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Nashim
- A Journal of Jewish Women's
Studies and Gender
Issues
Current
issue (no. 5, Summer 2002):
Feeding an Identity:
Gender, Food, and Survival
 Contents
Norma Baumel Joseph
Introduction
Carol Meyers
"Having Their Space and Eating There Too: Bread
Production and Female Power in Ancient Israelite
Households"
Nina Mandel
"Spirituality, Baking, and the Queen of Heaven"
Ruth Abusch-Magder
"Eating 'Out': Food and the Boundaries of Jewish
Community and Home in Germany and the United States"
Wendy Zierler
"The Rabbi's Daughter In and Out of the Kitchen:
Feminist Literary Negotiations"
Paulette Kershenovich
"Evoking the Essence of the Divine: The Construction
of Identity Through Food in the Syrian Jewish Community
in Mexico"
Mary I. Hale
"Not a Seder: Gender, Meal, and Memory Revisited
in a Christian Community"
Sonia Zylberberg
"Oranges and Seders: Symbols of Jewish Women's Wrestlings"
Rob Baum
"The Order of Things" (poem)
Farideh Dayanim Goldin
"Blood Lines" (memoir)
Resident artist: Judith Margolis
"The Wedding of Food and Death"
Issue
#5, Feeding an Identity: Gender, Food, and Survival,
was edited by Norma Baumel Joseph.
"Why do we talk disparagingly of 'kitchen Judaism'?"
asks Norma Baumel Joseph in her "Moreover, is it coincidental
or consequential that the food preparer -- the neglected
or invisible ritual expert and participant -- is
female? Food appears to play a profound part in
Jewish communal identity and religious life, but
the woman's ...productive power is lost to the observer's
gaze."
Precisely because it is the quintessential requirement
of nature, food becomes a primary product and vehicle of culture;
and women, by and large, are the medium of that
metamorphosis. In NASHIM no. 5, seven writers take
a learned look at the "meat and potatoes"
(or rice and lentils) of Jewish cultural life, at
the mainly female hands that cook and serve them,
at the formative and transformative effect of food
upon community and community upon food, and at how
women think about their roles as food providers.
True to NASHIM's multicultural, interdisciplinary
mission, the contents span centuries and continents. Archaeologist Carol
Meyers analyzes how women's role in grinding flour and making it into
bread for a family made them economic and social agents of community in
biblical times, while Nina Mandel, a rabbinical student, takes a theological
look at how certain baked goods mentioned in Scripture might have shored up
or -- in the hands of women -- challenged the hierarchy of religious leadership.
Ruth Abusch-Magder and Paulette Kershenovich, writing,
respectively, on the nineteenth-century German Jewish
community and the present-day Syrian Jewish community
in Mexico, examine the role of traditional foods
in defining the borders of community. The introduction
of new foods, either from the "outside," non-Jewish world or
from different Jewish communities encountered by Jewish immigrant groups, impacts
on how Jews define their identity both to themselves
and to the world.
Wendy Zierler focuses on a very specific group of
women: three rabbis' daughters in the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries who -- unlike most
of their female contemporaries -- absorbed Jewish
learning in their natal homes and later turned to
the writer's life. How did this affect their attitudes
toward the place allotted to them in the kitchen
by traditional society, and toward the women --
mothers, sisters, friends -- who remain there?
Finally, two articles discuss new rituals created
by women, both in the context of the Passover story.
Mary Hale, the only non-Jewish contributor, describes
the effect on an Anglican community of a ritual
communal meal designed to commemorate the Seder
which was Jesus' last supper, without co-opting
the Jewish ritual itself. In Sonia Zylberberg's
article, we learn the history and cultural reverberations,
past and future, of a new feminist Jewish symbol:
the orange on the Seder plate.
Food itself, women, and the dynamic preservation
and transformation of tradition are the recurrent themes of this colorful
issue, which is rounded out by creative perspectives in poetry, memoir,
and art. Particularly moving is Audrey Flack's account, cited by art editor
Judith Margolis in her essay on "The Wedding of Food and Death,"
of the reception of her vanitas painting, "World War II," by a
group of women Holocaust survivors.
SYMPOSIUM
Changes
and Directions in Women's and Gender Studies: Contrasts
and Comparisons -- participants: Renée Levine
Melammed, Deborah Bernstein, Sara R. Horowitz, Leah
Shakdiel, Asunción Blasco, Erella Shadmi,
Ada Rapoport-Albert, Galit Hasan-Rokem, Susan Handelman
Brenda Socachevsky Bacon
Reader Response: "How Shall We Tell the Story of
Bruria's End?"
The Jewish Family: Myth and
Reality
The Second Conference of European Female Rabbis,
Cantors, Jewish Activists, and Scholars, Centrum
Judaicum/Neue Synagogue, Berlin, Germany, June 1-4,
2001, reviewed by Lori Klein
Ronit Lentin
Israel and the Daughters of the Shoah: Reoccupying
the Territories of Silence, reviewed by Sybil Sheridan
Adele Berlin
JPS Bible Commentary: Esther, reviewed by Pnina
Galpaz-Feller
Call for papers Nashim no.
7
Autobiography and Memoir
Call for papers Nashim no.
8
Tense Dialogues: Speaking (Across) Multicultural
Differences in the Jewish/Israeli/International
Feminist World
AVAILABLE BACK ISSUES:
No. 4 (2001): Feminist Interpretations of Rabbinic
Literature
No. 3 (2000): Motherhood (edited by Susan Sered)
No. 2 (1999): Crossing into Modernity: Renegotiating
Jewish Gender Identities
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Deborah Greniman, Managing Editor
NASHIM: A Journal of Jewish Women's Studies and
Gender Issues
e-mail: dvorahg@zahav.net.il
Tel: (972-2) 6716096; Fax: (972-2) 6790840
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