A Couple of Articles from the First Issue of Sources

This past Shabbat, I had read a couple of articles from the first issue of the Sources journal. Both of the articles I read were intriguing and insightful. 

 

"Is Jewish Continuity Sexist?"

The first of them was Mijal Bitton's "Is Jewish Continuity Sexist? On Jewish Values and Female Bodies". It was interesting and insightful to not only consider such a question, but also in dealing with the topic of how much had particular scholars' views on women necessarily shape the national Jewish discourse around Jewish continuity.

However, for an article that presumably seeks to not be sexist, yet it ignores men out of the picture of reproduction, which is remarkably befuddling. One wonders if there are people espousing endogamous marriages and sexual reproduction, why does this article only deal with one half of such relationships? She even makes a parenthetical comment about this glaring lacuna: "We have also ignored individual men and their desire for parenthood." It was fairly bizarre to me to miss out on half of the marriage and reproduction equation. Look, I get that Dr. Bitton was largely going for feminist perspectives, which is great, but why exclude men from these feminist perspectives? If, however, she meant gynocentric perspectives, I would understand, but she didn't specify that that was her intention in her article.

One paragraph to highlight is the following:

There simply is no intrinsic link between male actors in the field who behave badly and the validity of the arguments put forth in defense of the field of Jewish continuity. On the contrary, many women scholars have both advocated Jewish continuity and adopted a pro-natalist discourse. Based on a review of the scholarly literature, Sylvia Barack Fishman and Michelle Shain in a recent Contemporary Jewry article have argued that the claim animating this position—that “scholarly analysis of marriage and fertility reflects controlling male scrutiny”—is simply not supported by the evidence.

A key recommendation of hers is:

Jewish communal organizations should invest in children in ways that go beyond promoting childbirth by supporting working mothers and parents through policies in myriad areas, such as paid family leave, support for childcare, etc. Special attention should be given to feminist recommendations for the well-being of mothers in our society.

"What Happened to Jewish Pluralism?"

The other article I read was Yehuda Kurtzer's "What Happened to Jewish Pluralism?". It was quite insightful! I haven't yet mentioned Kurtzer yet in this space, although I have found him to be profoundly insightful over the years (for instance, check out these quotes of his that I have found to be of interest). Additionally, an interesting discussion of this article may be found in this Facebook discussion by Rabbi Joshua Bolton.
 

The clear highlight for me from this essay was his pointing out about pluralistic attitudes and Talmudic study in the 1980s and 1990s, including this excerpt:

We can draw a straight line from this hermeneutical strategy to the widespread use of the Talmud in non-orthodox, non-normative Jewish educational settings: the emphasis on its ideological heterogeneity, the culture of debate, and the idea of the legitimacy of multiple viewpoints are all Talmudic ideas, but they are extrapolated to make a larger cultural argument about the Talmud. In turn, studying Talmud – and these selections of Talmud in particular – connects the (presumably) pluralistic ideas of the learner with the very activity in which they are engaged.

It's funny because even I have considered a cacophony of competing ideas as a way of describing the term "Talmudic". For instance, I was speaking with a yeshivish person about my Jewish drinking project and I described drinking in the Jewish tradition as something that is actually quite rabbinic/Talmudic, yielding a quizzical look. I had not realized that this notion of "Talmudic" standing in for containing multiple opinions derives from this since the last few decades.

I was also fascinated to learn that the same thing was happening in Talmudic studies in the academy in the 1970s and 1980s:

The late 1970s and 1980s saw massive growth in rabbinics scholarship in American Jewish studies, especially at the Mishnaic stratum, driven in no small part by the prolific output of Jacob Neusner and his training and placement of his students in university positions. (A Google ngram search shows a massive spike in the use of the word “Mishnah” between 1980-1990.) In “The Significance of Yavneh: Pharisees, Rabbis, and the End of Jewish Sectarianism,” an influential article about Yavneh and the formation of the rabbinic project, Shaye Cohen (then at the Jewish Theological Seminary, and now at Harvard) wrote that “the major contribution of Yavneh to Jewish history” was “the creation of a society which tolerates disputes without producing sects.” For the first time, Jews “agreed to disagree.” Other scholars contested Cohen’s chronology, but one thing is clear: this characteristic of rabbinic culture was being interrogated in the academy at the same time that an industry was growing around it in the Jewish community.

There is a lot more to unpack, but these were a couple of interesting pieces, to be sure.