Woman’s Work

On April 13, 2021, members of the Association for Jewish Studies (AJS) received an email from its president, University of Washington historian Noam Pianko, in which he confessed to having participated in an ill-considered Zoom session:

I write today to tender my resignation as AJS President, effective immediately.

As I shared with the board last week, I met on March 11th with Steven M. Cohen, Jack Wertheimer, Steven Bayme, and Sylvia Barack Fishman in [an] hour-long Zoom conversation to discuss a short paper they shared with me in my area of academic research. . . . I have now come to understand that although I violated no AJS policy . . . Accepting this meeting invitation was a mistake. 

Three years earlier, several women had credibly accused Cohen of sexual harassment. Cohen, a prominent sociologist of American Jewry, was subsequently fired from his tenured position at Hebrew Union College. Many other Jewish institutions barred him, including the AJS (one of the alleged incidents took place at its annual conference).

Nonetheless, Bayme, the longtime director of contemporary Jewish life for the American Jewish Committee, Barack Fishman, a professor emerita specializing in contemporary American Jewry at Brandeis, and Wertheimer, a prominent historian of American Jewry at the Jewish Theological Seminary, continued to maintain a collegial relationship with Cohen. During the COVID-19 pandemic, they started a working group on Zoom to discuss issues related to their common interest in the sociology of American Jews, and eventually began inviting colleagues to join them. On several occasions, they invited female colleagues in the early stages of their careers, some of whom felt ambushed and saw this as an attempt by senior figures at key institutions to restore the professional reputation of a known sexual predator. When reporter Hannah Dreyfus broke the news of these meetings in The Forward, she asked Susannah Heschel, a distinguished professor of Jewish studies and member of the religion department at Dartmouth College, to comment. Describing the organizers of the working group, she said:

These are probably among the four best known figures in the field of Jewish studies, with strong connections to Jewish organizations and donors. . . . Them joining together and saying [to junior female colleagues] “Come, we just want to have a conversation with you,” is like the story of the Big Bad Wolf. 

Whether the “Big Bad Wolf” is Cohen or Cohen and his allies, Heschel’s point is clear enough.

Now, some four years later, Heschel and Sarah Imhoff, a professor of Religious studies who holds a chair in Jewish studies at Indiana University Bloomington, have published The Woman Question in Jewish Studies. The book considers Cohen’s case as symptomatic of a broader issue that, according to Heschel and Imhoff, has so far escaped notice.

But is there a woman question in Jewish studies? Insofar as there are many women (and, I would hope, at least some men) who are deeply dismayed by the way that many men (and, I would assume, at least some women) professionally affiliated with an academic field called Jewish studies treat women in the field, the answer, as Heschel and Imhoff document, is certainly yes. Whether Heschel and Imhoff make a similarly convincing case that “the woman question” is specific to Jewish studies as opposed to, say, history or sociology—in other words, whether it also constitutes a distinctively Jewish question—is a different matter altogether. 

The first half of The Woman Question examines the makeup of Jewish studies from the perspective of gender. Heschel and Imhoff open with a statistical survey of gender distribution in the field (hiring, tenure, prestigious publication, citation frequency, and so on), which, not surprisingly, generally conforms with the findings of similar studies conducted in other fields. On their (arguably generous) count of 1,054 tenured or tenure-track faculty positions in Jewish studies at schools designated by the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education as “research 1,” 40 percent are women; however, 60 percent of recent doctoral dissertations about “Jews, Judaism, or Jewishness” were written by women. The percentage of women who hold endowed chairs or have been promoted to full professor is smaller still. The lag is in keeping with recent developments in the humanities and social sciences, which makes perfect sense. As Heschel and Imhoff note:

The overwhelming majority of faculty members [in Jewish studies] have a PhD not granted by a Jewish studies department but by another . . . [such as] history, religious studies, languages and literature, English, comparative literature, and Germanic studies.

