FRANK E LY SPEAKING October 2012 Jean & Samuel Frankel Center for Judaic Studies From the Director 2 Jonathan Freedman 3 Jewish Communal Leadership Program 7 New Visiting Faculty 9 Ketubot Exhibit 11 Mazel Tov! 11 Save the Date 12 Ketubah by Deborah Ugoretz. See Page 11 for more information. Ketubah by Deborah Ugoretz. See Page 11 The Frankel Center for Judaic Studies • University of Michigan 202 S. Thayer St. • Suite 2111 Ann Arbor, MI 48104-1608 [email protected] • (734) 763-9047 A Conversation with Jonathan Freedman, From the Director: Ladies First Deborah Dash Moore is the Director of the Frankel Center for Judaic Studies Marvin Felheim Collegiate Professor of and the Frederick G.L. Huetwell Professor of History The expression, “Ladies First,” popular engagement with Jewish culture and English, American Culture, and Judaic Studies in the United States a century ago, religion, as well as Jewish politics. came to signify for Jewish immigrants Jonathan Freedman was recently named the Marvin Felheim Collegiate Professor of English, American an American perspective on gender These centennials inspire me. I am Studies, and Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. He has also taught at Yale University, Oxford relations. “Ladies” walked through a impressed not only with these two University, Williams College and the Bread Loaf School of English and was recently a Fulbright fellow at door ahead of “gentlemen;” ladies sat organizations’ longevity but also Tel Aviv University. He’s the author of three books—Professions of Taste: Henry James, British Aestheticism down at a table before gents; ladies by their creativity and productivity. and Commodity Culture (1991); The Temple of Culture: Assimilation, Anti-Semitism and the Making of received a measure of respect not Hadassah began with a focus on health accorded women in the old country. and healing, sending nurses and then Literary Anglo-America (2001), and Klezmer America (2008). Humorists had a great time with doctors to Palestine to improve public Photo by Jean-Pierre Jans. Where did you grow up? the expression, pronounced “foist” health care, but it quickly expanded Deborah Dash Moore. instead of “first,” yet the seductive its mandate to include children, I was born and raised in Iowa City, Iowa, the child of pull of new gendered relationships building playgrounds in Palestine a German refugee and, as my mother jokingly called was hard to resist. “Ladies first” spoke and then sponsoring Youth Aliyah synagogue-based activities, including herself, an emigrant from the distant land of Brooklyn. of bourgeois norms and constraints in the 1930s to rescue children from Sunday schools, musical and dramatic What did “Jewishness” mean for you, early in on the behaviors of women by Nazi Germany. As scholars have performances, and engagement with elevating them, but “ladies” also increasingly recognized, medicine the larger community. It also spoke your life? advocated far more radical changes carried on under non-governmental out on issues of the day involving My father and mother were of that generation that such as suffrage and social reform. auspices by organizations like Hadassah war and peace, disarmament and wore their Jewishness very lightly. Dad had been born serves political purposes. Hadassah’s immigration. Its fund-raising supported into a wealthy Hamburg family that lost everything One hundred years ago some of these explicit Zionist ideology certainly the education of rabbis at Hebrew in the Depression—his father was a banker; after Jewish “ladies” decided to grab hold made that clear to its members who Union College, congregational schools Kristallnacht, he was abandoned by his gentile friends, of the freedoms and possibilities of often became articulate spokeswomen, and expansion of social activism who stopped talking to him and indeed started American life by organizing. Both first for the establishment of a Jewish sponsored by Reform temples. The trying to beat him up, and transferred to a Jewish Hadassah, the women’s Zionist state and then for support of Israel. Yet women developed innovative fund- cheder, where the enlightened pedagogical methods organization, and the National Hadassah also held to its own political raising projects, including Uniongrams involved rapping him with a ruler on the knuckles for Federation of Temple Sisterhoods, values—perhaps most importantly (modeled on Western Union’s popular not knowing enough Hebrew. His family was high My father, grandfather, grandmother and uncle all now known as the Women of Reform its commitment to provide medical form for “instant” messages in the days Reform—indeed, my great-uncle was an architect who escaped the Nazis, by one means or another; they were Judaism (WRJ), began in 1912 and care to all, irrespective of race or before SMS) and