Is Jewish Continuity Sexist?
On Jewish Values and Female Bodies
Mijal Bitton
Mijal Bitton is Scholar in Residence at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America and Rosh Kehilla of the Downtown Minyan in New York City.
In the summer of 2018, the small community of social scientists of American Jews was shaken. Investigative journalist Hannah Dreyfus had revealed accusations that a prominent sociologist of American Jews, Steven M. Cohen, had sexually harassed a number of female students and colleagues.
As a mentee and colleague of Cohen’s, I was devastated by painful revelations I had known nothing about, and I mourned the professional and personal losses that women in my community had suffered.
As I struggled to come to grips with these revelations, the discourse began to focus on Cohen’s scholarship. Email threads linked Cohen’s work promoting Jewish continuity to his mistreatment of women. Op-eds argued that allegations against Cohen "reflect the troubling gender and sexual politics long embedded in communal discussions of Jewish continuity and survival,” as historians Kate Rosenblatt, Ronit Stahl, and Lila Corwin Berman wrote in the Forward.
Those arguments implicated and challenged me on a different level. For years, I had been involved in the professional academic community of sociologists arguing in favor of Jewish continuity. I had co-authored an op-ed with Cohen making the case for why “more is better when it comes to Jewish numbers.” I also identify as a feminist and actively promoted voices of women in the Jewish community.
The arguments that linked Cohen’s behavior with the Jewish continuity agenda implied that my own dual commitments – to Jewish continuity and to feminism – were at odds. The suggestion that my own valuing of Jewish continuity was intrinsically tied up with the mistreatment of women and misogyny filled me with horror.
Ensuing developments would bring this claim even more sharply to the fore. In late 2018, Michael Steinhardt, an influential philanthropist who was known to promote Jewish fertility and in-marriage, was also accused of sexual improprieties against women.
Once again, op-ed writers posited an essential connection between the sexual objectification of women and Jewish pro-endogamy/pro-natalist orientations.
This ongoing critique of Jewish continuity, which has arisen on other occasions as well – following, for example, the horrific allegations of Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual violence, pedophilia, and obsession with having children – compelled me to ask uncomfortable questions about a set of values and practices that I had long since persuaded myself were positive.
I decided to rejoin the exploration of Jewish continuity in view of my multiple identities as a sociologist, a Sephardic Jew, a mother, and a feminist. Could Jewish pro-natalism and feminism be ethically reconciled?
My journey began with an analysis of the scholarly and popular conversation around this question and went on to look at the underlying values animating both positions. Ultimately, my commitments led me to renew my conviction in the value of a pro-natalist Jewish continuity stance – one shaped and informed by Jewish ideals that take seriously agency as a feminist value. What I see at stake here then is not merely questions about the scholarship of particular individuals but a deeper need to engage in a wider discussion about the power and promise of genuine female agency in the debate about Jewish continuity.
FEMINIST CRITIQUES OF JEWISH CONTINUITY
The ambiguous term “Jewish continuity” often serves as a broad catch-all category that includes efforts toward religious, institutional, cultural, ethnic, and biological Jewish continuity. Jewish continuity can address Jewish education, Jewish socialization, Jewish childrearing, in-marriage, or the general goal of Jewish biological continuation infused with the replication of Jewish commitments.
Feminist critiques of Jewish continuity often focus on a specific aspect of the Jewish continuity discourse: the scholarly and communal centering of Jewish endogamy and fertility as normative ideals for the North American Jewish community.
Allegations against Cohen prompted the widely read 2018 Forward op-ed by Rosenblatt, Stahl, and Berman quoted above. Its authors argue for a direct linkage between Cohen’s actions and his continuity agenda, one predicated on the study of “sex and statistics — specifically, how many Jews are married to Jews, and how many children they have.”
Rosenblatt, Stahl, and Berman elaborated on this in a comprehensive scholarly article titled “Continuity Crisis: The History and Sexual Politics of an American Jewish Communal Project.”1 There they offer a series of interlocking critiques of sociological epistemology and Jewish communal knowledge production, in which Cohen is not an architect but a manifestation of the sexism that they claim characterizes the structure of Jewish continuity.
Their op-ed and ensuing journal article circle around five interconnected points:
- The social scientific focus on endogamy and fertility at the heart of Jewish continuity valorizes the nuclear endogamous Jewish family with offspring as the key strategy to address concerns about the American Jewish future.