Although Heschel and Imhoff do not address this issue directly, their own characterization of a typical career trajectory in Jewish studies has serious implications for the cogency of their argument. It suggests that Jewish studies is a subject of study—or a set of more or less loosely related subjects—rather than a unified institutional field. Faculty members affiliated with programs or departments in “Jewish studies” are socialized into the academic profession through their disciplines. Aside from a small number of universities that maintain a kind of informal Jewish studies subculture, most scholars associated with Jewish studies spend their professional lives within the ambit of the same departments and disciplines that trained them: history, religious studies, literature, sociology, and so on.

Heschel and Imhoff attempt to get around the methodological problem of locating Jewish studies by focusing their inquiry on the AJS, but whether the association constitutes Jewish studies in any meaningful sense is debatable. First, membership in the AJS is entirely voluntary and self-selecting. There are no criteria for membership beyond a willingness to pay dues. Second, the AJS has no discretionary power over the conduct of scholarship or teaching at any institutional level. Members encounter each other once a year at a conference or in the pages of the AJS Review. Finally, the AJS does not exercise any control (social or intellectual) over the content of Jewish studies. None of this is meant to be a criticism; what it means is that the AJS is not a professional community with a distinct ethos, established norms of training and conduct, and enforceable disciplinary procedures. The Jewish Studies Program at Cornell, where I teach, is not a branch office or an affiliate of the AJS. The idea that the AJS somehow represents a field called “Jewish studies” is a social mirage.

Heschel and Imhoff leave me uncertain about the coherence of a field or subfield designated as “Jewish studies” about which it is possible to ask any kind of general “question.” Aside from the problematic application of their quantitative data to something called “Jewish studies,” Heschel and Imhoff base much of their argument on interviews with “over eighty scholars, including nonbinary people, non-Jews, people of color, and people with disabilities,” ranging from postdoctoral fellows to tenured full professors. All of them presumably think of themselves as Jewish studies scholars, despite the fact that, professionally and institutionally, there is no necessary connection between this identification and their disciplinary affiliation. In these interviews, “all but three,” Heschel and Imhoff write, “gave us vivid accounts of witnessing or experiencing discrimination, exclusion, harassment, or assault.” Having navigated these murky waters myself over the course of three decades, I am not surprised to learn that faculty engaged in Jewish studies are complicit in an academic culture that leaves women vulnerable to abuse, harassment, and disrespect on the part of men with an exaggerated sense of social entitlement, a grossly inflated estimate of their own importance, and an infantile lack of self-restraint, not to mention very bad manners. But what does this demonstrate about the field of Jewish studies, if, indeed, it is a field?

Moving beyond anonymized anecdotes of both subtle microaggression and outright harassment, coercion, discrimination, and assault, Heschel and Imhoff focus on “two egregious” and widely reported cases, “one involving scholars in Jewish studies, the other in an adjacent field.” These examples are meant to demonstrate the insufficiency of existing measures against entrenched patterns of behavior and perception, but they are also offered in support of Heschel and Imhoff’s specific claim about the state of the woman question in Jewish studies.

The first of the two examples concerns Cohen, whom we’ve already met. Although rumors as well as occasional reports to academic authorities about Cohen’s treatment of female colleagues had apparently been circulating for years, neither his department nor his employer (Hebrew Union College) had taken any action. The situation changed when Keren McGinity, a young sociologist of American Jewry, published an essay in New York Jewish Week titled “American Jewry’s #MeToo Problem: A First Person Encounter.” McGinity detailed her interactions with an “older, married man”—she did not explicitly accuse Cohen by name until later—who had asked her out to dinner to discuss her work at the 2017 AJS conference:

He took me to a candle-lit Italian restaurant . . . [and] peppered me with personal questions about my love life. He reached across the table and took my hand in his. I could not get . . . back to the conference hotel fast enough. But despite my obvious discomfort, he persisted in accompanying me . . . up to my floor. I should have insisted on parting ways in the hotel lobby. But he is a leader in his field and I was afraid to offend him.

I firmly said “good night,” told him that he did not have to walk me back to my room, and turned to walk away when he suddenly wrapped his arms around me, pressed his body against mine, and forcefully kissed my neck in a way that only lovers should. I broke free and ran to my room. . . . Adding to my wound, he texted me the next day as if he had not done anything wrong.

