Jewish “Bad Girls”: Transgressive Narratives and Rebellious Daughters in Contemporary British Jewish Women’s Writings

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 the Jewish feminist in Britain at the end of the twentieth century as seen by the author of Sexing the Millennium: A Political History of the Sexual Revolution (1993), Grant’s seminal study of the sexual revolution of the seventies, which concluded that, while women had been liberated and could enjoy their sexuality more openly, they had not been released * Abrahams-Curiel Department of Foreign Literatures and Linguistics, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel. Email: sicher@bgu.ac.il 1 Linda Grant, Still Here (London: Virago, 2010), 312. 2 Ibid., 342. 3 Ibid., 372. JEWISH “BAD GIRLS” (SICHER) 121 from male control and in fact their new freedom played to male fantasies. What was needed was a new language to replace phallocentrism and a new ethics of human relationships that would help women retain control of their sexuality and enjoy it beyond menopause.4 There is, nevertheless, no denying the changes that women’s liberation has made to women around the world, particularly in the choice of freedom and a career over marriage and family. However, Jewish feminists have sometimes felt challenged in applying these achievements in a traditional Jewish home. As the British Jewish feminist dramatist and musician Michelene Wandor puts it, there is a “mythic duality” in “the dichotomy of the patriarchal Jewish father figure, on the one hand, and the dominant Jewish mother figure, on the other,”5 which creates “a peculiar love-hate ambivalence and fear in each sex for the strength of the other.”6 Aside from the stereotypes invoked here, this view of the power relations in the Jewish home suggests one reason why it is not so easy for Jewish daughters to leave home without conflicted emotions and even harder to finally slam the door. While Judaism emphasizes the importance of intimacy in marriage and of mutual harmony, especially the need for sexual pleasure, it insists on purposeful procreation and warns of the dangers of the mainstream permissive society. A traditional Jewish position would respond that the dominant discourse, which says do what you feel like, weakens faith and offers behavioural models that are inappropriate for a traditional Jewish life-style and the rules of tsniut (modesty) that regulate clothing and make talking about sexuality taboo.7 Some disaffected Jewish women are indeed pulled by the outside world where they do not have to worry about religious and social restrictions, yet all too often abandonment of the Jewish community leads to assimilation into the materialist values of a superficial consumer culture offering false happiness that lacks true spirituality. Freedom may be tempting, but can trap women into being evaluated for their sexual performance in a power game dominated by men, without necessarily attaining lasting relationships or family love. From a feminist viewpoint, from Virginia Woolf’s Room of One’s Own to coming out gay and gender switching, women have demanded the right to make their own choices, to be free of the strait-jacket of marriage and maternity. Unfortunately, many secular Jewish women who were brought up in the seventies were taught that Jewish marital laws practiced misogyny and that Judaism was the root of patriarchy; they mistakenly thought Orthodox feminism was some kind of contradiction and that they had to abhor religion if they valued their freedom.8 In the following discussion of contemporary Jewish women’s writing in the UK, 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, 4 Linda Grant, Sexing the Millennium: Women and the Sexual Revolution (New York: Grove Press, 1994), 254-56. 5 Michelene Wandor, “The Sex Divide in Jewish Culture: A Meditation on Jewishness and Gender,” Jewish Quarterly (Spring 1997): 12–13. 6 Ibid. See Jenny Bourne, “Homelands of the Mind: Jewish Feminism and Identity Politics,” Race & Class 29 (1987): 1–24. For the experiences of Jewish feminists in the United States vis-à-vis the feminist movement and the Jewish community see Dina Pinsky, Jewish Feminists: Complex Identities and Activist Lives (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2010). On the difficulties of defining Jewish women who are feminists in multicultural America see Naomi Seidman, “Fag-Hags and Bu-Jews: Toward a (Jewish) Politics of Vicarious Identity,” in David Biale, Michael Galchinsky, and Susannah Heschel, eds., Insider/Outsider: American Jews and Multiculturalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 254-68. For the relationship between feminism and Jewish religious practice see T. M. Rudavsky, ed., Gender and Judaism: The Transformation of Tradition (New York: New York University Press, 1995); Susannah Heschel, ed., On Being a Jewish Feminist: A Reader (New York: Schocken, 1983); Moshe Avital, The Role and Status of Women in Jewish Tradition (Jacksonville: Mazo Publishers, 2014). 7 See Rachel S. Harris, “Sex, Violence, Motherhood and Modesty: Controlling the Jewish Woman and Her Body,” Nashim: A Journal of Jewish Women’s Studies and Gender Issues 23 (Spring-Fall 5772-3/2012): 5-10; The Passionate Torah: Sex and Judaism, ed. Danya Ruttenberg (New York: New York University Press, 2009). For a Modern Orthodox perspective, see Maurice Lamm, The Jewish Way in Love and Marriage (Middle Village: Jonathan David Publishers, 1980); Raphael Aron, Spirituality & Intimacy: Where Heaven and Love Meet (White Plains: Mosaica Press, 2016). On the issue of modesty see Ayala Fader, Mitzvah Girls: Bringing Up the Next Generation of Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009); Yehuda Henkin, Understanding Tzniut: Modern Controversies in the Jewish Community (Jerusalem: Urim Publications, 2008); Jonathan S. Marion, “Seeing and Being in Contemporary Orthodox Dress,” in Laurence Roth and Nadia Valman, eds., The Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Jewish Cultures (London and New York: Routledge, 2015), 297-307. 8 Helene Meyers, Identity Papers: Contemporary Narratives of American Jewishness (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2011), 19-20. See also Andrea Dworkin, Scapegoat: The Jews, Israel, and Women’s Liberation (London: Virago, 2000). For a critique of feminists’ use of Christian anti-Semitism in their attack on “Jewish” patriarchy see Judith Plaskow, “Blaming the Jews for the Birth of Patriarchy,” in Evelyn Torton Beck, ed., Nice Jewish Girls: A Lesbian Anthology, revised edition (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989), 298-302. 122 MELILAH MANCHESTER JOURNAL OF JEWISH STUDIES 13 (2019) the pull of ideologies and agendas which encourage women to be independent in a society that affords them freedom to do what they want. I will focus on the rebellious daughter in particular as a way of exemplifying the self-liberation of some (but not all) Jewish women who break away from the Jewish family but do not always find resolution of the