Content area
Full text
Abstract
Although some researchers argue that a generation of feminist innovations and changes in American Jewish life has produced an egalitarian generation in which gender differences among Jewish children and adolescents are insignificant, this article argues that the salience of gender differences is a factor of the kinds of questions that children are asked by researchers. When the question of gender was explicitly posed to 67 Jewish children, subtle differences did emerge. Jewish girls were found to be more sensitive to issues of equal rights and sexism, more ambivalent about their proper roles, and more aware of the contributions of Jewish women than boys.
Since the 1980s, Jewish feminists have repeatedly testified to the contradictions Jewish women have experienced-sometimes as early as childhood-between their consciousness of themselves as females and their consciousness of themselves as Jews, that is, a conflict between two different identities (Plaskow 1976, 1990; Pogrebin 1991; Schneider 1984; Dufour 2000). Many Jewish women have reported the beginning of their disillusionment with Judaism as a painful side-effect of the dawning of their feminist consciousness (Kendall 1983; Umansky 1985). With the rise of the feminist movement, Jewish women began to complain about their exclusion from the public religious realm of Judaism [not being counted in a quorum for prayer, or minyan; being hidden behind a curtain (mechitzah) separating men from women in some synagogues, not being allowed to wear the Jewish ritual objects oftefillin, tallit, or kipot; not being allowed to read from the Torah, being barred from the rabbinate], their inferior status in Jewish religious law, and their subordinate role and lack of voice in the religious narrative of Judaism.
Although some of these women experienced a conflict of loyalties between their commitment to the Jewish community, which has seemed hostile to women at times, and their commitment to women and the women's movement, which at times seems hostile to Judaism and Jewish survival (Fishman 1993), other Jewish women have argued that these two identities are mutually supporting and that Judaism actually enhances and enriches their experience as women (Frankiel 1990; Greenberg 1981).
In the case of religious behavior, children are socialized into gender-appropriate behavior and roles in a number of ways, such as reinforcement of traditional roles for the child...