Donations to Synagogues by Jewish Women, from 17th-Century Italy to the Present

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion · 2025-09-16

Abstract Jewish women throughout the ages, while excluded from public roles in Jewish worship until the Modern period, were active in the beautification and maintenance of the ritual objects of the synagogue. Objects made by women, “signed” in their embroidery, offer a visual and artistic testimony missing from written sources of women’s involvement and participation in the spiritual life of their community. This involvement is already mentioned in biblical texts and continues until the present. Documentation of this, however, is sporadic. The strongest evidence of women’s contributions to the synagogue comes from Italy, from the 16th century onward, in the form of elaborately embroidered textiles. This phenomenon was so pronounced that a special prayer, a mi sheberach [“one who shall be blessed”], was instituted in the Italian liturgy for these women. The textiles were largely, but not only, embroidered belts, known in Italian as fasce (pl.; singular, fascia), that would be wrapped around the Torah scroll before the Torah mantles were put on. These fasce helped keep the Torah tightly bound, so that the heavy parchment scroll would not unroll or be torn while being handled or moved. A second textile, the mappa, with a similar but not identical function, developed in Rome. These textiles, largely decorated with family crests, also protected the Torah scroll but would be alternated frequently and prominently displayed in the synagogue on the Sabbath. The third textiles commonly embroidered by Jewish women were Torah Ark curtains, parokhot (singular, parokhet), that would hang before the Holy Ark, the focal point of the synagogue service and the repository of the Torah scrolls. Some of these parokhot exhibit unique iconography, attesting to a knowledge not only of the Hebrew language but also of Jewish texts, including biblical commentary and homiletics. In addition, these beautiful textiles are finely embroidered, demonstrating the expert technical proficiency of the women who made them. Women generally “signed” their names in the dedicatory inscriptions, enabling them to be vicariously close to the Torah (and, in the case of the fascia and mappa, to virtually “embrace” the Torah scroll). The custom of women’s embroidery for the synagogue continues into the modern period, under the guidance of women, many of them accomplished artists in their own right.

Memory Work and Dirty Work: Writing the Labor of Eldercare

New Literary History · 2023-03-01 · 1 citations

Abstract: "Memory Work and Dirty Work: Writing the Labor of Eldercare" identifies the US eldercare memoir as a burgeoning subgenre of life writing. Typically written by daughters about nursing their parents at the end of life, these memoirs—searing accounts of care for declining bodies—make eldercare visible as a major category of unpaid feminized work. Most home care aides in the US are also women, many of them Black and/or immigrants, performing this important job for meager wages. Eldercare memoirs are thus substantially concerned with the nature and devaluation of a particular form of labor. Dramatizing its feminization, they lead me to pursue a further question: to what extent are female aides and their unequal, quasi-familial relationships with daughters given space in these narratives? Texts treated in detail include Sue Miller's The Story of My Father (2003) and Ruth Tosic's I Am Not the Girl: Memoirs of a Certified Nursing Assistant (2021).

Moritz Daniel Oppenheim – Citizen of Frankfurt and Artiste Engagé

De Gruyter eBooks · 2023

• Art history
• Art

Realism’s Gender Wars: Masculinity Effects in Late Realist Fiction and Contemporary Reality TV

American Literary History · 2022-11-18

Abstract Who owns The Real in realism, and what difference does gender make? Countering monolithic (and often dismissive) notions of realism, this article recognizes divergent signifiers of the real. Its particular concern is the war between realisms coded as feminine and those coded as masculine—between what Frank Norris belittled as “the drama of a broken teacup” and the drama of a man battling to survive in the wild. Juxtaposing Jack London’s Klondike fiction with today’s survival reality TV shows, I see these as similar efforts to put a masculine stamp on the real. In my reading of the History Channel’s Alone (2015–present), however, a Londonesque realism of moose-killing is challenged by a realism of the daily, non-dire, and domestic. Alone’s oscillation between these modes recalls that Ur-text of literary realism in which a violent, shipwrecked man sets about reinventing the household arts.“A realism of the nondire is just as authentic—its sociable, homemaking women and men just as credible and worthy—as a realism of men in mortal danger.”

