Melilah: Manchester Journal of Jewish Studies (1759-1953)最新文献

{"title":"A Response to Lisa Fishbayn Joffe and Discussion Points","authors":"Laliv Clenman","doi":"10.31826/mjj-2019-130109","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.31826/mjj-2019-130109","url":null,"abstract":"This piece is a response to the challenging and inspirational paper presented by Dr. Fishbayn Joffe as part of the University of Manchester’s Sherman Conversations on the last fifty years in Jewish Studies and Gender Studies. I engage with Dr. Fishbayn Joffe’s focus on various attempts to resolve the legal problems related to kiddushin, and explore these issues through my academic experiences learning and teaching about kiddushin with a wide range of scholars and students over the past 25 years. After examining various avenues for legal change, given the inherent inequity of kiddushin, I ultimately argue in favour of its abandonment.","PeriodicalId":305040,"journal":{"name":"Melilah: Manchester Journal of Jewish Studies (1759-1953)","volume":"8 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124440867","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Women and Priests in Tractate Hallah: Gender Readings in Rabbinic Literature","authors":"C. Haendler","doi":"10.31826/mjj-2019-130112","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.31826/mjj-2019-130112","url":null,"abstract":"This paper examines new possibilities of gendered readings on the relationship between images of priesthood and women in rabbinic texts. It is argued that the ritual of hallah separation, transformed in rabbinic literature from the biblical genderless task into a female domain, emerges as an important element in the substitution of the priests’ work. In the absence of a Temple, the newly established rabbinic model of worship sees the act of hallah separation assume a strong imaginative significance, and the figure of the woman who performs it becomes a distinct ritual actor. A gender-sensitive analysis of the sources further exposes the rabbinically instituted rituals as competing with the priestly cult, as well as the ideologies embedded in the text. Moreover, working with such textual material requires the constant reconsideration of scales of values and ideas of hierarchy, in particular those concerning female work and women’s rituals, and it underlines the necessity to repeatedly rethinking our gendered","PeriodicalId":305040,"journal":{"name":"Melilah: Manchester Journal of Jewish Studies (1759-1953)","volume":"7 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132319667","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Reflections on Feminist Jewish Approaches to the Bible and the Making of a Feminist Jew in Israel","authors":"N. Graetz","doi":"10.31826/mjj-2019-130110","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.31826/mjj-2019-130110","url":null,"abstract":"This article incorporates personal insights into the development of feminist Jewish approaches to the Bible. I discuss what it means to be a feminist Jew in Israel and make a clear distinction between feminist Jews and Jewish feminists, by using my personal history as a feminist Jew and how my upbringing in an intense American Jewish environment influenced me. I explain how I became a feminist Jew and reflect on the Jewish feminism that emerged between the 70s and the 90s. My reflections are part of the process through which I became a midrash writer and an independent Bible scholar and in doing so I situate myself within various feminist/Jewish approaches to the Bible. In the third section of this article I describe how I and other feminist Jews have dealt with the problematics of being both Jewishly engaged as well as being ardent feminists. I conclude the article by citing a poem by a well-known Bible scholar who represents to me what it means to be female and Jewish at the same time. In 1992, I made a list of “How I became a feminist Jew.” This is what I wrote then: 1. I enjoyed Junior Congregation until I turned twelve when I moved upstairs in the main synagogue (in the women’s section) and became an usherette. The 5th grade cantillation class, where we learned how to read the Torah tropes, was wasted on me because they were irrelevant—who ever heard of a female Torah reader. I did not enjoy prayers in camp and I always tried to escape. I flunked Judaic subjects in high school despite my fluent Hebrew. 2. I read Betty Friedan when my first born daughter Ariella was five months old and thought my life was wasted and over and wished I could begin it again, unencumbered by marriage and children. I wrote an impassioned, single-spaced two pages bemoaning my fate and then forgot all about it. 3. My active synagogue participation began in Omer when Ariella was 10 years old with the realization that if I did not serve as a role model for the community, my daughter would not consider it natural either to participate in and/or lead services for her Bat Mitzvah. 4. I began to learn all the issues--reading the quarterly Conservative Judaism and everything else I could get my hands on; convincing my husband the rabbi of the correctness of this (as well as myself). First I learned how to chant a haftarah and then decided I could do Torah reading as well if not better than my husband and began doing it for more than forty years. 