Jews and Feminism: The Ambivalent Search for Home »

Laura Levitt is Assistant Professor of Religion at Temple University where she also teaches in the Women's Studies Department. She is co-editor of Judaism Since Gender, also available from Routledge.

By interrogating America's promise of a home for Jews as citizens of the liberal state, Jews and Feminism questions the very terms of this social "contract". Maintaining that Jews, women, and Jewish women are not necessarily secure within this construction of the state, Laura Levitt links this contractual construction of belonging and acceptance to legacies of marriage as a contractual home for Jewish women.

Exploring the immigration of Jews from Eastern Europe for America, as well as their desire to make this country their permanent home, Levitt raises questions about the search for stability in specific Jewish religious and cultural traditions which is linked to the liberal academy as well as feminist study, thus offering an account of an ambivalent Jewish feminist embrace of America as home.

Booknews

A granddaughter of Jewish immigrants to the US, Levitt (religion, Temple U.) describes her attempts to claim from her various homes the legacies that she both lost and found in her parents' home. She also discusses her efforts to lay claim to liberal and feminist positions in the present. There is, she asserts, an ambivalence at the heart of immigration that arises from the realization that nothing, including home, is ever really permanent. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.