Interdisciplinary Approaches to Jewish Identity: What Counts as “Jewish” in Our Scholarship and in the Pioneering Work of Feminist Historian Gerda Lerner?

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Abstract

Discussant Kathy Bayer’s film, "Living History," documents Gerda Lerner’s life/work. Austrian Holocaust refugee, reformer, writer, pioneering feminist historian, Lerner forged the field―Women's History. As both Jew and researcher of African American women, she developed the concept "otherness" cross-culturally. Her works include: "The Creation of Patriarchy," "The Creation of Feminist Consciousness," "Black Women in White America," "Why History Matters."

This session aims for scholars from different disciplines to examine the centrality of Jewish “difference” to Jewish identity and the nature of such difference. Do ethnic, secular, cultural Jews and their scholarly work “count” as Jewish? How do gender, sex, race, class nuance Jewish identification? Why have Jewish Studies scholars overlooked Lerner as subject of Jewish study? Using Lerner’s example interweaving personal and professional, how have discussants’ own Jewish identities expanded as they’ve researched Jewish identity? How might Lerner’s work and ethnic/assimilated identity count as Jewish, given broader identity paradigms?


Joyce Antler, Samuel B. Lane Professor of American Jewish History and Culture, Brandeis University, connects Lerner’s Jewishness to her life and work and to personal conversations and professional collaborations with Lerner. Antler relates Lerner’s Jewish feminism to many American Jewish women’s liberationists and self-identified Jewish feminists interviewed in her forthcoming book on radical feminism and Jewish identity.


Deborah Dash Moore, Frederick G. L. Huetwell Professor of History, University of Michigan, relates Lerner and her second husband’s politics to L.A. and N.Y.C. communities where they lived and suggests Jewish dimensions to their milieus of family and post-WW II urbanism.


Debra Renee Kaufman, Professor Emeritus, Sociology, Northeastern University, focuses in her scholarship on what "counts" as Jewish in contemporary Jewish identities, and how this relates with religion. In Lerner's work, specifically her turning common assumptions about motherhood into predictors of tensions, Kaufman finds Jewish approaches to ways culture and identities often link ambiguously.


Rachael Kamel, Doctoral Candidate, Religion, Temple University, completed AJS’ Women's Caucus’ oral history (2013). Interviewing leaders showed multiple intersections fostering the Caucus. Women's history/gender analysis, emerging academic Jewish Studies, feminism’s impact on the American Jewish community together transformed what “counts” as Jewish within Jewish Studies and AJS, considering women’s participation and recognition of gender analysis.

Moderator Sharon Leder, Emeritus, English, Nassau Community College, Holocaust literature scholar, interviewed women twenty to eighty for work-in-progress, "Jewish Women’s Transformations." She found Lerner articulating these women’s wrestling with Jewish roots.

Sub Unit

• Interdisciplinary, Theoretical, and New Approaches

Moderator

• Deborah Dash Moore, University of Michigan

Discussants

• Joyce Antler, Brandeis University

• Debra Renee Kaufman, Northeastern University

• Rachael Kamel, Temple University

• Sharon Leder, Nassau Community College