Shulamit Reinharz

In her interesting chapter, Felister Nyaera Nkangi broadens the focus from arguments about female genital mutilation as a harmful cultural practice to examine how to create social change, that is, how to persuade all the relevant actors to abandon the practice, a custom so ingrained in people's lives that, she reports, "97% of Kenyan Abagusii amputate girls' genitalia." How do you go from 97% to 0%?

This chapter has several parts: Social Memory of Genocide as a Jewish Responsibility; Genocide as a Continuing Phenomenon; Genocide as an Area of Research; Genocide Stage Theory; Three Innovations for Genocide Stage Theory; Augmenting Stanton’s 10 Stages; and a brief Conclusion. Religious texts and annual holidays within Jewish life reinforce the importance of remembering Jewish history. The Holocaust is the focus of much, but not all, of this memory work. Remembering the Holocaust assiduously, however, has not prevented the occurrence of numerous genocides since the end of World War II. Genocide analyst, Gregory Stanton’s stage theory describes how genocide unfolds. This chapter augments his model with three additional ideas: silencing dissent, forming alliances, and apologizing publicly.

This book concerns the music and musical practices of a select group of Jewish singer-songwriters in the United States, who consider themselves and their music to be feminist and Jewish. Because of this and for practical reasons, the purpose of this book is not to provide hard representative data about each feminist Jewish singer-songwriter in the United States. Rather, it seeks to impart their and my understanding of and reflections on the flavor of the interrelationships of some singer-songwriters who collectively constituted the feminist Jewish music scene in the United States between the 1960s and the 2000s, and a

“LOVE,” “MARRIAGE,” AND “FAMILY,” are fluid concepts.¹ Legal, economic, social, and religious attitudes vary significantly in different times and places, and discrete societies construct divergent normative gender roles, sexual interactions, and family arrangements. Many today regard the 1950s affection-based Western nuclear family as the “conventional” model of family life, but social scientists have argued for decades that the companionate marriage based on emotional satisfaction and romantic love was itself a significant departure from earlier historical formulations.² Today, that nuclear model has declined, and concepts of marriage have undergone “a transition from the companionate marriage to what we might call the

The HBI (Hadassah-Brandeis Institute) Series on Jewish Women is pleased to present this volume, edited and with an Introduction by the HBI co-director, Sylvia Barack Fishman. The Introduction and thirteen essays that comprise Love, Marriage and Jewish Families are fascinating and illustrate the continuous morphing of family forms among generations and contexts. Take for example the 1960s Broadway musical, “Fiddler on the Roof,” which reworks Sholom Aleichem’s depiction of the changing Jewish family in the Russian Pale of Settlement in the early twentieth century. Golde, the play’s middle-aged wife and mother, responds to her husband’s question, “Do you Love Me?”

This chapter addresses complications and contradictions inherent in the con cept of “Jewish peoplehood.” My working definition of peoplehood is “unity of widely dispersed people around a particular identity leading to shared actions.” I believe that because this Jewish unity does not exist, we should continue our search for an apt metaphor that reflects reality. My overview of this topic leads me to suggest that given the multiplicity of types of Jews, some of whom are organized into groups, people interested in promoting Jewish peoplehood should devise ways of having these groups accept each other as Jews. In other words, instead of focusing on the individual, it behooves promoters of Jewish peoplehood to focus on the subgroup in relation to other subgroups.

In this brave and original work, Federica Clementi focuses on the mother-daughter bond as depicted in six works by women who experienced the Holocaust, sometimes with their mothers, sometimes not. The daughters’ memoirs, which record the “all-too-human” qualities of those who were persecuted and murdered by the Nazis, show that the Holocaust cannot be used to neatly segregate lives into the categories of before and after. Clementi’s discussions of differences in social status, along with the persistence of antisemitism and patriarchal structures, support this point strongly, demonstrating the tenacity of trauma―individual, familial, and collective―among Jews in twentieth-century Europe.