- Historically, much of the intellectual development for this Jewish continuity agenda was offered by male scholars and came hand in hand with conservative and reactionary intellectual and communal projects, such as identifying "second-wave feminism and the counterculture as sources of communal dissolution.”
- Then once the nuclear family became idealized as the engine for Jewish continuity, women were tasked with bringing it to fruition; the responsibility for Jewish continuity became gendered.
- By valorizing this gendered vision for Jewish continuity as the “sole solutions for securing the Jewish future,” the organized Jewish community – its scholars, philanthropists and professionals – promoted “surveillance over women’s bodies” and assumptions “about women’s bodies as objects to be controlled and policed...[which] validate the simple ‘truth’ of women’s primary role in Jewish continuity: as incubators.”
- This continuity agenda makes normative judgments as to what Judaism should be and should not be. It allows “an entire community – replete with resources, experts, and power – to tell people what to do with their values and relationships.”
Each of these critiques is a supporting wall in an edifice that diagnoses the North American Jewish continuity agenda as sexist. As the authors conclude, “telling women who they can and should marry and when and how often they should have children is what we mean by the patriarchal and misogynistic foundations of the continuity paradigm and its apparatus.”
A range of Jewish professionals, thought leaders, and writers have offered additional illustrations of why they believe the American Jewish continuity agenda is tied up with misogyny. These arguments identify Jewish continuity as a discourse that regulates women’s bodies, sees powerful and abusive men as producing the Jewish continuity discourse, and evaluates Jewish communal prescriptions as intolerant and exclusivist.
For example, following the Steinhardt allegations, Idit Klein, president and CEO of Keshet, an organization working for LGBTQ equality in Jewish life, was quoted in a JTA article advancing a version of the regulating claim: “An emphasis on heterosexual marriage and reproduction is problematic in the way that it, for many women, creates the sense that their most important contribution to the Jewish people is as functioning wombs, and that there is no higher mission for them than to be wives and mothers.”
Others frame the regulating charge by positing that pro-natalism treats those who are unable or unwilling to have children “as a problem.” Feminist philanthropist Barbara Dobkin writes in eJewish Philanthropy that since the Jewish community establishes fertility as a significant marker of success, it follows that those who are not reproducing biologically fail to meet communal expectations. As a result, women without children are often shunned in Jewish communal settings.
Then there are those that have latched onto the fact that wealthy and powerful men have directed projects or scholarship related to Jewish continuity as proof that the men who have more opportunity or ability to abuse women (as far as we understand that sexual violations relate to power) have shaped the Jewish continuity agenda. In their eyes finding sexual predators promoting fertility should lead us to examine their ideologies in a way that finding sexual predators in a field like astrophysics would not.
An example of this approach can be found in playwright and journalist Rokhl Kafrissen’s Forward op-ed where she connects Cohen’s “gendered” continuity agenda—which she describes as a “view of women as baby-makers and wives”—with what she sees as the exploitation of women’s labor in the broader Jewish communal agenda. At the heart of this critique is not only a resistance to the ideology of Jewish continuity itself but an insistence on evaluating it through a lens of power dynamics.
One final form the critique of the Jewish continuity discourse takes is seeing it as having a covert agenda. Although the discourse speaks of the biological (and social) reproduction of American Jews, this critique claims that Jewish continuity proponents often intend the reproduction of a certain kind of American Jew — one who bears close resemblance and political interests with those promulgating this discourse.
In a Jewish Currents essay called “The Right Kind of Continuity,” Ari M. Brostoff and Noah Kulwin argue that the continuity discourse offers a communal roadmap to perpetuate certain Jewish commitments, aimed toward “ardently pro-Israel children of two Jewish parents.” By their lights, individuals (often men) who promote Jewish continuity are intrinsically invested in self-reproduction. They want to help bring about more Jews who look like them, who share their Jewish commitments, and who will help maintain the kind of Judaism they treasure rather than a Judaism that reflects true American Jewish diversity.
CRITIQUES OF JEWISH CONTINUITY, RIGHT AND WRONG
In several respects, these critiques of Jewish continuity expose important questions and offer significant contributions. It is undeniable the American Jewish continuity project demands gendered labor – whether implicitly or explicitly, it inescapably frames women’s bodies as instruments for bearing Jewish children. It is equally true that the most visible advocates for biological Jewish continuity have been men.
