Jewish Lesbian Scholarship in a Time of Change

Marla Brettschneider, Marla Brettschneider

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000622126
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Sozialwissenschaften
• Thema: LGBT-Studien

Jewish Lesbian Scholarship in a Time of Change is the first major work in Jewish lesbian studies in more than a decade.

Once a vibrant field, few works in Jewish queer studies in recent years have looked at the experiences of, and scholarship on, Jewish women, feminists, and those identified as lesbians. Correcting a twenty-first century shift away from explicitly feminist investigations in Jewish queer and LBGTQ studies, this work signals a new trend of scholarly works in the field. The chapters span an array of genres, presenting the rich diversity of Jewish lesbians as they are, as well as of Jewish lesbian scholarship today. This collection makes an innovative contribution to Jewish studies, lesbian and queer studies, gender studies, as well as to racial and cultural diversity studies.

This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Lesbian Studies.

Introduction

Marla Brettschneider

ABSTRACT

This introduction provides an overview of the field of Jewish lesbian studies, particularly in the United States and the English-speaking world. The author looks at the opening of the field of Jewish lesbian feminist work and then explores ways in which Jewish lesbians have been active in religious and spiritual initiatives, the arts, politics and history, as well as academic and organizational life, and matters of exclusion.

Well-known Jewish lesbians from the early twentieth century include Gertrude Stein, Alice Toklas, and their friends. In addition, Mexican artist and Communist activist Frida Kahlo was bisexual, and anarchist writer and activist Emma Goldman defended homosexuals and may have had a romantic relationship with a woman. What is often called the second wave of feminism in the United States included many Jewish leaders who were lesbians, bi, and trans (e.g., Susan Sontag, Andrea Dworkin, Gayle Rubin, Joan Nestle, Lillian Faderman, Judith Butler, Leslie Cagan, and Annie Leibowitz). Many other Jewish feminists became core to the development of lesbian and queer theory. Among these were Susan Brownmiller, Shulamith Firestone, Ellen Willis, Judy Chicago, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. We have our share of Jewish dyke public figures (many of whom were/are also feminist activists), such as athlete Renée Richards, actress and comedian Sandra Bernhard, singer-songwriter Phranc, and folk singer/songwriter Alex Dobkin. Many more lesbian feminists who became known in the larger movement were or are Jewish, but this aspect of their identity has received little attention.

The field of Jewish lesbian feminist work has grown and shifted since the publication of Evelyn Torton Beck’s pivotal 1982 Nice Jewish Girls. As part of the larger Jewish feminist, feminist and lesbian feminist movements, Jewish lesbian feminists sought to create a space for articulating their unique experiences, perspectives, and modes of inquiry. Lesbian work was often occluded in general feminist scholarship and Jewish work was largely absent from feminist and lesbian feminist work, rendering Jewish lesbian feminism virtually invisible in all three fields. Jewish lesbian feminist work began in close connection with non-Jewish lesbian and feminist scholarship and activism and was highly attentive to diversity. Even with the deepening work of intersectionality (Crenshaw 1989), these two factors have changed significantly since the early 1980s, in part due to historic anti-Semitism in the U.S. left.

In this introduction, I provide an overview of the field of Jewish lesbian studies, particularly in the United States and the English-speaking world. Here, I look at the opening of the field of Jewish lesbian feminist work. I then explore ways in which Jewish lesbians have been active in religious and spiritual initiatives, the arts, politics and history, as well as academic and organizational life. After addressing matters of exclusion, I introduce the contributions to this special issue.¹

Opening the field

Adrienne Rich became increasingly outspoken as a feminist in the 1970s, and by the 1980s already had a following among feminists. With Carol Christ, Judith Plaskow co-edited the pivotal feminist spirituality reader, Womanspirit Rising, in 1979 (and the follow-up, Weaving the Visions, in 1989). Savina Teubal published Sarah the Priestess in 1984, and Irena Klepfisz and Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz were known within the general lesbian feminist movement. Particularly with the Kaye/Kantrowitz and Klepfisz 1986 publication of The Tribe of Dina, the Jewish lesbian field started off consciously exploring and purposely interrupting the Ashkenazi presumptions of U.S. Jewry. It also began in intense conversation with non-Jewish lesbians, both White and of color, with Elly Bulkin, Barbara Smith, and Minnie Bruce Pratt’s significant dialogue in Yours in Struggle (1984). This diversity within Jewish lesbian scholarship and such robust exchanges between Jewish and non-Jewish lesbian feminists quickly eroded.