Bathroom Realism and the Women of Cable TV

Signs · 2022 · 1 citations

• Sociology
• Aesthetics
• Sociology

Who gets The Real in realism? Taking as case studies three women-centered cable TV shows, this essay aims to renegotiate the terms of realism along feminist lines. In their focus on the ordinary and domestic, on proximate bodies and intimate conversations, Broad City, Insecure, and Girls echo the quotidian concerns of the nineteenth-century realist novel. Beyond this, in their signature use of the bathroom, they echo late Victorian efforts to push past the accepted limits of the “real” to explore matters conventionally hidden and beneath consideration. Abbi Jacobson, Ilana Glazer, Issa Rae, and Lena Dunham turn for reality effects to the “ugly” and typically unseen aspects of women’s daily lives: objects from tampons to toilets, shameful bodily functions, imperfect and vulnerable bodies, confused and embarrassing feelings. While all three shows exemplify a women-centered bathroom realism (in contrast to male-centered works for which violence is the key to a grittier realism), their particular strategies are differentiated by race. Jacobson, Glazer, and Dunham give us white women sprawled on toilets and tubs, trashing the ideal of proper ladyness. Rae’s bathroom fixture of choice is a mirror, a device she uses to explore the neglected terrain of Black female interiority.

Machines for Living: Modernism and Domestic Life by Victoria Rosner

Modern fiction studies · 2021-01-01

Reviewed by: Machines for Living: Modernism and Domestic Life by Victoria Rosner Susan Fraiman Victoria Rosner. Machines for Living: Modernism and Domestic Life. Oxford UP, 2020. xi + 292 pp. Victoria Rosner’s Machines for Living opens with a view of T. S. Eliot’s typist from The Waste Land as a type of the modern woman. In Rosner’s deft reading, modern women’s tinned food, gas stove, and automated gestures signal the presence of modernity’s objects and ethos at the center of modernist works by Eliot and others. Like the journal Modernism/modernity, Rosner’s project places innovations in such areas as manufacturing, epidemiology, and child psychology side by side with those in architecture and literature. As Rosner explains, however, her aim is to “discard the dividing bar” (4) of that journal’s title, placing greater emphasis on the mutual imbrication of, say, modernized plumbing and modern poetry. Machines for Living argues that even writers who were hostile to modernization were nonetheless preoccupied and influenced by its ideas—for example, functionalism, standardization, and hygiene—and material effects on everyday life. The book “investigates the ways in which modern-ist literature develops and communicates meaning through a new vocabulary of form substantially derived from non-literary discourses of modernity” (18). Among these “non-literary discourses,” Rosner is interested above all in those concerning the modernization of the home. This is the book’s most important contribution: its commitment to triangulating the relationship between aesthetics and technics by inserting the domestic as a galvanizing third term. Domesticity is typically identified with stasis, sentimentality, and conservatism. Associated with women and coded as feminine, it appears antithetical to both modernism’s smashing of formal conventions and modernity’s fixation on speed and machines. Pointing to the modern home as a dynamic machine for living—insisting on it as a site of experiment, controversy, and change—Rosner redresses what she rightly sees as [End Page 599] an area of critical neglect. By refusing to treat the home as modernity’s backwater, she not only recognizes the kitchen as a mechanized workplace but also restores the bodies of women and children to a period more often troped by disillusioned men. In a compelling reformulation, chapter 5 (“Modernism’s Missing Children: Mass Production and Human Reproduction”) shows that modernist fears of mass production were especially acute regarding standardized approaches to child rearing. In the 1920s, armies of child experts insisted on normative developmental “milestones” (194); in the 1930s, John Watson’s coldly rational and behaviorist model of parenting was the order of the day. Focusing on Aldous Huxley, Rosner suggests that writers countered these trends both thematically and formally—with images of children damaged by such methods and with nonlinear narratives of stymied development. One of the book’s most telling moves is to link modernist anxiety less to modernity generally than to modernity’s threat to encroach on a still sacrosanct private sphere. An interesting implication is that modernist discontents were underwritten by a residual Victorian view of domestic spaces. Chapter 5 points to writers from Thomas Hardy to Huxley as active participants in debates about raising modern children. In chapter 3 (“‘Fear in a Handful of Dust’: Modernism and Germ Theory”), modernists weigh in on another pressing household matter: hygiene in the context of modern germ theory. On this topic, as opposed to childrearing, H. G. Wells, Henrik Ibsen, Thomas Mann, and Sinclair Lewis generally reinforce the views of modern experts. Their works feature heroic bacteriologists, mocked by those who refuse to believe in microscopic health hazards. Rosner argues that Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, beyond explicitly depicting germ science, transposed the era’s concern with cleanliness into a modernist aesthetic that emphasized clarity. For Williams, poet-physician that he was, clarity of poetic vision and precision of poetic language amounted to a kind of literary hygiene. It is one thing to see modernists directly thematizing contemporary theories of child development or infection. It is another, less obvious, matter to find these theories playing out at the more abstract level of form. In discussing germ theory, Rosner notes that hygiene in poetry operates differently from hygiene in kitchen design but goes on...