Nor are the critics wrong to point out that there is a tangled relationship that raises ethical questions when philanthropists direct money to Jewish communal organizations to fund specific research reflecting metrics they deem important, which are then used to establish communal priorities.
Lastly, critiques of Jewish continuity rightly call attention to language and practices misaligned with Jewish values. Some sociologists and thought leaders have passed judgment on those Jews who remain unmarried or childless. Moreover, many continue to place greater emphasis on promoting in-marriage and Jewish fertility than on supporting mothers and families through programs like paid family leave, subsidized childcare, and Jewish childrearing in general, rendering their call to promote “family values” somewhat hollow.
But even as critiques of Jewish continuity contribute to the discourse, a closer examination of the claim that support for Jewish continuity is in tension with feminist values falls short.
Too often critiques of Jewish continuity address pro-natalism as if it were merely a Jewish communal issue. Rosenblatt, Stahl, and Berman, for instance, give the impression that only reactionary Jewish leaders in the second half of the 20th century in America developed a pro-natalist stance. This is simply not the case. There are manifold expressions of pro-natalism, Jewish and not-Jewish, liberal and conservative. There are also many strains of feminism, some of them pro-natalist
“We have yet to incorporate women’s wishes for children into our feminist evaluation of Jewish continuity.”
Feminist pro-natalist approaches base themselves on the fact that many women want and have children. Using this as their baseline, some feminists adopt pro-natalist approaches that align politically with family-friendly policies that benefit women and promote feminist goals that help women financially afford children, balance family and work, and receive greater support for caregiving duties.
Considering that most women “seem to want both jobs and children,” as Michelle Goldberg writes in the New York Times, we can see that our patriarchal culture “is failing to support women in creating the lives they want, and that failure threatens the future.” Declining birthrates are correlated with a lack of support for working mothers, whereas there is a correlation between higher fertility and feminist social policy.
Critics of American Jewish continuity who see it aligned with patriarchy argue or imply that a mostly male communal authority attempts to coerce women to procreate. Yet lost in this critique is the fact that communal pro-natalism aligns with and reflects the desire of most American Jewish women to have children.2 To be clear, women have waged hard-won fights to achieve control over their reproductive choices. This autonomy is nowhere fully ensured – not even in contemporary America. But reproductive autonomy implies both the freedom to not reproduce and the freedom to pursue childbearing.
This matters because many women have fewer children than they wish to have. Describing the American context, Lyman Stone of the Institute of Family Studies writes for the New York Times that “the gap between the number of children that women say they want to have (2.7) and the number of children they will probably have (1.8) has risen to the highest level in forty years.” According to research from Brandeis University’s Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies, most young American Jewish women also express the desire to have children.3 Feminist critiques of Jewish continuity must contend with a complex ecosystem that includes communal discourses that idealize higher Jewish fertility rates and the real desires of most Jewish women to have children. We have yet to incorporate women’s wishes for children into our feminist evaluation of Jewish continuity. (We have also ignored individual men and their desire for parenthood).
Sometimes critics claim without much in the way of evidence that the ethnic concerns of the Jewish continuity camp over Jewish survival and the flourishing of this particular ethno-religious community is simply window dressing for the real agenda: the objectification of women. But to claim that the mere expression of concern over Jewish ethnic survival is somehow incongruous with the larger Jewish continuity program and therefore cover for a more sinister agenda simply flies in the face of common sense. Of course a concern for Jewish fertility rates is relevant for the thriving of the Jewish people.4 For the Jewish continuity critique to be taken seriously, it would have to put forth a robust alternative vision for a Jewish future independent of biological continuity.