In the late 1980s, Tracy Moore (long active in U.S. lesbian publishing) undertook an interesting and complex project of interviewing Israeli lesbians, and then engaging mainly U.S. Jewish lesbians to edit their interviews for publication in Lesbiot (1995; see also Frankfort-Nachmias and Shadmi 2005). Jewish lesbian feminists continued to explore issues together with other Jewish queers and with gay men generally (Balka and Rose 1989; Boyarin, Itzkovitz, and Pellegrini 2003; Drinkwater, Lesser, and Shneer 2009). They also wrote about the benefits and limitations of identifying as lesbians (Alpert 1997) and/or queer (Shneer and Aviv 2002), the challenges facing the first generation of lesbian rabbis (Alpert, Elwell, and Idelson 2001), various issues for Orthodox Jewish lesbians (Kabakov 2010), and the situation of lesbians in and from ultra-Orthodox communities (Halff 2018). Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz (1992, 2007) and Leslie Feinberg (1996, 1998) both continued their multi-level work involving class-based frameworks, critical race theory, and feminist lesbian analysis.

Unfortunately, outside of the forum Clare Kinberg and her cohort created in Bridges: A Journal for Jewish Feminists and Our Friends (particularly Bridges 1997 and 2001), this sort of work became less frequent (see Bulkin 2017). Additionally, Jewish feminism and specifically Jewish lesbian feminist work became nearly absent in general feminist and lesbian/queer feminist work. Exclusion of Jewish feminists from these circles was growing, as Rosie Pegueros describes in her piece about her experience as a contributor to This Bridge Called Home (Anzaldúa and Keating 2002), a follow-up to the groundbreaking 1983 This Bridge Called My Back, which had included a piece by the Jewish lesbian Aurora Levins Morales.

Religion and spirituality

Numerous religious and spiritual initiatives launched and led by and for Jewish lesbians have provided crucial support. Beginning in the 1970s, Jewish lesbians were active in the formation of LGBTQ synagogues across the United States. These include Am Tikva-Boston, founded in 1976 (discussed in Conaway’s contribution to this volume); Congregation Bet Haverim-Atlanta, which began meeting in people’s homes in 1985; two in Los Angeles: Beth Chayim Chadashim (BCC), founded in 1972, and Congregation Kol Ami, launched in 1992; and the largest LGBTQ synagogue in the world, Congregation Beit Simchat Torah in New York, which began on an informal basis in 1973 and more formally by 1975 (Shokeid 1995). Sukop’s article in this special issue discusses an interesting project of Beth Chayim Chadashim in Los Angeles. There have also been any number of LGBTQ Havurot and informal groups, such as the New Jersey Lesbian and Gay Havurah, which formed in 1991 and continues to meet regularly.

There is also an important legacy of lesbian organizing within the mainstream religious movements of U.S. Judaism. Even in the progressive Reconstructionist movement, where lesbians such as Linda Holtzman and Rebecca Alpert were pioneers (https://www.reconstructingjudaism.org/search/lesbian), full transformation has been a long-term challenge. In the 1980s, Julie Greenberg from the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College and her colleagues created Ameinu for gay, lesbian, and bisexual rabbis, cantors, and rabbinical/cantorial students, most of whom were closeted and dispersed throughout the orthodox, conservative, reconstructionist, and reform movements (Greenberg 2001). Ameinu was a national organization that met for three years with approximately thirty people attending meetings at any one time, and a wider base of financial support. In the early 1990s, soon after Ameinu folded, Dawn Rose and allies created the Incognito Club at the Conservative Movement’s New York City seminary, The Jewish Theological Seminary. This initiative was prompted by a devastating anti-gay and lesbian “witch-hunt” in the institution after the movement’s 1983 decision to ordain women (Rose 2001; Stone 2011).

Spiritual initiatives outside of formal Jewish movements also emerged during this time period. Savina Teubal and other well-known Jewish lesbians, such as composer/singer Debbie Friedman and scholar and rabbi Drorah Setel, helped to found the organization Sarah’s Tent: Sheltering Creative Jewish Spirituality. This organization, aimed at Jewish feminist spiritual innovation, overlapped with other West Coast Jewish feminist initiatives with high lesbian participation and leadership (including from lesbians who were not yet out at the time), such as Shabbat Sheinit and the Mikvah Ladies. In 1995, Reconstructionist rabbi Sarra Levine (now Lev) and Reform rabbi Rochelle Robins launched Bat Kol, a feminist yeshiva (Jewish house of study...