5. I began to write midrash when I returned from my “wasted” sabbatical in 1985. a. This resulted in the investigation of rabbinic midrash to see what its attitudes towards women were, and b. conscious writing of midrashim which reflected the feminist approaches of Judith Plaskow etc. 6. My participating in the first (and only) Jerusalem International Conference on Women and Judaism: Halacha and the Jewish Woman (1986) and in a feminist conference in Ireland, where I gave papers on the topic of the rape of Dinah which led me to a m","PeriodicalId":305040,"journal":{"name":"Melilah: Manchester Journal of Jewish Studies (1759-1953)","volume":"71 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121547885","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Liquid Love, Trans-Humanism and Eugenics: On Paradoxes in Post- Gender Jewish Feminist Thought","authors":"E. Ramon","doi":"10.31826/mjj-2019-130115","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.31826/mjj-2019-130115","url":null,"abstract":"My essay critiques concepts of “family fluidity” in the works of three leading American Jewish feminist thinkers: Judith Plaskow, Rachel Adler and Martha Ackelsberg. Based on “queer theory,” they question the very distinction between “man” and “woman” and the legitimacy of educating for a covenant between them. The term “fluidity” is borrowed from the works Zygmunt Bauman. In his book Liquid Love (2003), he criticizes the fluidity of boundaries in the sexual behavior of post-modern Western inhabitants. I address the serious bio-ethical challenges that follow the disintegration of these identities, ignored by feminist Jewish American thinkers.","PeriodicalId":305040,"journal":{"name":"Melilah: Manchester Journal of Jewish Studies (1759-1953)","volume":"64 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125090146","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Introduction: Five Decades of Gender in Jewish Studies","authors":"Katja Stuerzenhofecker","doi":"10.31826/mjj-2019-130102","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.31826/mjj-2019-130102","url":null,"abstract":"Where is gender in Jewish Studies and what does it mean? Labels send messages that result in selfselection but not always as intended by the sender. We chose gender because we assumed that it is now flexible enough to encompass methodological developments and individual preferences for feminism, women’s studies, men’s studies, gender studies, sexuality studies, and queer theory. The reader of this special issue, one of several similar recent stock-takes,1 can gauge to what extent our efforts to capture such breadth have been successful. The historiography of gender-sensitive study of Judaism encapsulates an interesting and ongoing dilemma of causality for the feminist movement: how do concepts and lived experience interact, and which of these should be the target for transformation? And indeed, is there a place for advocacy in scholarship? Two early English-language pieces on Jewish religion and gender set this out, both first published in Davka; I mention this in order to signal the importance of dissemination platforms willing to support this work. In fact, Rachel Adler’s “The Jew Who Wasn’t There: Halacha and the Jewish Woman” appeared in a special issue of Davka on “The Jewish Woman” in 1971. Adler addresses halakhic scholars as change-makers; she is clear that inaction on their part should be countered with direct action: “the most learned and halachically committed among us must make halakhic decisions for the rest.”2 Davka was not an academic publication, and it could be argued that Adler’s piece does not belong in the historiography of Jewish Studies, but Jewish activism. Yet, its republication in the Brandeisbased Response: A Contemporary Jewish Review in 1973, again in a special issue on ‘The Jewish Woman,’ illustrates the embodied link between advocacy and academia in the field, a theme that recurs in the following papers. What is also a recurring, still necessary process is the corralling of gendersensitive approaches to Jewish Studies into special issues, a sign that mainstreaming has not yet been achieved. The second early work to mention is Rita Gross’ examination of gender in God language, originally published in 1976. Whether it is still essential to address this issue today or whether it is a purposeless distraction emerges as a point of contention in our later discussion of Jewish religious thought. When Gross reviewed her career in gender studies in religion, she stated: “It has taken me a long time to learn that telling the truth can exact a heavy price.”3 “The truth” here refers to the development and application of research methods that do not omit, obscure, or falsify, something she helped to pioneer. Gross expressed her surprise about the resistance to such an endeavour. I suggest that there are at least two reasons for this resistance: first the perception that feminist gender studies in Jewish Studies makes patriarchy and by extension men look bad, and second that it makes Judaism look bad because it names its