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Carnal Knowledge Comes to Jewish Studies: Bay Area Professors Rethink the. Role of Sex and Gender in Judaism
Want to study the history of sexuality in Judaism? Images of God's body in the Bible and Midrash? Or perhaps the concept of gender in the Mishnah? You'd do well to come to the San Francisco Bay Area, the country's newest, most forward-looking center for Jewish studies, where three prominent professors are exploring these topics in local universities. The three -- Daniel Boyarin, Howard Eilberg-Schwartz and David Biale -- have written recent books that are defining the field of gender studies in its Jewish studies incarnation.
With titles like Mr. Boyarin's "Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture" (University of California Press), Mr. Eilberg-Schwartz's "God's Phallus and Other Problems for Men and Monotheism" (Beacon Press) and Mr. Biale's "Eros and the Jews: From Biblical Israel to Contemporary America" (Basic Books), these books seem designed to shock their staid field with provocative assertions and uncomfortable questions, a project all three scholars freely admit.
Mr. Boyarin tries to uncover "`feminist,' that is, resistant or oppositional voices in ancient texts" and to retrieve what he sees as the healthy regard for sexuality and the body of Talmudic culture as a counter-model to the deleterious mind/body dichotomy in Western Christian culture. He also proposes that the traditional prohibition against women studying Talmud stems more from the rabbis' valuation of women's reproductive function than from their denigration of the female mind.
Mr. Biale, who looks at concepts of sexuality in the sweep of Jewish history, explains that he wants to ask questions that advance the "erotic liberation" of Jewish culture and "temper the elements of fantasy and projection" between Jew and Gentile so that, in effect, modern Jews can see each other as sexy again.
Mr. Eilberg-Schwartz sees "God's Phallus" not only as a critique of Jewish patriarchy but as a step toward fostering a loving vision of fatherhood, since by breaking the age-old taboo against imagining God's form we can create images of a nurturing father God.
The three collaborated on a book of essays, "People of the Body" (edited by Mr. Eilberg-Schwartz and published by SUNY Press), that grew out of a conference held at the University of California-Berkeley...