Sarah Imhoff, PhD Candidate in History of Judaism

Time: 12:30pm, Monday, March 1st, 2010
Place: Swift Hall, Room 400
Food: Snacks provided, feel free to bring your lunch
Paper: Copies available by emailing kwagner@uchicago.edu

Sarah will be presenting an untitled chapter from her dissertation, a short abstract follows:

Abstract

This chapter argues that Jewish religious practice and values contributed to the construction of gender roles that differed from non-Jewish, mainstream American gender roles. It focuses on the World War I era, during which Jewish difference was particularly fraught because of immigration, racial theories, and contested American gender roles.

And, to whet your appetites, a first paragraph:

In her 1926 memoir I am a Woman—and a Jew, Leah Morton compared mothers and fathers in Jewish households to their counterparts in non-Jewish households: “When Professor MacArthur spoke of his mother, his whole tone changed, its lightness went; it was of her that he spoke with that seriousness and careful respect we knew for our father. Ours was for the man in the home; his—the American—was for the woman.” Although Leah Morton was a pseudonym for Elizabeth Stern and the memoir was not truly autobiographical, many of Stern’s contemporaries took the memoir to be fact. It described American Jewish life in a way that resonated with its audience, but the slight distance from autobiography allowed Stern to discuss what she saw to be both the positive and the negative aspects of Jewish gender in the United States without implicating her family and acquaintances. Here, she described a mirror image of Jewish and non-Jewish attitudes toward parents: Jews, she explained, revered men and spoke of them in serious tones, while non-Jews revered women in the same serious way. Why was there a gendered difference between Jews and non-Jews? And what was it about Jewishness or womanhood that made the title I am a Woman—and a Jew surprising, or in the words of one review, “defiant”?