BY JUDITH A. KATES
Photograph by Clive Grainger

Dr. Judith A. Kates is Professor of Jewish Women's Studies at Hebrew College and Faculty Advisor to the Jewish Women's Studies Initiative of the Adult Learning Collaborative of Hebrew College and Combined Jewish Philanthropies. She received her PhD in Comparative Literature from Harvard University, where she taught literature for 11 years. Kates is co-editor, with Gail Twersky Reimer, of Reading Ruth: Contemporary Women Reclaim a Sacred Story (Ballantine Books, 1994) and Beginning Anew: A Woman's Companion to the High Holy Days (Touchstone Books, 1997). In this essay, Kates explores how the field of Jewish Women's Studies has broadened the world of Jewish scholarship by addressing the question, Where are the women?

Reclaiming the largely unknown histories and experiences of half the Jewish people and working toward an understanding of the significance of gender in Jewish life and culture are the primary projects of "Jewish Women's Studies," an umbrella term used to refer to a broad range of academic and scholarly activity. Jewish Women's Studies both owes its inception and remains in constant conversation with the field of Women's Studies, developed since the 1970s in many colleges and universities into a recognized academic field. Beginning with what sounds like a simple question—Where are the women?—scholarly work has mapped a remarkable evolution over the past three decades, resulting in revolutionary change in many academic disciplines.

Beginning with what sounds like a simple question—Where are the women?—scholarly work has mapped a remarkable evolution over the past three decades.

Initially, the answer to that apparently simple question brought to our attention the almost universal invisibility of women in academia, "both as producers and as subjects of knowledge," to quote a pathbreaking book on the subject, Feminist Perspectives on Jewish Studies, edited by Lynn Davidman and Shelly Tenenbaum (Yale University Press, 1994). That awareness resulted in an explosion of feminist scholarship, an outpouring that also began to affect the various disciplines that make up Jewish Studies. Since the 1970s, the interaction of Women's Studies and Jewish Studies has generated new ways of thinking, new questions, new avenues of research.

As Davidman and Tenenbaum explain in their important survey of the field, one key meaning of Jewish Women's Studies refers to the impact of such feminist scholarship on many of the disciplines encompassed by Jewish Studies. An essential beginning point has universally been a critique that brings to awareness the absence of knowledge about women's lives, and the failure to notice what questions are not being asked in Jewish Studies as conventionally studied and taught.

At the same time, scholars of Jewish Women's Studies have worked to fill the gaps in our knowledge, to hear women's voices or perceive traces of women's experiences in texts and historical data, where previous lack of interest in or value placed on such material had led to silence or marginality. The perception of how much we have been missing has resulted in a powerful infusion of energy, a continuing flow of articles and books in Jewish history of all periods, Bible, rabbinics, Jewish thought, literature and other arts such as film, and in social science fields like sociology and anthropology. This scholarly work has often used the modes of analysis and the categories of traditional male scholarship.

But feminist scholars have also begun to question the adequacy of such thinking for understanding women's experiences, cultural roles and contributions. In the famous phrase of scholar Charlotte Bunch, "adding women and stirring" does not go far enough. A further stage of feminist scholarship has sought to restructure each discipline and in fact to push toward more interdisciplinary methodology. Placing women and women's experiences at the center of inquiry results in new questions, reshaping our sense of what is important, new research methods and ways of thinking.

For those who teach in any area of Jewish Studies, Jewish Women's Studies offers a tremendous challenge and opportunity. A constantly growing and ever more sophisticated body of scholarship places demands on teachers to convey new materials, ideas and modes of analysis that often raise questions about traditional ways of presenting the history and culture of the Jews. Although the Association of Jewish Studies now has a Women's Caucus devoted both to the subject and the concerns of women working in the academy, and every annual meeting includes sessions of scholarly presentations in a variety of fields within Jewish Women's Studies, the integration of women-centered and feminist perspectives into the teaching of the various disciplines ranges from the relatively full integration into the study of American Jewish history and literature to small beginnings in rabbinics, with many fields, such as Tanakh, presenting a wealth of scholarly opportunity not always represented in actual teaching.

Although not all feminist scholars would agree, the goal that I, as a professor of Jewish Women's Studies, envision is the ultimate integration of the materials and modes of thought generated by this new body of scholarship throughout our teaching of adults and, through our mission of teaching the teachers, a transformation of the ways that Jewish adults and children come to understand our history and culture.

Jewish Women's Studies is an academic discipline dedicated to deepening and enlarging our understanding of our subject, yet it also speaks to communal needs and goals. Women who seek full involvement in Jewish learning and life, and men who support that engagement, can find sustenance and energy in the ongoing transformation of our knowledge generated by this dynamic new field.

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