Critics also point to the complicated history of the Jewish continuity agenda – a history that they claim continues to contaminate its agenda today. Rosenblatt, Stahl, and Berman compellingly show that the notion of Jewish continuity was shaped in the past by patriarchal concerns over feminism, sexual liberation, and women’s autonomy. But these critics have failed to investigate how the discourse around Jewish continuity has evolved to include and reflect more progressive and feminist stances. Anthropologist Michal Kravel-Tovi is correct when she notes that Jewish fertility—as opposed to endogamy—has not “been positioned as an institutionalized focus [with] established policy steps” but “remains an object of rather sporadic and sometimes apologetic assertions.”5 This is due in part to communal discomfort around prescribing fertility as an explicit communal goal, reflecting how Jewish continuity discourse has increasingly been nourished by feminist and liberal concerns more generally.6
There are those critics who argue that the Jewish continuity discourse embraces a community ideal around Jewish fertility which inherently excludes and judges those who are not partnered or who are not parents. This criticism has sometimes been expressed in the form of a reluctance around enforcing communal norms in general – as if having any communal ideals or standards is inherently exclusivist and morally problematic. Yet no community can survive without norms, and these critics face an uphill battle in trying to explain communal standards that wouldn’t entail judging or excluding those who cannot or choose not to live up to it.7 The criticism of Jewish communal normative claims is particularly problematic since many of those who disagree with specific standards of the Jewish continuity agenda (endogamy, Zionism, ethnic bonds, Jewish fertility, etc.) still believe it is moral to promote certain other communal standards, such as giving charity, being inclusive, or pursuing higher education. For these critics, an argument framed around the rejection of Jewish communal judgments may in fact be rooted in a dispute about which judgments to prefer.
“The notion of Jewish continuity was shaped in the past by patriarchal concerns over feminism, sexual liberation, and women’s autonomy”
Finally, many critics make a broader and particularly erroneous set of assumptions: that there is some sort of coherent linkage between the bad actions of specific men and their advocacy for Jewish continuity; that the continuity agenda reflects an obsession with "other people having sex, with other people having babies,” as Forward editor at the time Batya Ungar-Sargon put it; and that this obsession is “sexist and homophobic.” Kafrissen describes Cohen as the architect of the Jewish continuity discourse in which "it becomes very hard to disentangle the sexism of the alleged abuse from the patriarchal agenda Cohen spent decades pushing.”
Yet there is no field of study or industry immune to #MeToo revelations. If anything, the #MeToo movement has shown that there are actors who abuse their power in nearly every arena, even in fields deemed “liberal” or “feminist.” To be certain, no one is claiming that since there are actors who act badly everywhere, those related to the Jewish continuity agenda should be taken less seriously; they should not. But the unfortunate pervasiveness of sexist behaviors does mean that such actors are either a reflection of all fields or no field in particular.
There simply is no intrinsic link between male actors in the field who behave badly and the validity of the arguments put forth in defense of the field of Jewish continuity. On the contrary, many women scholars have both advocated Jewish continuity and adopted a pro-natalist discourse. Based on a review of the scholarly literature, Sylvia Barack Fishman and Michelle Shain in a recent Contemporary Jewry article have argued that the claim animating this position—that “scholarly analysis of marriage and fertility reflects controlling male scrutiny”—is simply not supported by the evidence.8
Fishman and Shain distinguish between two different epistemological orientations: one which draws from feminist standpoint theory and another that draws from feminist empiricism. In short, many of the critiques of Jewish continuity are based on feminist standpoint theory which claims that “knowledge is socially constructed, sees women as epistemically advantaged, and privileges qualitative methods.” It is this epistemological approach that goes hand in hand with a critique of the quantitative research of Jewish families and fertilities. But Fishman and Shain point out that alternative feminist epistemological stances exist. For example, scholars who operate within the epistemological tradition of feminist empiricism hold that “researchers can pursue feminist goals while maintaining a postpositivist emphasis on validity, generalizability, and experimental and quasi-experimental methods.” They argue that a focus on fertility is both entirely consistent with an empirical feminist lens and an important marker for the study of Jewish life and the wellbeing of the Jewish population.
But perhaps most concerning from a feminist perspective is how, in focusing on the scholarship of men who have engaged in problematic behavior in a way which ignores the work of other scholars, the discussion elevates them as representatives of their field and paradoxically reinforces patriarchal power structures. This erases the voices of female (and male) researchers, thought leaders, and Jewish communal professionals who endorse Jewish continuity and who have no association at all with sexual impropriety.
We should call out bad actors in this discipline as in any other without letting them own the field. But doing so shouldn’t come at the cost of elevating the voices of others whose ideas deserve to be heard and evaluated on their own merits. Rather than claim the Jewish continuity agenda is fundamentally male and problematic, we should welcome the multifaceted and excellent scholarship about this topic while subjecting the arguments of both the women (and men) who advance it to the same level of logical scrutiny as we would any other argument about Jewish life.