When McGinity told colleagues about this, several responded that “he’s been acting like that since graduate school” and that “everyone knows you should never be alone in a room with him.” But she hadn’t known.

Hannah Dreyfus of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency and other journalists followed up on McGinity’s allegations. They identified several women who described similar experiences with Cohen, including one in which a female colleague reported arriving at his apartment to work on an article and found him in his underwear requesting sex, rather than help with his footnotes.

 Heschel and Imhoff attempt to draw a connection between Steven Cohen’s appalling conduct and his sociological scholarship. Citing Gilah Kletenik and Rafael Rachel Neis, they argue that Cohen promoted a Jewish “continuity agenda . . . ‘tethered to an idealized patriarchal heteronuclear family that stigmatizes and erases increasingly more common forms of kinship and networks of care.’” In his academic work and policy recommendations, Cohen, Heschel and Imhoff write, failed to attend to “the intersectionality of identities regarding gender, sexuality, ethnicity, religion, race, and other categories that have become central to the work of academic sociologists.” In a highly ambiguous summary paragraph that I must quote in full, they ask the reader to contemplate the following prospect:

Imagine if Cohen’s research recommendations had included that paid parental leave be mandated by federal law; that overcoming sexism be placed prominently on the agenda of the Anti-Defamation League; that the federal government or Jewish federations fund day-care centers; that Jewish day schools and summer camps be made affordable and be mandated to teach antiharassment and antiracism curriculums [sic]; that the American Jewish Committee direct its resources toward supporting the Equal Rights Amendment; that all Jewish organizations develop strict rules about harassment and sexual assault; that equal numbers of women and men serve on the boards of all Jewish organizations; that equal pay be instituted for employees of Jewish organizations at all levels; that more women be appointed as executive directors of Jewish organizations; that all Jewish schools, synagogues and camps be made accessible to anyone with disabilities; and that conferences take place to talk about what needs to be done, on the ground floor level, to eliminate sexism in every Jewish community.

Am I meant to infer from this scenario that had “Cohen’s research recommendations” included every (or any) of these objectives, he would have treated women with courtesy and respect? Surely such an ambitious proposition requires more than the reader’s imagination to sustain it. I do not find it at all difficult to imagine the contrary: a career harasser who wraps his academic persona in a progressive research agenda. Maybe I’m a congenital pessimist, but I can even imagine a person engaging in this kind of performance deliberately. Would an exemplary track record of progressive scholarship make Cohen’s victims feel better about what he did to them? Now, that I find very hard to imagine.

Heschel and Imhoff do not entertain the possibility that the connection between having the right politics and having the right ethics may not be self-evident. I don’t think we need to know anything about Cohen’s scholarship to find his behavior gross and indefensible. At the same time, even if he had behaved himself with unimpeachable civility, his work as a sociologist could still be considered reactionary not merely by Jewish men and women but by his fellow sociologists. The case against the one does not add up to a case against the other. As a matter of fact, I can also imagine a man whose gender politics do not bear thinking about but who treats every woman he knows with admiration and esteem and endorses women’s equality on the moral grounds of justice and fair dealing (actually, I don’t even need to imagine such a man, as he happens to be my father). How Cohen’s work as a sociologist indicts “Jewish studies,” I still do not know.

Heschel and Imhoff’s second case study is such an odd choice, it’s hard to know quite what to say about its relevance to the woman question in Jewish studies, or, for that matter, in any academic field. Although they consider it alongside the Cohen case to show “what happens when women report harassment,” in substance, it is very different. To begin with, the connection with the subject of Jewish studies is much more attenuated—even forced. Neither of the two parties involved, Richard Ned Lebow and Simona Sharoni, is a scholar of Jewish studies, either by training or by institutional affiliation. Heschel and Imhoff as much as admit this but add that “each has published on topics adjacent to the field, including some with relevance to Israel studies, and each has had engagement with the Israeli academic world.”

