Gender in American Jewish Life

Abstract

Diverse communities construct gender roles—the complex fabric of behaviors, attitudes, and expectations that societies weave around biological sexual differences—in different ways, producing widely varying ideas of normative “maleness” and “femaleness” and what constitutes a “family.” Changes in gender role construction are often precipitated by historical, economic, social, and political changes (Scott 1988). Evolving—and sometimes reversed—assumptions about maleness and femaleness have transformed many aspects of American—and American Jewish—religious life and culture in an American environment characterized by increasingly porous boundaries in general (Amato and Booth 1997). Researchers have examined these transformations in religions, relationships, families, and American society (Williams 2003, pp. 470–487) using frameworks such as gender theory, social scientific theories about marriage, families and sexuality, rational choice theory, signaling and economic theories, and even evolutionary biology. Few if any, however, have “connected the dots” and examined critical intersections between gendered changes in Jewish religious culture and gendered changes in Jewish personal and familial patterns.