patriarch","PeriodicalId":305040,"journal":{"name":"Melilah: Manchester Journal of Jewish Studies (1759-1953)","volume":"30 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126442353","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Response to Ruth Gilbert, “Jewish Gender Studies and Contemporary Literary Criticism”","authors":"Tamar S. Drukker","doi":"10.31826/mjj-2019-130105","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.31826/mjj-2019-130105","url":null,"abstract":"This paper offers a brief overview of several key developments in modern Hebrew Israeli literature, moments where the female voice, of authors, poets and literary characters, paves the way to different sensitivities and voices in a seemingly hegemonic and strongly-ideological literary corpus. It aims to show that just like in world literature, in Jewish literature and in literary criticism, the rise of feminist readings opened the way to a variety of alternative voices, identities and otherness. Ruth Gilbert offers readers a brief, yet detailed and illuminating overview of the main themes and questions in gender studies and their uses for literary criticism in Jewish literature, and the many examples of the characterization of both Jewish men and women in a rich and diverse corpus. It is interesting to note that Gilbert begins and ends with queer studies as a development of feminist readings and theory, a field where masculine and feminine identities of Jewish characters are fluid, constantlychanging and these identities re-examine perceived norms and cultural expectations. I would like to take these theories and test them out on modern Hebrew literature produced in Israel. For most of the twentieth century this literature offered a voice to a culture obsessed with masculinity. Fearing and rejecting Boyarin's effeminate Jew, modern Hebrew literature gives room to a new man; the anti-diaspora muscular new Hebrew, active, strong and virile.1 This is the heroic Zionist fighter and lover familiar to English readers in the image of Ari Ben Canaan from Leon Uris’ Exodus (1958) and numerous male protagonists in Hebrew fiction, perhaps most iconic is Uri Kahana in Moshe Shamir’s 1947 novel He Walked through the Fields. The story of the nation is told in the fictional biography of these young men, and from the 1930s through to the 1980s, and some would argue still today, modern Hebrew literature was devoted to history. Women’s writing dealt with the domestic and emotional life of individuals outside or on the fringe of national narrative. In a literary landscape populated by “Ari”s and “Uri”s, the appearance of N’ima Sassoon in 1963 caused a minor earthquake.2 The narrator of this short story is a twelve-year-old Mizrahi girl in a religious Jewish school in a small town in Israel; a new literary type, an Israeli, Hebrew-speaking, Mizrahi female young artist. N’ima’s voice and poetry are a complete new addition to the “soundtrack” of Hebrew literature, and not only because she is a woman. This female voice is also religious, and Mizrahi, and the language, setting, and characters of this story offer an alternative to the seemingly uniform Israeli Hebrew literature. The author, Amalia Kahana-Carmon (1926-2019), is a product and a member of this dominant Zionist new Hebrew culture. Kahana-Carmon was born in a kibbutz, was raised in Tel Aviv, she was a member of the Palmach and she fought in 1948, and yet, when offering a female voice in Hebrew letters, the fe","PeriodicalId":305040,"journal":{"name":"Melilah: Manchester Journal of Jewish Studies (1759-1953)","volume":"51 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121028538","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Jewish Gender Studies and Contemporary Literary Criticism","authors":"R. Gilbert","doi":"10.31826/mjj-2019-130104","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.31826/mjj-2019-130104","url":null,"abstract":"My starting point for this discussion is my work in literary criticism, especially in terms of my ongoing research which focuses on contemporary British Jewish writing. So, drawing from a contemporary cultural context, in the following, I situate gender studies in relation to the ways in which it impacts on readings of recent Jewish literature. Rather than trying to sum up five decades of thinking about gender, I suggest a few moments in the development of gender studies, in terms of some of the achievements, challenges and changes we have seen since the 1970s; and then, in brief, I look forward to future developments. Theoretical Contexts Firstly, I want to give a broad overview of some theoretical contexts and then look at the ways in which ideas about Jewishness have intersected with those developments. Literary criticism is of course informed by wider intellectual, social and cultural movements. So, in line with other disciplinary approaches, I begin with an understanding of gender as focused on the construction and representation of categories of masculinity and femininity. In terms of the evolution of the kinds of gender studies that are applied within literary criticism today, we need to situate developments from the early contexts of Second Wave feminism and its impact in the academy during the 1970s and 1980s. Alongside