RECONCILING WITH THE IRRECONCILABLE
Critiques of Jewish continuity have forced me to ask myself whether my support of Jewish continuity can co-exist with the Jewish values I strive to live by and the feminist commitments I hold dear. After all, there simply is no denying the gendered aspect of fertility. I once expressed my frustration to a friend that although both my husband and I wanted children, I would have to bear them – a fact of biology that does not align with gender equality. My friend replied that he envied my ability to be pregnant; he would give anything to be able to have biological children with his partner. “Alas,” he said, “the injustices of the body take many forms.”
Those forms are many, ranging from infertility or other biological barriers to having children to the challenges faced by non-partnered individuals. Increasing awareness in our communities about gay, lesbian, trans, nonbinary and queer individuals also complicates assumptions that blend gender, sexuality and reproductive roles with each other. Discussions of Jewish continuity need to keep the kaleidoscope of human experience in mind when examining its agenda, and I share these thoughts about one set of challenges around fertility without seeking to erase the experiences of others or construct a hierarchy of injustice.
Behind my frustrated comment to my friend was a deeper resentment.
I wrote the first draft of this essay while heavily pregnant with my second child, anxiously awaiting the days to my due date after which I hoped I would feel like myself again. Becoming a mother was not simple for me. I felt torn between knowing intellectually that I wanted to have children, and overwhelming anxiety at the thought of pregnancy, childbirth, and childrearing. It took me a long time to disentangle my true feelings.
The moment of revelation remains clear in my mind. I was in a busy subway car travelling toward downtown Manhattan. Enmeshed in my confused reactions towards having children, I looked around the subway with intense resentment towards every man there. I was taken aback by my own resentment. Why did I feel such antagonism towards these strangers? The answer came to me in a flash.
I wanted for myself what most male parents have: the possibility to be a biological parent without being a mother; or in other words parenthood without the labor that mothers unequally carry.
To be clear, I feel no ambivalence over the precious value of children. My own upbringing in a family of seven children showed me how much joy family can provide. Our parents treated us as their most sublime legacy and worked hard to make our family time—especially on Shabbat and holidays—replete with moments in which we felt the grandeur of belonging to something greater than our individual selves.
My Jewish values also informed my feelings about being a parent. Our tradition is unequivocal in treasuring the ability of parents to pass their legacy forward. Even a not-so-lachrymose conception of Jewish history is replete with examples of attempts to destroy Jewish continuity. The Pharaohs and Hamans and Queen Isabellas and Hitlers have ensured that Jewish survival—biological continuity endowed with spiritual meaning and covenantal commitment—became a sacred act of Jewish resistance, what Emil Fackenheim called the 614th commandment. The very personal act of pregnancy and childbirth has taken on intense collective significance as a mitzvah for the sake of God and the Jewish people.
The value of children and biological reproduction seemed clear to me from a purely logical and purpose-driven perspective, too. If we believe that we are working hard to build a good society, wouldn’t we want to perpetuate it? This approach need not depend on a chauvinism that upholds the exclusive goodness of one's own people. It just means that if we desire communal reproduction, we should acknowledge that, historically, it has been most easily been achieved through biological reproduction.
But on that subway ride I realized that pro-natalist arguments have one glaring flaw: they ignore or whitewash the fact that the biological production of children entails gender inequality and inequity. For continuity projects to succeed, only those with wombs must go through pregnancy and childbirth and nursing. Granted, many women experience this as a beautiful and sublime privilege. But it is undeniable that women must invest unequal time and experience unequal physical labor to bear children.
Nor is this inequality merely biological. Even in progressive and liberal circles, mothers in heteronormative partnerships end up carrying significantly more childrearing responsibility than their male partners. Working mothers have a “second shift” in the words of sociologist Arlie Hochschild, a situation made worse by the absence of government-sponsored help to care for their children.9
As Rosenblatt, Stahl, and Berman describe, promoting Jewish continuity demands unequal biological labor by women. What I find problematic is not this undeniable reality – what concerns me is the silence around it, the absence of any acknowledgment of it from pro-natalist Jewish institutions and leaders.
