American Jews and the Transformations of Masculinity

Session Submission Type: Panel Session

Abstract

In much of American Jewish history, “gender” still means “women.” In the 2010 edited collection GENDER AND JEWISH HISTORY, for instance, only one of the twenty-one essays focuses on men or masculinity. Masculinity matters not because historians have heretofore neglected to study men, but rather because it highlights the contingency of gendered norms and experiences of both sexes.

These three papers take the cultural moment of the first decades of the twentieth century as a pivotal moment for American Jewish masculinity. “American Jewish Men and the Anxieties of Breadwinning” shows how Jewish men encountered American norms of economics and social class. Immigrant Jews from Eastern Europe found the male breadwinner ethic particularly jarring, since they came from a society that endorsed married women’s work as a cultural norm. Yet once in the United States, most Jews quickly embraced middle-class standards of gendered economic behavior despite their initial poverty. “New York City Cafés as Spaces of Modern Jewish Masculinity” turns to another primarily urban space to consider literary, artistic, and intellectual modes of American Jewish life. Using English, Yiddish and Hebrew texts as well as images, it analyzes the café as a space where Jewish men enacted complex dynamics of modern Jewish masculinity. For many Jewish male writers, mostly immigrants from Eastern Europe with traditional background, the café represented a modern, secular Beys medrash (House of Study). “Afternoon Calisthenics at Woodbine: Jewish Agriculture and the Male Body” turns from the city to the fields, where it analyzes planned Jewish agricultural communities. The philanthropists, organizers, and immigrants who created Jewish agrarian communal settings argued that working the land was the best way to become—and demonstrate to others that they were capable of becoming—healthy, robust, physically strong, and productive American men.

Sub Unit

• Modern Jewish History in the Americas

Chair

• Pamela S. Nadell, American University

Individual Presentations

• New York City Cafés as Spaces of Modern Jewish Masculinity - Shachar M. Pinsker, University of Michigan

• American Jewish Men and the Anxieties of Breadwinning - Beth S. Wenger, University of Pennsylvania

• Afternoon Calisthenics at Woodbine: American Jewish Agriculture and the Male Body - Sarah Imhoff, Indiana University