a new emphasis on women’s experience within literature and criticism, which was formative throughout the 1980s and 1990s, feminism has to some extent evolved into what we now think of as gender studies. That is to say that the construction of masculinity, as a social and cultural category, has, alongside the study of femininity, also become a significant focus of enquiry. In recent years gender studies has further evolved to incorporate a far wider exploration of sexual identification. Within the contemporary social context, as well as within academic discourse, there are now many and various non-binary permutations of gender, sex and sexuality. In terms of literary theory, the inception of queer theory has been pivotal within this development and has shaped much current critical thinking in cultural and literary studies. Most notably, the work of the philosopher and theorist, Judith Butler, in the 1990s, particularly her exploration of gender performativity, was groundbreaking.1 Alongside other theorists of the time, such as the literary critic Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, this work transformed the field.2 As Sedgwick and her contemporaries argued at the time, queer theory allows for a multiple and diffuse understanding of identities. In a defining statement she explained that: [Queer] is the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically’. These influential academic considerations arguably prefigured some of the more mainstream social and cultu","PeriodicalId":305040,"journal":{"name":"Melilah: Manchester Journal of Jewish Studies (1759-1953)","volume":"20 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128380971","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Women in Antiquity: From Marginalization to Prominence","authors":"Etka Liebowitz","doi":"10.31826/mjj-2019-130113","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.31826/mjj-2019-130113","url":null,"abstract":"Despite the fact that royal women in Antiquity played a major dynastic role, historical accounts either ignored them or mentioned them merely as appendages to kings. Beginning in the 1970s, a major change transpired due to the impact of women’s and gender studies. Numerous studies on the role of royal women in Antiquity were published, shedding light upon previously unknown women. This new understanding of royal women in Antiquity has implications for historical scholarship and its methodologies as well as for attitudes towards contemporary female leaders, who can be viewed as a continuation of an ancient tradition. The escalating interest in royal women in Antiquity from the 1970s onwards has launched a plethora of studies bringing to light the varied roles and actions of royal women that were previously obscured.1 This new knowledge has not only contributed to a better understanding of the role of women in Antiquity but also of the events and processes in which these women played a major role. June Hannam points out another effect of these historical studies: The writing of women’s history has always been closely linked with contemporary feminist politics as well as with changes in the discipline of history itself. When women sought to question inequalities in their own lives they turned to history to understand the roots of their oppression and to see what they could learn from challenges that had been made in the past. 2 Looking back upon the past two centuries of scholarship , this article will examine the impact of women’s and gender studies upon the scholarly evaluation of the role of royal women in Antiquity in general, and of Jewish aristocratic women in the Second Temple Period in particular.3 Such an investigation has implications for historical scholarship and its methodologies as well as for attitudes towards contemporary female leaders. Although one may claim that aristocratic women do not represent the majority of women, one must remember that the ordinary woman (and even man) was seldom mentioned in ancient texts. Therefore royal women lend themselves well to such an analysis due to their presence, even if minor, in ancient writings. I would like to preface this analysis with an examination of the difference between women’s and gender studies as they relate to the field of history. Women’s studies commenced in force in the 1970s, focusing upon women as active agents in the historical narrative.4 This new field involved reading * Schechter Institute of Jewish Studies, Jerusalem, Israel. Email: etka.liebowitz@mail.huji.ac.il 1 For example, the Macedonian queen Arsinoë II (ca. 316-270/268 BCE), who played a major role in affaires d’État and was even viewed as a deity (see Elizabeth Carney, Arsinoë of Egypt and Macedon [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013]); the Seleucid queen Laodike II (240-190) who obtained political authority through euergetism (see Gillian Ramsey, “The Queen and the City: Royal Female Intervention and Patronage","PeriodicalId":305040,"journal":{"name":"Melilah: Manchester Journal of Jewish Studies (1759-1953)","volume":"18 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123614916","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Impact of Gender on Jewish Religious