It is impossible to evaluate what Heschel and Imhoff mean by “adjacent to the field” or “with relevance to Israel studies,” which, in any case, ought not be equated with Jewish studies. Needless to say, the “Israeli academic world” cannot be reduced to “Jewish studies,” since the vast majority of Israeli academics are affiliated with other fields. As they do not document any of the claims they make here, I don’t see why the Lebow case should be included as evidence of anything anywhere “adjacent” or “relevant” to Jewish studies. A quick Google search for Lebow shows that he is a distinguished senior political scientist whose work often focuses on US-China relations. Sharoni is a professor of women’s and gender studies at Merrimack College. Based on her own description of her research, she may as well be considered a representative of “Irish studies.” Both Lebow and Sharoni happen to identify as Jewish, but that can hardly be considered probative.

In any event, the incident in question took place nowhere in the vicinity of Jewish studies scholars or institutions. Lebow was in an elevator at a hotel that was hosting the annual conference of the International Studies Association. When Sharoni asked the other people in the elevator what floors they needed, Lebow quipped, “Ladies lingerie.” The remark would be held in poor taste pretty much anywhere, but it had no Jewish content and does not seem to have been directed specifically at Sharoni as a Jewish woman or Jewish studies scholar. One does not have to pass judgment on Sharoni’s ordeal to see that whatever she experienced in that elevator as a result of being within earshot of Lebow and in consequence of reporting his comment in the Feminist Review did not happen in or to the field of Jewish studies.

Whatever analytical value we attach to the two cases that Heschel and Imhoff discuss at length, the upshot of the first half of their book is that Jewish men have taken to the gendered power structure of the modern university like ducks to water—with predictably adverse consequences for some of the women who have to share the same institutional space. If they had stopped there, what we would have in The Woman Question in Jewish Studies might be a case study of the ethical costs of Jewish acculturation. Actually, that isexactly what we do have; however, for reasons they never make entirely clear, Heschel and Imhoff seem invested in pushing what might be a compelling argument toward an insupportable conclusion.

Setting out to “analyze the historical legacy of Jewish studies,” they point to “the culture of our nineteenth-century forefathers,” or to be more precise, the “first generation of Jewish studies scholars” of Wissenschaft des Judentums (Science of Judaism) who “created the field . . . without the involvement of women scholars.” In this respect, however, the German Jewish founders of Wissenschaft were hardly unique:

Among both Jewish and Christian scholars, masculinity was elevated as a force to protect not only the university but the whole society, and the male voice was viewed as universal and transcendent.

But this attitude was not merely shared “among both Jewish and Christian scholars.” The male-dominated scholarly ethos that Wissenschaft des Judentums ostensibly introduced into Jewish studies was the product of the nineteenth-century German university and its scientific approach to the humanities (Geisteswissenschaften), which was nourished by liberal helpings of Protestant theology. If the “culture of our nineteenth-century forefathers” really does represent the “historical legacy of Jewish studies,” it is certainly not on account of its Jewishness.

Moreover, the institutionalization of Jewish studies at American universities—where most of “us” now work—dates no further back than the appointment of Harry Austryn Wolfson to the Nathan Littauer Professorship of Hebrew Literature and Philosophy at Harvard in 1925 and of Salo Wittmayer Baron to the Nathan L. Miller Professorship of Jewish History, Literature and Institutions at Columbia in 1929. Now, it is true that the twentieth-century history of Jewish studies is a small part of a much longer story about the commanding influence of the German university model of higher education in the US and elsewhere. The idealized image of the male scholar that largely still prevails in the American academy is ultimately traceable to nineteenth-century Germany. But this image is neither of Jewish origins nor specific to “Jewish” studies. Strictly speaking, “our forefathers” were Wolfson and Baron, neither of whom was from Germany. Wolfson came from Ostryna, near Vilna (to which “Austryn,” his invented middle name, alludes). Baron was from Tarnów in Galicia. How much the formative role they played in shaping the future of Jewish studies in the US owed to Wissenschaft des Judentums is debatable. Heschel and Imhoff do not mention either of them.