calendars. Sisterhood designed a Bauhaus-style Reform synagogue that was scattered to the winds—my uncle and grandmother 1913 respectively. That both are still religion (an American ideal it has women also produced cookbooks. (In taken over by the Nazis as a command post and is now went East, after Stalin and Hitler signed their non- around to celebrate their centennials successfully defended in its hospitals fact, hundreds of these cookbooks were the headquarters of Northern German Radio. Here’s a aggression pact, and then to Yokahama and thence published in the 20th century, providing (as the National Council of Jewish and clinics within Israel)—and picture: to Seattle; my grandfather, north to Denmark and Women and the American Jewish refused to join the male-dominated a rich resource for historians seeking Norway, escaping on the last boat out of Oslo before Committee did a number of years ago) movement of American Zionists. Since an understanding of the role of food in the Germans invaded; my father, to England and then, should give us pause. These women’s the rise of feminism in the 1960s the lives of Reform Jewish women.) organizations mobilized around specific and 70s, Hadassah has struggled to Like Hadassah, WRJ has reinvented dodging the U-boats with my grandfather, to New goals, encouraging their members jettison its heritage of “ladies, first” itself in response to feminism and York. Everyone got reunited in Seattle in 1941—and my to work together to help the Jewish that protected its members’ often especially the increasing presence father promptly enlisted in the Army, where he served people. Although they imagined the bold activities (even admitting men of women as rabbis in the Reform as an interpreter/interrogator in the North African and bonds connecting Jews differently— to membership). Yet it remains a movement. The recent publication of Italian campaigns. After the war, he used the GI Bill to Hadassah espoused ties of nationhood relatively nimble and vigorous lady The Torah: A Women’s Commentary finish college and graduate school at Yale, and got his while WRJ championed religious links at 100. Despite streamlining and (2007) speaks to these changes. first job at Iowa, where I was born. among Jews—they shared a common reimagining, it continues to recruit drive to harness women’s energies women to its vision of purposeful Although “ladies” is no longer a My mother’s life was a touch less dramatic, but not to enrich Jewish life. Much of their action on behalf of the Jewish nation. favored term of respect for women, without its intricacies. She was the daughter of a activity centered on fund-raising, Jewish or American, we should not lose first-generation Russian Jew—Boris, my grandfather, which grounded their endeavors as WRJ in its early decades coordinated sight of what the ladies of sisterhood emigrated from Kiev around 1907; he had a job as women to a larger vision. Yet fund- and inspired local temple sisterhoods and Hadassah accomplished under its raising accompanied diverse forms of to take responsibility for an array of protective and empowering banner. 2 3 student at Yale, I continued to be a High-Holiday-only Yale, the question was what kind of tie one wore a dental equipment salesman, not bad during the looked exactly like the house my parents proudly bought Jew; my work took me to the same kind of English to teach in; at Michigan, as in Israel, I discovered Depression, but one that kept him on the road. My on the finest street in Iowa City in 1963, to which I literature, though in a different period, that obsessed when I taught there, no one even seemed to know grandmother was not up to raising Mom or her proudly returned last year to give a talk at the University my mother: I wrote my dissertation on Henry James what a tie was!) I felt at home in my new-found brother—my Uncle Bob, who turned out to be a of Iowa. and, during my time as a junior professor at Yale, intellectual interest in Jewish issues and themes mathematical genius, started college at 15, and was off turned it into a book. One day, however, on a whim, as well. I was encouraged in this by some of the to the Institute for Advanced Studies by 19. So they We knew we were Jews, in other words, because my I sent off an application to a scholarly conference faculty active in the Jewish studies program—not were farmed out for much of their childhood. Mom parents were always looking for ways to fit in; we knew to give a talk on James: searching for a subject that yet, I believe, the Frankel Center, like my new-found made a life for herself at Brooklyn College, where we were Jews, too, because we never quite did. I knew I would take me to L.A., I wrote down on the page: friend Anita Norich, who was appalled by my stories she discovered English was Jewish because we were Democrats James and Jews.