Thought. Exemplar: Jewish Feminist Theology","authors":"Melissa R Raphael","doi":"10.31826/mjj-2019-130106","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.31826/mjj-2019-130106","url":null,"abstract":"From the early 1970s a small number of Jewish women began to express theological concerns about the kind of language, concepts and values used to evoke the character of God. Judith Plaskow, who had identified as a feminist since 1969, was equipped by both feminist theory and her postgraduate studies in Protestant theology to argue that the Jewish tradition’s assumption of women's Otherness to men and to God is theological and determines their socio-cultural roles and status in Judaism before any particular halakhot might do. Judith Ochshorn also pointed that the masculine God’s Oneness relegates anything that is not the same, namely the feminine, to a lesser or deviant order of power and reality. Where the divine and human masculine will is considered normative and ordains the nature and sphere of female activity as the silent object of its discourse, women are dehumanized. They are the Jews ‘who are not there’ as Adler had described them in 1973. In 1979, the Jewish feminist novelist and critic Cynthia Ozick famously pointed out that while the whole point of the Torah is to countermand the ways of the world, its ethic has not extended to proscription of the dehumanization of women. This glaring omission led Ozick to propose an 11th commandment: ‘Thou shalt not lessen the humanity of women’.","PeriodicalId":305040,"journal":{"name":"Melilah: Manchester Journal of Jewish Studies (1759-1953)","volume":"22 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114608865","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Jewish “Bad Girls”: Transgressive Narratives and Rebellious Daughters in Contemporary British Jewish Women’s Writings","authors":"E. Sicher","doi":"10.31826/mjj-2019-130114","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.31826/mjj-2019-130114","url":null,"abstract":"This contribution to a special issue on gender looks at contemporary Jewish women fiction writers in the UK who, following the sexual revolution, depict the rebellion against the restrictive gender roles and behavioural rules of the Jewish home. I will argue that the subversive representation of transgressive behavior demonstrates tensions between, on the one hand, loyalty to the Jewish home and the imperative of communal or tribal continuity and, on the other, the pull of ideologies and agendas which encourage women to be independent in a society that affords them freedom to do what they want. Introduction: Rebellious Bodies Alix is a tough woman, tough because her father Saul Rebick fought back when the fascists re-emerged after the war in England; tough because she is a graduate of second-wave feminism in the seventies; tough because, after centuries of persecution and deportation, it is time for Jews to stand up for themselves, and especially a Jewish woman who has no patience for the patriarchal rules of the Bible or the Jewish family. Her answer to Hitler is “We’re still here,” the title of the 2002 novel by Linda Grant of which Alix is the female protagonist and one of the narrators.1 Alix is looking for a male partner who would be an equal in toughness. But as she nears the fifty-mark, Alix is becoming frustrated at waiting for the ideal solution to power relations in sex. Her body is betraying her; she relies on a woman’s cosmetic tricks to mask the unattractiveness of her age. It is in fact a face cream that her mother brought with her from Germany on the Kindertransport that stands at the centre of a dispute over inheritance. Her family’s claims to rights to the factory in Dresden, which used to produce the cream, raise questions of continuity after destruction similar to those faced by Alix in her job recovering and restoring synagogues in Eastern Europe. Her Jewish family is “still here” in Liverpool, not having made the Atlantic crossing, like so many Russian Jews at the turn of the twentieth century who intended to reach America and landed in England. But she is “still here” in a more regressive sense of being left on her own, unmarried and without children. Despite all the promises of the feminist revolution, she has found neither fulfilment nor satisfaction, yet she is trapped by her desire: The phallic right, the phallic entitlement to which everyone else must submit—brutal, simple, magnificent—this is what thirty years of feminism had battled to overthrow, and where had it got us, the generation that took to the streets? What did we wind up with? Empty cunts. What’s the resolution? The resolution is that there is no resolution, no catharsis, no release. Submission and acceptance, or refusal to submit and accept. Both ways are intolerable. In the end, she finds her match in Joseph Shields, an American Jewish architect, whose Jewish phallus (quite literally) silences her Jewish mouth.3 Here we have in a nutshell the dilemma of th","PeriodicalId":305040,"journal":{"name":"Melilah: Manchester Journal of Jewish Studies (1759-1953)","volume":"68 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129110020","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}