This lack of acknowledgment pervades the literature of Jewish sociology.10 Articles point to fertility rates or to the number of children that parents have without acknowledging that biological labor to bear them falls only on those who can bear children. Those who bemoan the low number of babies born to Jews seldom note that only half of the Jewish population is physically tasked with carrying out this continuity project.
Emblematic of this attitude were remarks by Michael Siegal in 2015 in his role as chair of the Jewish Federations of North America: “The one thing that is occurring in the United States which is most damaging is we’re just not having enough babies in the non-Orthodox world.” The royal “we” shows up again and again in remarks by pro-natalists without the slightest acknowledgement that it is women who are biologically having the babies in question.
This lack of recognition becomes even more significant in light of how often pro-natalist attitudes are expressed through “soft” communal interventions that ignore fertility’s gendered origins. In a fascinating article that focuses on the blurring between ‘quality’ and ‘quantity’ in the Jewish continuity discourse, Kravel-Tovi argues that much of the pro-natalist sentiments result in interventions that are meant to strengthen fertility without explicitly saying so, like funding Jewish education.11 This “soft” Jewish pro-natalism cloaked in the warm embrace of advancing Jewish education further obscures the root fact that birthing those babies that will receive that education is not a gender-neutral enterprise. Even as our communities support natalism, they do not acknowledge the embodied unequal experiences of those who are asked to bring it to fruition.
In offering this observation I do not mean to minimize the parenting contributions of fathers or non-biological parents. In fact, men today increasingly embody their role as fathers in the raising of children.12 But none of this progress detracts from two stark facts: individuals with wombs are still the only ones potentially able to be pregnant, and childrearing continues to be carried out disproportionately by women.
“Can we advocate for Jewish continuity when it inherently demands a unique biological labor from women?”
These reflections lead me to my point: the ambivalence toward Jewish continuity stems (I believe) much more from the silence around this biological reality than from the pro-natalist position itself or from the few bad actors in the field.
A gender-neutral discourse of Jewish continuity that de facto places the responsibility of biological reproduction on women gives rise to a certain cognitive dissonance. This dissonance, I think, accounts for much of the discomfort caused by it. By failing to acknowledge that women must physically bear the continuity project, the sociological discourse seems replete with not-so-secret attempts to control women’s bodies using a language veiled by Jewish values.
When such realities are obscured, we cannot make the space to ask the difficult questions that the messy and sometimes painful encounter between our bodies and values demands. Does valuing Jewish continuity inherently exclude those who do not procreate? How can we create space for new forms of embodied identities and Jewish families? How can we embrace a discourse of Jewish continuity together with gender egalitarianism?
Understanding this hidden gap between our reality and our discourse has helped me make sense of my own internal contradictions: I have twenty-first-century values ensconced in a body like the ones women have inhabited for millennia. We can talk about gender equity all we want, but our bodies are out of sync with our beliefs.
Naming this gap between biological reproduction and gender equality leads to new conundrums. Should feminists embark on motherhood in light of its irrevocably non-egalitarian outcomes? Shulamith Firestone argued that biological inequality around reproduction is inherently tied to the inequality of men and women, leading her to argue that we should invest in technology that could free women from childbirth.13
In a similar vein, can someone advocate for Jewish continuity as a value of the American Jewish community when it inherently demands a unique biological labor from women? What can they say to the likes of Rosenblatt, Stahl and Berman who conclude that the agenda of Jewish continuity results in approaching women’s bodies as “communal property” and non-autonomous “vessels for the Jewish future.”
AN ETHICAL JEWISH CONTINUITY
Such questions give way to more than one answer. My pro-natalist and pro-Jewish continuity convictions stem from my multiple commitments as a Jewish sociologist, feminist, and mother.
My convictions have also been shaped by studying the choices of traditional Sephardic women. The work of the late anthropologist Saba Mahmood has proven particularly influential. Mahmood challenged the scholarly discourse on feminism by arguing that it centers a western and liberal view of the autonomous self—one that could not properly recognize the choices of women when those choices did not align with emancipatory progressive politics. In her book Politics of Piety, Mahmood studied the religious subjectivities of women in Egypt who were part of pietist revival movements.14 She showed that those women’s choices, however non-feminist they may appear to western eyes, must be understood in light of their agency in shaping their own lives—the seemingly paradoxical ability to make choices despite those choices being non-egalitarian.
