on ‘tachlis’ (action/substance) not talk.
Abstract: This report has been written at the request of Jewish Women’s Aid (JWA). JWA commissioned this
research to better understand several key factors influencing their work: general Jewish opinion
and knowledge about domestic violence; the ways in which current and former clients come to
JWA and how useful they find its services; and the position of JWA in the UK and in comparison to
other Jewish domestic violence charities in Israel, the USA and Canada.
The researchers determined that the best way of ascertaining information about these areas of
interest was to conduct a three- stage research project. Firstly, a literature review was undertaken
to contextualise the work JWA does in both a national and international context. This literature
review informs chapter two of this research report, which provides an overview of domestic
violence in the UK with references throughout to three countries of interest to Jewish Women’s Aid
(because of the presence of Jewish-specific domestic violence charities), namely Canada, the
United States, and Israel.
Secondly, the researchers conducted a domestic violence Jewish general opinion survey, which
yielded 842 complete responses. The survey was largely taken by women and this response rate
makes this survey, to the knowledge of the authors and JWA, the largest Jewish survey on a
women’s issue ever conducted.
This report discusses the findings from the survey; see chapter three for details, including a discussion of the methodology employed.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the researchers conducted face –to- face interviews with
twenty current or former JWA clients, who agreed to speak to them after communication from JWA
employees. Chapter four of this report gives voice to the personal suffering experienced by
women; it illuminates the ‘real life stories’ behind the statistics.
The report concludes with recommendations that JWA will be implementing to continue combating
domestic violence in all of its forms; these recommendations are based both on the findings arising
from the general survey and client interviews, and from examples of best practice from domestic
violence charities in the UK and abroad.