The Lost Portrait of Gutle Rothschild

Judaica Neue digitale Folge · 2020-09-10

The lost portrait of the matriarch of the Rothschild family, Gutle Rothschild (1735-1849), offers a window not only into the lives of the Rothschilds, but into the lives of Jewish women of the late 18th and early 19th century. The artist Oppenheim was affiliated with the Rothschild family for close to fifty years, and during that period executed a large number of commissions for them. It is possible to compare his extant works with this painting, which disappeared during World War II. The article examines what can be gleaned from the painting about its subjects and commissioners, as well as probes the question of the changing roles and views of the Jewish woman at the end of the 19th century.

The Torah Ark of Arthur Szyk

Arts · 2020-05-19

This paper discusses the design and symbolism of a hitherto unpublished work by the artist Arthur Szyk (1894–1951), an ark for the Torah which he designed for the Forest Hills Jewish Center of Queens, New York, and which was dedicated in 1949. The Torah Ark is the central focus of all synagogue worship. Szyk’s ark is unique in its multiplicity of symbols and texts, which was at odds with the modernist idiom of post-World War II synagogue architecture. This research, which also brings previously unpublished material, analyzes the possible sources for the work and its distinctive message, which is exceptional in the world of modern contemporary Jewish art.

Occupying Domesticity

Routledge eBooks · 2020

• Art

This essay offers a feminist analysis of Occupy Wall Street as a site of public, collectivized, politicized domestic labor. Feminists have long struggled to make women’s unpaid or underpaid housework – cooking, cleaning, and care work – visible as work. Building on Marxist frameworks, they have identified the largely unwaged labor involved in reproducing human beings as the necessary basis for capitalist modes of production. Appreciating and denaturalizing domestic labor, they have also sought to de-gender it – not only to distribute it equally between women and men, but also to question its coding as “feminine” and, accordingly, as low-status. Many writers have observed that OWS demanded true democracy while also seeking to model it. They have, however, focused primarily on the modeling of horizontality, decision-making by consensus, etc., rather than the organization of domestic labor. Drawing on interviews with seven members of the Kitchen Working Group, this essay investigates whether the two-month occupation of Zuccotti Park reinvented domestic labor along feminist lines, and considers whether it made a difference that the “hidden” work of reproducing bodies was exposed to the public eye.

Everyday life studies and feminism

2019-05-16 · 2 citations

This chapter discusses the suffrage as an equality campaign; by contrast, laws protecting women from hazardous working conditions may be seen as reflecting a difference strategy. It describes a similar split in feminist emphases between, for example, “leaning in” and provides for nursing mothers. The chapter shows how feminist interventions serve to reorient the field of everyday life studies and explores the feminist contributions made to this field by two women – one well-known, the other neglected, and both overshadowed by male colleagues. It demonstrates that the continued explanatory value of “equality versus difference” in parsing feminist approaches. In the 1980s, as women’s studies was gaining a foothold in the US academy, feminist theorists commonly made a distinction between “equality” and “difference” approaches to the project of unseating patriarchy. Generally speaking, the first pursues equal access to traditionally male institutions and prerogatives, while the second recognizes the specificity of women’s lives and redeems qualities traditionally denigrated as “feminine.”.