Where, then, should we look for the Jewishness of Jewish studies? Heschel and Imhoff take another stab at the question in their book’s penultimate chapter, where they trace the gendering of Jewish studies to male “nostalgia” for “imagined, ‘traditional’ learning,” a system in which Jewish men once enjoyed what Heschel and Imhoff call “insider status.” According to Heschel and Imhoff, the persistence of such nostalgia in Jewish studies has given rise to an “atmosphere [that] easily creates outsiders, excluding those who do not belong to the past, including women, nonbinary, Black, Asian and non-Jewish scholars.”

The phrase “imagined, ‘traditional’ learning” (note the scare quotes) suggests that Heschel and Imhoff are aware of the fact that nostalgia fetishizes a fantasy of the past; they seem to concede that the “nostalgic” image of traditional learning that operates to “create outsiders in Jewish studies” is a contemporary projection. Nevertheless, they immediately go on to say:

The creation of insider status in Jewish studies has roots in the type of learning that began in antiquity, when Jewish men created themselves as an elite by gathering to discuss religious texts and produce oral traditions. (emphasis added)

We can see where they are going from here: The Jewish learned elite (rabbis, or, as Heschel and Imhoff describe them, men who are “older, white, and bearded, and [wear] a kippah”) step forth as the bearers of the “historical legacy of Jewish studies.” Alongside the German-Jewish founders of Wissenschaft des Judentums, they are to be held accountable for the gender trouble that now afflicts the field:

A pervasive conviction that “authentic” Jewish knowledge stems from the yeshiva learning of religious men undermines academic scholarship and the authority of women and creates a desire for traditional Jewish learning—focusing on what the text says rather than contextualizing it historically, questioning its authorship, situating it within a complex of intellectual debates, and analyzing its covert meanings. Experiences that marginalize women and non-Jews within the field of Jewish studies imply that only Jewish men, best if graying and bearded, truly understand Judaism “from the inside.”

The representation of “traditional Jewish learning” as deaf to textual nuance (not to mention “intellectual debates” and “covert meanings”) is wide of the mark, to say no more. Who thinks this way? The absence of a footnote at the end of this description suggests that such a view is so widely shared as not to require documentation, but it is deeply misleading. I doubt that, say, Judith Hauptman, Christine Hayes, Catherine Hezser, Charlotte Fonrobert, Beth Berkowitz, and Mira Balberg—contemporary pioneers in scholarship on what Heschel and Imhoff dismiss as traditional Jewish learning—would agree with it (nor would those great contextualizers of the last century, Baron and Wolfson, and their students). Even a rudimentary training in the history of Jews and Judaism, which ought to involve at least a passing acquaintance with the methods of traditional Jewish learning, should be sufficient to dispel the impression that it is a species of Protestant fundamentalism.

A critique of nostalgia slips too easily into what is supposed to be an informed, historical account of rabbinic learning by two senior professors of Jewish studies. Heschel and Imhoff do not bother to correct the impression they have given the reader that rabbis really were old, white, bearded men wearing skullcaps. According to the “religious texts” and “oral traditions,” the Jewish men who produced them were just as likely to be young and clean-shaven. Judging by where most of them lived—Sasanian Persia and Roman Palestine—they were also not white, certainly not in the political sense that we attach to skin color. What kind of hats they favored might be a subject for future investigation.

I have no trouble accepting the proposition that a fantasy of rabbinic power informs the way that some ill-informed and lazy Jewish men construct a flattering image of themselves. My problem is that Heschel and Imhoff assume that the history of the rabbinate endorses this fantasy. To begin with, it needs to be said that the kind of social power to which senior scholars in Jewish studies can now lay claim, thanks to their academic credentials, their professional status as permanent university employees, and their healthy salaries, is far more impressive and secure than anything that even the most distinguished member of the learned elite would have enjoyed at any time between the first century and the 1960s.

