ABSTRACT
Opening with a discussion of the alienation experienced by mid-twentieth century Jewish women, Chapter 6 reviews their attempts to construct a usable Jewish self. The chapter illustrates how Jewish feminism’s cultural critique was undertaken in the idoloclastic register common to all modern Jewish cultural criticism. As well as showing how Jewish women became speaking subjects by ‘talking back’ to the stereotypes that silenced them into idols or caricatures of themselves, the chapter examines the work of four Jewish feminist artists as exemplifying how it was possible for Jewish women to produce images of themselves that observed the Second Commandment’s proscription of idolatrous images. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how the development of queer Jewish studies and its account of the ambiguities and instabilities in both intra-Jewish and antisemitic constructions of Jewish masculinity made second wave Jewish feminist elucidations of an ideology of femininity predicated on a binary distinction between the male and the female seem less plausible.
