Abstract
Diverse communities construct gender roles—the complex fabric of behaviors, attitudes, and expectations that societies weave around biological sexual differences—in different ways, producing widely varying ideas of normative “maleness” and “femaleness” and what constitutes a “family.” Changes in gender role construction are often precipitated by historical, economic, social, and political changes (Scott 1988). Evolving—and sometimes reversed—assumptions about maleness and femaleness have transformed many aspects of American—and American Jewish—religious life and culture in an American environment characterized by increasingly porous boundaries in general (Amato and Booth 1997). Researchers have examined these transformations in religions, relationships, families, and American society (Williams 2003, pp. 470–487) using frameworks such as gender theory, social scientific theories about marriage, families and sexuality, rational choice theory, signaling and economic theories, and even evolutionary biology. Few if any, however, have “connected the dots” and examined critical intersections between gendered changes in Jewish religious culture and gendered changes in Jewish personal and familial patterns.
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Notes
- 1.
See Becker, Gary S. 1983. A theory of marriage: Part I. The Journal of Political Economy 81: 813–846; 1974. A theory of marriage: Part II. The Journal of Political Economy 82: S11–S26.
- 2.
See Spence, Michael. 1974. Market signaling: informational transfer in hiring and related screening processes. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
- 3.
See Grossbard-Schechtman, Shoshana. 2003. Marriage and the economy: Theory and evidence from advanced industrial societies. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
- 4.
Two intriguing recent works are: Pagel, Mark. 2012. Wired for culture: Origins of the human social mind. New York: W.W. Norton & Company; and Pinker, Steven. 2002. The blank slate: The modern denial of human nature. New York: Penguin Books.
- 5.
Cited in Parmer, Daniel. What’s love got to do with it? Marriage and non-marriage among younger American Jews. Jewish Families Today, Table 2, Marital Status of American Jewish Adults by Age and Gender, Pew results repercentaged.
- 6.
The National Jewish Population Survey 2000-01 was conducted by the United Jewish Communities (UJC), Lawrence Kotler-Berkowitz et al. 2,148 respondents were interviewed. See www.jewishdatabank.org for more information.
- 7.
Esther Perel, speaking at the Council of Jewish Federations General Assembly in Chicago, 1987, reported on her research showing that single Jews deal with their own “ambivalence by projecting the unfavorable characteristics onto the opposite sex.” Calling single Jewish men’s and women’s attitudes a “toxic relationship,” she emphasized that this problem appeared to be peculiarly American.
- 8.
For decades, studies have documented that when Jewish children are enrolled in Jewish content classes, the Jewish connections and activities of the whole family are strengthened. For Jewish pre-school impact, see Feldman, Ruth Pinkenson. 1987. The impact of the day care experience on parently Jewish identity. New York: American Jewish Committee; for the familial impact of retaining teenagers in Jewish supplementary schools, see Fishman, Sylvia Barack. 2007. Generating Jewish connections: Conversations with Jewish teenagers, their parents, and Jewish educators and thinkers. In Family matters: Jewish education in an age of choice, ed. Jack Wertheimer. Waltham: Brandeis University Press/University Press of New England, pp. 181–210.
- 9.
These ideas are explored more fully in Irshai, Ronit. 2012. Fertility and Jewish law: Feminist perspectives on orthodox responsa literature. Waltham: Brandeis University Press/University Press of New England.
- 10.
A head-shot photograph of each of the women interviewed at length is included in this article, setting this Orthodox Union publication firmly on the “Modern Orthodox” side of retaining the behavior of picturing women in public settings and publications, rather than agreeing to the new haredi stringency of eliminating women’s pictures from mixed-gender publications.
- 11.
This is a report on studies showing that “the divorce rate for people 50 and older has doubled in the past two decades.”
- 12.
December 22, 2009, YU Tolerance Club and Wurzweiler School of Social Work hosted an event entitled, “Being Gay in the Orthodox World: A Conversation with Members of the YU Community,” moderated by Rabbi Yosef Blau.
- 13.