In her recent work, Conceiving Agency, Michal Raucher offers a similar argument. Focusing on the specific area of reproduction and taking into account the patriarchal dynamics which shape the lives of Haredi women in Israel, Raucher argues that “agency and authority can also be found through conformity to reproductive norms.”15
For some women, there is a tension (perhaps a fruitful one) between equality and agency. Some argue that women who adopt traditionalist stances or pro-natalist orientations are simply suffering under false consciousness, adopting values that are imposed on them by a patriarchal culture.16 But I hold to Mahmood and Raucher's notions of feminist agency: if we are going to take women’s choices seriously, we will have to allow for the possibility or indeed the reality that women who adopt pro-natalist and other positions are neither deluded nor oppressed, but full human beings making up their own minds about the things that matter most to them.
Considering the feminist value of agency transforms the nature of the discourse around biological reproduction and Jewish continuity. We humans are complex creatures, with multiple and sometimes contradictory commitments. In this case, agency—not equality—is the sine qua non for justice.
As a result, despite the lack of egalitarianism inherent in childbearing, I have chosen to try to have children of my own, was blessed with the ability to do so, and have found in them a greater source of love, joy, and purpose that I could ever have imagined.
At the same time, I continue to uphold a commitment to Jewish continuity and pro-natalism in the Jewish communal context. But my commitment is of a piece with my other values. I do not believe that we can ethically uphold the value of Jewish continuity without shaping it in ways that consider, and are alert to tensions with other Jewish and feminist values. In this vein, our commitment to Jewish continuity should openly and honestly grapple with the fact that Jewish women are asked to bear a greater aspect of the labor to bring about Jewish continuity.
An open and honest grappling would result in changes in the discourse around fertility and Jewish continuity. It would center women’s voices and seek to be truly representative of the diversity of our communities. It would acknowledge that the liberal Jewish community is invested in two values that sometimes stand in tension: promoting Jewish fertility and advancing gender equality. To aid in this goal, the communal discourse related to fertility should strive to distinguish between describing population trends and proposing communal interventions.
Changes should extend beyond the way we talk about these issues. Jewish communal organizations should invest in children in ways that go beyond promoting childbirth by supporting working mothers and parents through policies in a myriad of areas such as paid family leave, support for childcare, etc. Special attention should be given to feminist recommendations for the wellbeing of mothers in our society.
At the same time, Jewish communal funds should offer support for those Jewish individuals seeking to have children who cannot biologically have children or who are not partnered, such as providing funds for women to freeze their eggs or helping sponsor IVF treatments. The broader discourse around Jewish continuity must be attuned to the family needs of single parents and new and diverse family structures.
But while changes to the discourse and policy are necessary, they are not sufficient. As I noted above, it is at best naïve and at worst irresponsible to imagine a Jewish community with no norms; if it seeks to uphold any values at all, no community can include everyone’s views. Yet those who espouse the Jewish continuity agenda must do better in acknowledging and responding to the pain of those who cannot or do not want to conform to those norms, especially those who have felt excluded or harmed by arguments about Jewish continuity. While some positions will naturally be irreconcilable, there are many choices we can make to ameliorate harm, specifically in exploring how to prevent support for Jewish fertility from being translated into judgment of those who cannot or choose not to have children.
While not an exhaustive set of recommendations, these suggestions are at least a starting point for moving past the initial response to the pro-natalism debate to engage the profound issues that lie at its core. Adopting them would signal that the Jewish community can honor female agency and treasure Jewish continuity as part of a broader celebration of traditional Jewish values in a 21st-century context.
This article appears in Sources, Spring 2021
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Jewish Continuity and Jewish Destiny: It’s Not Just About You
Notes
1. Berman, L. C., Rosenblatt, K., & Stahl, R. Y. (2020). Continuity Crisis: The History and Sexual Politics of an American Jewish Communal Project. American Jewish History, 104(2), 167–194.
