Status
Available
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Collection
Publication
HarperOne (1995), Edition: First Edition, 560 pages
Description
A sweeping look at the complex patterns of the Jewish experience Jewish Women/Jewish Men offers a new and often controversial view of gender, generational, and social struggles throughout Jewish history. Author Aviva Cantor shows how every aspect of Jewish life has been affected by patriarchy and offers a liberating vision of a society transformed by humane feminist values.
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User reviews
LibraryThing member CapitalHackels
I'm sure JWJM is a well-researched and thoroughly documented treatise, but it doesn't come off that way. JWJM was a chore to read. I found the arguments unconvincing, and for some reason the work struck me as slightly unprofessional. In two chapters, it feels like Cantor is taking her own personal
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experience and stretching it to unfairly represent all of American Jewish experience during the 1960s Left culture and the 1970s feminist movement. Further, this book is surprisingly critical of Jewish culture, past and present. No expression of Jewish culture is ever authentic enough for Cantor. Jewish organization are portrayed as either morally bankrupt or politically paralyzed. Cantor spends twelve chapters lambasting American Jewry for not being Jewish, and two chapters on "I tried to fix it, but it was too hard". JWJM feels like fourteen loosely connected essays, rather than a comprehensive work, wherein Cantor spends most of her time diagnosing problems and complaining about them but seldom suggesting practical or realistic solutions. Instead, Cantor implies that Jewish culture is rotten to the core, and has been that way for centuries, unable to reform unless it adopts fundamental structural changes. That's a harsh pill to swallow. Show Less
ISBN
0060613769 / 9780060613761