| This study explores mother-daughter dynamics in the context of writing by contemporary Jewish women whose texts were published from 1980 through the present, including Cynthia Ozick, Marge Piercy, Tova Mirvis, Marjorie Agosin, Carmit Delman, and Farideh Goldin. Complicated psychoanalytic situations, identified by such theorists as Nancy Chodorow, Jessica Benjamin, and Adrienne Rich, occur throughout Jewish women's fiction, poetry, and memoirs, and I seek here an understanding of how Judaism exacerbates them. Matrophobia, dyadicism, melancholia, and role-reversals create tension between Jewish mothers and daughters stemming from the prevalence of feminism in modern society and from the now common practice of Reform Judaism, a denomination which adapts the laws of Torah to fit contemporary, gender-egalitarian times.;The mothers represented here came of age not only under the precepts of a traditionally misogynistic brand of Judaism, but also within a society where feminism is not the norm. They are therefore not religiously or historically situated to be agentive; instead, men make decisions for them and expect from them fulfillment of domestic tasks. Their daughters, however, are situationally primed to seize opportunities for learning and working outside the home, where they are free of certain religious obligations. When daughters choose feminism over aspects of Jewish tradition, their mothers feel mixed emotions: some desperately try to keep their daughters in the fold; others are both jealous and glad, sometimes simultaneously.;Ultimately, the bond of genetics is an irresistible force, as is the community of Judaism. Though daughters studied here try to break with their mothers' models of womanhood, they invariably come to understand that they can be different from, but not entirely separate from, their female predecessors. While they may live out their mothers' stories in their own unique ways, daughters almost always eventually incarnate those stories, whether they come to them willingly or inhabit them despite their best efforts to resist. The daughters cannot but be bound to their foremothers through biology and tradition, since many of them bear strong physical resemblances and because they all remain firmly committed to---and rooted in some version or another of---their Jewish heritage. |