2. This alignment between communal and individual interests in relation to fertility leads me to resist making sharp distinctions between individual and communal pro-natalist orientations in this analysis. This is based, of course, on the nature of the American Jewish community, which is based on non-coercive and voluntaristic association. A different environment, like the Israeli context, in which a state legislates based on a pro-natalist agenda that sees Jewish fertility as intrinsically intertwined with state interests, would demand different analytical approaches to personal versus communal pro-natalist choices. See Birenbaum-Carmeli, D. (2009). The politics of ‘The Natural Family’ in Israel: State policy and kinship ideologies. Social Science & Medicine, 69(7), 1018–1024; Stypińska, J. (2007). Jewish majority and Arab minority in Israel-demographic struggle. Polish Sociological Review, 157(1), 105–120.
3. Saxe, L., Shain, M., Hecht, S., Wright, G., Rieser, M., & Sasson, T. (2014). Jewish futures project. The impact of Taglit-Birthright Israel: Marriage and family. See also this op-ed by Michelle Shain in which she reflects on different projects that support this assertion: https://jewishweek.timesofisrael.com/studying-fertility-is-a-feminist-and-a-jewish-enterprise/ and Shain, M. (2018). Understanding the Demographic Challenge: Education, Orthodoxy and the Fertility of American Jews. Contemporary Jewry, 39(2), 273-292. doi:10.1007/s12397-018-9249-6
4. Put differently, Len Saxe argues that ”Demography is part of the Jewish story.” See Saxe, L. (2020) "Misogyny and the Continuity Crisis: Is Social Science Research Responsible?." American Jewish History 104(2), 221–228.
5. Kravel-Tovi, M. (2020). " Continuity Crisis" and its Instrumentalizing Effects. American Jewish History, 104(2), 215–220.
6. See Kravel-Tovi, M. (2020). The Specter of Dwindling Numbers: Population Quantity and Jewish Biopolitics in the United States. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 62(1), 35–67.
7. For a description of the anti-essentialist stance intertwined in the feminist critique of Jewish continuity, see Shain, M., & Williams, M. (2020). Continuity and the Politics of an American "Mitzvah". American Jewish History, 104(2), 201–206.
8. Fishman, S. B., & Shain, M. (2019). Go Figure: Feminist Sociological Analysis of Diverse Jewish Households. Contemporary Jewry, 39(3-4), 407–425.
9. Hochschild, A., & Machung, A. (2012). The second shift: Working families and the revolution at home. Penguin.
10. This is also more generally pervasive in how we speak about parenting. As scholar Mara Benjamin writes in her powerful exploration of Jewish theology and motherhood, “If used without qualification, the contemporary, gender-neutral term “parent” risks whitewashing a reality that still bears a strong gendered aspect.” Benjamin, M. H. (2018). The Obligated Self: Maternal Subjectivity and Jewish Thought. Indiana University Press.
11. Kravel-Tovi, M. (2020). The Specter of Dwindling Numbers: Population Quantity and Jewish Biopolitics in the United States. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 62(1), 35–67.
12. As Keren McGinity points out, one of the deleterious effects of certain kinds of articulations of Jewish Continuity has been to excuse “Jewish men from the unpaid labor of domestic Judaism.” McGinity, K. R. (2020). The Unfinished Business of the Sexual Revolution. American Jewish History, 104(2), 207–213.
13. Firestone, S. (2003). The dialectic of sex: The case for feminist revolution. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
14. Mahmood, S. (2011). Politics of piety: The Islamic revival and the feminist subject. Princeton University Press.
15. Raucher, M. S. (2020). Conceiving Agency: Reproductive Authority Among Haredi Women. Indiana University Press.
16. There are many feminist scholars who question the ability of women to truly have agency in choosing to have children. See Solinger, R. (1998). Dependency and choice: The two faces of Eve. Social Justice, 25(1 (71), 1–27; Gill, R. (2008). Culture and subjectivity in neoliberal and postfeminist times. Subjectivity, 25(1), 432–445; McRobbie, A. (2009). The aftermath of feminism: Gender, culture and social change. Sage; Lahad, K. (2014). The single woman's choice as a zero-sum game. Cultural Studies, 28(2), 240–266; Donath, O. (2017). Regretting motherhood: A study. North Atlantic Books. While I value the questions these scholars raise about the possibility of agency, I am more compelled by Mahmood’s approach, which complicates the western assumptions that cannot concede a subject’s agency when her choices do not align with progressive politics. See also Mizrachi, N. (2016). Sociology in the garden: Beyond the liberal grammar of contemporary sociology. Israel Studies Review, 31(1), 36–65.
