Gender and Jewish identity

Gender scholarship, in both the social sciences and the humanities, shares many interesting parallels with identity studies. Both have been salient and productive areas of research within the various fields of Jewish Studies over the past three decades. The essays in Nashim 22 investigate a wide range of factors that affect women’s and men’s identities, social, religious, and political.

How did Jewish women leaders a century ago see themselves, and how were they seen by others? When 18-year-old women soldiers were sent to impart literacy skills to immigrant women on Israel's periphery, who were the learners and who were the teachers? Why would some ultra-Orthodox women take on standards of modesty going beyond the strict standards of their sects? Can women poets, writing in Hebrew, appropriate a stake in the world's literary and mythic corpus? What concepts of maleness and femaleness emerge when feminist analysis is applied to a famous Talmudic story? How are new roles emerging for women in the twenty-first century affecting the leadership of Orthodox Jewry? Can a biblical woman's voice emerge via the paintbrush of an Orthodox Jewish man? And, finally, whom do we call "mother"? These questions and more are addressed in Nashim 22. (https://iupress.org/connect/blog/gender-and-jewish-identity/)