From:    Kirsten Heinsohn <[log in to unmask]>
Date:    02.09.2003
Subject: Konf: Gender in Modern Jewish Histoy
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Institut für die Geschichte der deutschen Juden
Dr. Stefanie Schüler-Springorum
Dr. Kirsten Heinsohn, Hamburg
20.10.2003-22.10.2003, Warburg-Haus, Heilwigstrasse 116, 20249 Hamburg
Deadline: 15.10.2003

GENDER IN MODERN JEWISH HISTORY: Rethinking Jewish Women's and Gender
History

In studies of Jewish women's history two historiographical perspectives
converge, which focus on marginality as historical experience. Women's
history and Jewish history are therefore integrally related: the history
of women also touches on the history of men and masculinities; the
history of Jewish men and women always reveals something about the
society in which their specific histories unfold. This double relativity
of Jewish gender history should serve as framework in order to review
the past twenty years of studies in Jewish women's history and to
discuss new perspectives.

Jewish Women and Modernity

The first panel will serve as an introduction to the state of current
international research on the question of gender history and modern
society. We would like to discuss the contribution of women's history
and Jewish history to our understanding of the process of modernization:
What role do women play in Jewish modernization (as individuals, as
images, as counter-models)?  At the same time, we should address the
benefits and challenges of men's history in recent Jewish gender history
and especially women's history: How do they interact and where are
opposite perspectives?

Gender Relations: Women, Work, and the Family

From the start, women's history has been intended as social history that
takes gender differences into account. In this panel, the results of
research in the social realities of Jewish gender relations will be
summarized in order to serve as the basis for reflecting on the
empirical and analytic evaluation of the "family" system for the newer
subject areas of women's and gender history. Research in women's history
and, more recently, men's history have discovered (or rediscovered) the
family as a cultural and social entity that shapes the character of
social models of femininity and masculinity and thereby determines the
realms of agency for men and women. The debate on the crisis of the
Jewish family in the Weimar Republic is one example that points to the
social and cultural limits of the traditional (German-Jewish) concept of
family.

Performing Identities

Jewish identity and women's identity are not natural phenomena but
social and individual constructions. Using examples from different
social areas, the process of their construction will be analyzed as
performing acts, that is, as cultural acts that "produce" new concepts
of identity via citation and the (approximate) repetition of the
familiar. Here, the daily routine of cooking plays just as much a role
as stereotyped forms of remembrance of women's religious practices in
performing identities.

Beyond Kinder, Küche, and Kehille: A New Jewish Woman?

The final panel will explicitly pose the question of the "new women" and
their realms of agency in the Jewish community. Recent contributions to
the collective biography of Jewish women students in Europe before the
Second World War  and to the question of gender images in Zionist
thinking address the approaches of both social history and cultural
studies to Jewish gender history.


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Registration: [log in to unmask] 

Sponsored by:
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft
Behörde für Wissenschaft und Forschung Hamburg
Frauenförderfonds der Universität Hamburg


Monday, Oct. 20

5:00 * 6:00 p.m.
registration

6:00 * 8:00 p.m.
Evening Lecture
Prof. Dr. Barbara Hahn (Princeton)
Diagnosen der Moderne.
Mensch. Frau. Jude bei Margarete Susman und Hannah Arendt


Tuesday, Oct. 21

9:00 * 9:15 a.m.
Introduction
Dr. Stefanie Schüler-Springorum (Hamburg)


9:15 * 11:30 a.m.
I. Gender and Modernity
Prof. Dr. Angelika Schaser (Hamburg) (chair)

Dr. Maria Benjamin Baader (Halifax / Leipzig)
Jewish History, German History, and the History of Jewish Women and Men:
Achievements and Perspectives

Prof. Deborah Hertz (Princeton)
Be Careful What You Wish For, Or Where are the Women in the New Picture
of Jewish Masculinity?

Comment: Prof. Dr. Andreas Gotzmann (Erfurt)


1:30 * 3:30 p.m.
II. Gender Relations: Women, Work and the Family
Dr. Martina Steer (Wien / Leipzig) (chair)

Prof. Dr. Monika Richarz (Berlin)
Geschlechterhierarchie und Frauenarbeit in der jüdischen Geschichte seit
der Frühneuzeit

Prof. Sharon Gillerman (Cambridge)
Constructing a Jewish Body Politic:Maternity, Reproduction, and the
Weimar Republic

Comment: Prof. Atina Grossmann (New York)


4:00 * 6:00 p.m.
III. Performing Identities
Prof. Dr. Michael Brenner (Munich) (chair)

Ruth Abusch Magder (Maplewood / USA)
Recipe for Jewish Living. Cookery Books and Women's Vision of Modern
Judaism

Dr. Miriam Gebhardt (Konstanz)
"Verklärt vom heiligen Lichte" * Erinnerung und weibliche
Traditionalität im Kaiserreich

Comment: Prof. Marion Kaplan (New York)


7:30 * 8: 00 p.m.
Evening Lecture
Prof. Liliane Weissberg (Pennsylvania)
Männer-Träume


Wednesday, Oct. 22

9:00 * 11:30 a.m.
IV. Beyond Kinder, Küche and Kehille: The New Jewish Woman
Prof. Atina Grossmann (New York) (chair)

Prof. Harriet Pass Freidenreich (Philadelphia)
The Jewish 'New Woman' or the New Jewish Woman? Reflections on the
Impact of Higher Education in the Early Twentieth Century

Dr. Alison Rose (Providence)
Inventing a 'New Jewish Family': Gender Images in Austrian Zionism

Comment: Prof. Claudia Prestel (Leicester)


12:00 * 2:00 p.m.
V. Gender in Modern Jewish History: Summary Discussion
Dr. Stefanie Schüler-Springorum (Hamburg) (chair)

Prof. Dr. Karin Hausen (Berlin)
Prof. Steven M. Lowenstein (Los Angeles)



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Institut für die Geschichte der deutschen Juden
Dr. Stefanie Schüler-Springorum
Dr. Kirsten Heinsohn
Rothenbaumchaussee 7
D * 20148 Hamburg
+49 (0) 40 42838 2617


Homepage <www.rrz.uni-hamburg.de/igdj/homepage.de>