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  • The Longing for Jewish Homes, Jewish Babies, and the Trouble with Jewish Women
  • Karla Goldman (bio)

The question of whether a scholar guilty of sexual harassment may also be guilty of suspect scholarship takes on particular resonance in connection with Steven M. Cohen and his long-standing investment in the project of Jewish continuity. As Lila Corwin Berman, Kate Rosenblatt, and Ronit Y. Stahl suggest, the combination of Cohen's abusive behavior, his academic hyperfocus on women's fertility, and his unique influence in facilitating and amplifying conversations centered on anxieties about women's marriage and reproductive choices is particularly galling.

Some admire and others look askance at the way Cohen's scholarly agenda has been driven by his devotion to sustaining Jewish peoplehood. More distanced observers might note the irony of how Cohen's behavior and scholarship ultimately undermined his professed commitment to feminism, progressive values and liberal Judaism.1 The embrace of women's equality and autonomy, after all, are key to the elements defining the non-Orthodox, but still committed, "Jewish middle" that he has fought so assiduously to protect.

As Berman, Rosenblatt, and Stahl point out, Cohen was not the first, only, or last advocate for Jewish peoplehood to target women, their changing roles, and their choices, as the foundational problem for Jewish continuity. To add to the authors' work in placing Cohen's research within the context of evolving anxieties about American Jewish vitality, I want to use this opportunity to think more pointedly about the dynamics—beyond the inexorableness of demography—that may be at stake in these considerations. The pioneers of Jewish women's history pointed to the multifarious ways that changing understandings of women's roles were implicated in Jewish responses to modernity, but it seems important to mark the way that dire concern over changing roles [End Page 195] for women can disrupt the professed values of progressive Jewish leaders in their attempts to respond to the press of modernity.2

The desire to find solid ground in the ongoing quest to define a sustainable American Jewish identity transcends the demographic panic of twentieth- and twenty-first-century sociologists documented by Berman, Rosenblatt, and Stahl. Pretty much from the beginning of their settlement in the New World, North American Jews set about reconfiguring Jewish practice, belief, and ritual in keeping with the changing demands and contexts in which they found themselves. This effort took on heightened emphasis with the advent of a formal movement dedicated to the reform of Jewish practice with an eye toward modern sensibilities and prevailing expectations for public and private behavior.3

One of the most influential American Jewish reformers was Rabbi Kaufmann Kohler.4 Urgently seeking to secure Judaism's footing in a modern context, Kohler advocated radical changes in the structure and content of Judaism, altering or doing away with what most considered essential markers of Judaism. Most notably, in 1874, Kohler introduced the practice of Sunday Sabbath observance for Jews.5 He also abjured laws related to home observances as "void of all moral lessons and suggestive thought," offering nothing "that ennobles and refines the soul."6 He hoped that these adaptations would convey to both Jews and [End Page 196] non-Jews that Judaism was a religion of ethics and reason, unsullied by superstition or practices that would separate Jews from their neighbors. Kohler looked at traditional Judaism's restrictions upon women as hopelessly outdated and an affront to modern sensibilities. Moreover, he considered the achievement of "perfect equality" between men and women essential to the Reform project and to societal acceptance of Judaism as a rational religion.

Kohler believed that these and other refinements of Jewish practice and belief would highlight what he considered the pure essence of Judaism, but he did not introduce them lightly. While he desperately wanted Jews to observe the Sabbath, he brooked no illusions that the Saturday Sabbath could stand up to the demands of the American market. More tellingly, even as he saw the laws governing homebound Jewish practice as crude and isolating, he desperately yearned for a distinctive Jewish home life, marked by the warmth and comfort that he associated with his own youth in...

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