On Women in Neo-Hasidism

• In Event: Women in Hasidism: New Perspectives Beyond the Debate

Abstract

In her landmark article “On Women in Hasidism” (1988), Ada Rapoport-Albert lambasted Shmuel Abba Horodetsky’s romantic portrayal of gender egalitarianism in Hasidism. Rapoport-Albert refuted his claims on historical grounds, demonstrating how Hasidic communities were in fact glaringly patriarchal in their leadership structures and often explicitly misogynistic in their theological-metaphysical perspectives. Other scholars such as Marcin Wodzinski and Tsippi Kauffman have built upon Rapoport-Albert’s essay to further illuminate gender dynamics in Hasidism. My presentation inquires, though, what happens if we read someone like Horodetsky specifically as a neo-Hasidic writer and thus take historical inaccuracies for granted. If neo-Hasidism has been largely rooted in romanticizations of Hasidism, what are the ethics of sugarcoating Hasidic sexism? Might such revisionary representations foster more egalitarian and feminist movements in the contemporary world, or does glossing over the injustices of Hasidic communities actually render one’s own neo-Hasidic culture more susceptible to propagating those very injustices? These questions are at the core of my presentation, but I investigate this terrain primarily through a hermeneutical-intertextual lens. Rather than evaluate neo-Hasidic portrayals of women only over-against historical evidence, I examine how neo-Hasidic writers engage with Hasidic sources, shedding light at once on the hermeneutics of neo-Hasidism, the ethics of romantic movements, and, at times, the interpretive possibilities within Hasidic sources. Primary case studies to be considered will include Martin Buber (1878-1965) and Tirzah Firestone (b. 1954). In the former, we will see how neo-Hasidic efforts to sugarcoat Hasidism can render women even less visible than they were in the original sources. In the latter, we will explore how feminist hermeneutics of suspicion might seek to “reconstruct” memories of actual Hasidic women out of their distorted representations in Hasidic literature.

Author

• Sam Shonkoff, Graduate Theological Union