Year: 2007
Type: article
Abstract: Gender, Place, and Memory in the Modern Jewish Experience: Re-Placing Ourselves is an unusual collection that brings together a wide range of scholars from Israel, Europe, and the United States with a focus on historical memory from a variety of perspectives-sociological, historical, literary, artistic, and architectural.Like many anthologies especially on gender, this volume also grows out of a conference, in this case, an interdisciplinary gathering at Bar-Ilan University in January 2001.As the editors tell us in their introduction, it was the conference and its focus on the interplay between gender, place, and memory that inspired this publication.''Different memories of different places and different gendered experiences provide the backdrop to understand the variation of Jewish life and identity.These places and experiences shade Jewish memories in a myriad of shades, forming the rainbow of colors of which modern Jewish life is composed'' (p.xix).This alluring statement frames our understanding of the conference and its mandate, although it is unfortunate that the editors never make clear the specific relationship between these goals and the volume before us.Regretfully, they never flesh out how differences of place, memory, and gender come together and are in conversation within modern Jewish life.In other words, we never learn about the conversations, the discussion within and between sessions and papers that took place at Bar-Ilan and might have helped readers who were not there understand how these fascinating essays are in conversation with each other.Instead, the editors have chosen more or less to allow the essays and the three sections of the volume to speak for themselves.Given this, they begin their introduction by describing the complexities of modern identity in general and modern Jewish identity formation in particular.As they explain, for Jews not only are there issues of ''who we are, where we come from and how we remember our past'' but also questions about ''choice'' (p.xix).As they explain, ''In certain cases, being Jewish is still a pivotal part of a person's self-definition.For others, it is but one of aThe Jewish Quarterly Review (Summer 2007)
Source: The Jewish Quarterly Review
Author: Laura Levitt
Language: English
Topic: Jewish Identity and Society
Subfield: Demography
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Gender equality
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W1968973017