The Jewish men who, according to Heschel and Imhoff, “created themselves as an elite” in late antiquity had no power except that which people who turned to them for legal expertise and moral guidance granted them. The history of the rabbinic movement in the centuries between the destruction of the Second Temple in the first century CE and the Islamic conquest in the seventh century CE is a history of imperial subjection. It is, moreover, unclear whether rabbinic culture had any contemporary resonance beyond the study house. In the Middle Ages, the rabbinate was a vocation. Rabbis made their living in other occupations and rarely held special offices in Jewish communities. Whatever influence medieval rabbis enjoyed depended largely on their family lineage, their wealth, and their personal reputation for learning. By the early modern period, the rabbinate had become thoroughly professionalized, which is to say subordinate to the wealthy and distinguished laity who, increasingly, ran communal affairs and answered to whatever government was in charge of tax collection and peacekeeping in a given territory. The relationship between the cultural prestige of Torah scholarship and the exercise of social power was anything but direct. In a system that required the willing cooperation of communal and state authorities prepared to enforce rabbinic decisions as well as of men and women prepared to abide by them, it makes no sense to speak of rabbis as “Jewish men [who] created themselves as an elite.”

Second, the premodern gender regime institutionalized by rabbinic jurisprudence was, in many ways, the opposite of the one that now prevails in the academy. For a start, the ostensible autonomy of the traditional study house depended on the economic power of women. The Jewish social system was knit together by a kind of unspoken alliance between rabbis and wives. Rabbinic law secured the right of married women to inherit and dispose of their own money, long before the modern state finally dispensed with the doctrine of coverture that pauperized wives and deprived them of any personal independence. Rabbinic suspicion of learned women did not stop rabbis from occasionally deferring to female expertise; neither did it serve as an insurmountable impediment to female literacy. In the age of print, women, not rabbis, were the principal consumers and purveyors of vernacular Judaism. 

The paradox that modernity may serve the interests of Jewish men far better than the interests of Jewish women has not been lost on Jewish women. In her scorching, ferociously intelligent Memoirs of a Grandmother, Pauline Wengeroff described her own middle-class marriage as “enlightened” tyranny, sounding for all the world like Betty Friedan. I do not doubt for a moment that Wengeroff, writing in 1908–1910, would have known exactly what to say about the likes of Cohen and Lebow, in whom she would have seen perfect examples of modernity’s effects on Jewish manhood. It is a mystery to me why Wengeroff’s female rage, thoroughly informed by traditional Jewish learning, should now be so inaccessible and unintelligible to her scholarly granddaughters.

Reading The Woman Question while thinking of Wengeroff, I found myself asking why I should be prepared to accept the implicit proposition that inclusion in Jewish studies on a par with the men who, as Heschel and Imhoff show, have turned it into a club for spoiled, overgrown children represents the pinnacle of gender equity and the goal toward which I must strive. I am, I think, pretty good at my job. I find teaching immensely rewarding, and I take pleasure and pride in intellectual work that occasionally yields meaningful and interesting results. For this, I am reasonably well compensated so that I can support myself in relative comfort, contribute to my parents’ retirement, educate my daughter, and help pay for her wedding. But whatever satisfaction I may derive from this, I cannot accept the idea that what I do for a living represents the full measure of my worth as a Jewish woman or, indeed, as a thinking person. Why should any woman concede the measure of her importance to the men who have shaped the modern university, along with all the other modern citadels of professional privilege, in their own image?

In considering this question, we might take a page from the work of Elisheva Carlebach and Debra Kaplan, in a forthcoming study of early modern Jewish women, called Women Are Responsible for Everything. In their conclusion, Carlebach and Kaplan write:

Rather than focus on a catalog of ways in which early modern Jewish women did not adhere to the male model of intellectual and institutional contributions, we advocate for a new model, one that views women as creative and enterprising actors in constituting a lively and thriving form of Jewish life that sustained European Jews for three centuries.

The presence of women in Jewish studies (or any studies, for that matter) means nothing if it is not a force for the possibility of a radical transvaluation of values and the creation of a new, more sustaining form of common life. What I have learned from reading The Woman Question in Jewish Studies is that “Jewish studies” could stand to be a little more Jewish.