This section of the paper draws on data from Fishman, Sylvia Barack, and Daniel Parmer. 2008. Matrilineal ascent/patrilineal descent: The growing gender imbalance in contemporary Jewish life. Waltham: Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies; and Fishman, Sylvia Barack. 2012. Fathers of the faith? Three decades of patrilineal descent. Jerusalem: JPPI Annual Assessment.
- 14.
This study is based on 254 original in-depth interviews conducted by the author and her research team in the greater Boston, MetroWest, New Jersey, Atlanta, and Denver metropolitan areas in 1989–1999. The research was supported by the American Jewish Committee and implemented by researchers at Brandeis University. An expanded and revised analysis of these data was published as Double Or Nothing? op. cit.
- 15.
The National Jewish Population Survey 2000-01 was conducted by the United Jewish Communities (UJC), Lawrence Kotler-Berkowitz et al. 5,148 respondents were interviewed. See www.jewishdatabank.org for more information.
- 16.
Two data sets are employed in Sheskin and Hartman’s paper to provide quantitative data more recent than NJPS 2000-01. The first includes data from 56 communities on intermarriage rates and variables that may be related to explaining variations in intermarriage rates by community. The second is the “Decade 2000” data set, which combines the results of 22 local Jewish community studies conducted by Sheskin as the principal investigator between 2000 and 2010. It includes the results of 19,800 20-min interviews, and is a random sample of 547,000 Jewish households in the 22 communities.
- 17.
See also McGinity’s books. 2009. Still Jewish: A history of women and intermarriage in America. New York: NUY Press; and Marrying out: Jewish men, intermarriage, and fatherhood. Forthcoming 2014. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
- 18.
Cited in Nelson, Hart, and R. M. Potvin. Gender and regional differences in the religiosity of protestant adolescents. Review of Religious Research 22(3): 268–285.
- 19.
Statistical information in this chapter is drawn from NJPS 2000-01, analyzed in Phillips, Benjamin, and Sylvia Barack Fishman. 2006. Ethnic capital and intermarriage: A case study of American Jews. Sociology of Religion 67(4): 487–505.
- 20.
For a complete description of the creation of Shira Hadasha and its goals, see: Hartman, Tova. 2007. Feminism encounters traditional Judaism: Resistance and accommodation. Waltham: Brandeis University Press/University Press of New England.
- 21.
Raday’s “Women of the Wall” provides a thoughtful history. See also Fishman, Sylvia Barack. 2001. Comparative reflections on modern orthodoxy and women’s issues. Edah Journal 1/2(June); and Chestler, Phyllis, and Rivka Haut, eds. 2002. Women of the wall: Claiming sacred ground at Judaism’s holy site. Woodstock. Numerous journalistic accounts of the Women of the Wall appear regularly in the Israeli and American Jewish press.
- 22.
Stevenson, Richard W. 2012. Social issues return to dominant role in national debate. The New York Times, February 5; and Blow, Charles M. 2012. Santorum and the sexual revolution: At war with the 1960s. The New York Times, March 3.
- 23.
Cherry also cites interesting comparative research on marriage rates among Black American families: “Robert Mare and Christopher Winship (1991) and David Ellwood and David Rodda (1991) both find that 20 % and 15 %, respectively, of the decline in the black female marriage rate between 1970 and 1980 was the result of the decline in the employment of black men”(42).
- 24.
Men are given responsibility for and authority over women’s sexual and reproductive activities in the Hebrew Bible, for example, where female children belong to the father, who transfers ownership of each girl to a bridegroom following prescribed protocols. The Talmudic Tractate Kiddushin stipulates that a woman may only achieve the status of emancipation—of being responsible for herself, konah et atzmah (literally “buys” herself)—through three methods: being divorced by her husband, becoming a widow through a husband’s death, or simply outlasting her father and being a grown woman when he dies.
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Fishman, S.B. (2015). Gender in American Jewish Life. In: Dashefsky, A., Sheskin, I. (eds) American Jewish Year Book 2014. American Jewish Year Book, vol 114. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09623-0_14
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