Ultra-Orthodox Jewish women performing gender in Julius Caesar

ABSTRACT

This article explores the way gender resonates in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar through an active study of live performance. Combining pedagogy with performance as an interpretive methodology, this research focuses upon using my unique classroom situation, teaching ultra-Orthodox Jewish adolescent females, as a platform for analysis. Performing Julius Caesar in my classroom represents an inversion of early modern all-male performance. The question explored in this study is: what does this reversal illuminate about constructions of gender among ultra-Orthodox adolescents?

KEYWORDS:

• Shakespeare
• performance
• pedagogy
• ultra-Orthodox Jews
• feminism
• adolescents

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Esther Schupak currently teaches at Talpiot College of Education and Bar-Ilan University, where she attained her doctorate. Her research interests focus on Shakespeare, performance, listening rhetoric, and pedagogy. In addition to teaching rhetoric, academic writing, and literature courses, she teaches Shakespeare to both undergraduate and graduate students.

ORCID

Esther B. Schupak http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8980-4520

Notes

1. ‘Haredi’ is a term also used to describe this sector. I prefer ‘ultra-Orthodox’ because this terminology reflects the fact that there exists a spectrum of Orthodox religiosity and that the borders between Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox can often be vague and permeable.

2. I was particularly discouraged to hear these sentiments coming from an individual whose job is to encourage women’s careers.

3. Of course, performances, whether they take place within the classroom or in a more public setting, carry the potential for subversion. In distinguishing between sex and gender, Judith Butler opens a space for theorising about how identity is culturally constituted through performance. When individuals enact their culturally determined gender roles, whether in the public or private sphere, they become that which they enact. Theatre is one of the modes through which gender enactments are reflected back to society, normalising such performances and intensifying their cultural power. Butler, however, points out that performed gender does not always confirm societal expectations, and mentions drag as subversive to societal norms of gender, exposing the ‘tenuousness’ of gender norms. She suggests that society is prepared to tolerate performances in this category because they are seen as unreal: ‘[T]he various conventions which announce that “this is only a play” allows [sic] strict lines to be drawn between the performance and life’. But simultaneously, in performing a given play, we illuminate the performativity of gender.

4. When I taught Shakespeare in Bet Yaakov in the United States, I made extensive use of videos, but the school in Israel where I undertook the study did not allow me to do so for religious reasons.

5. Outside of Israel, the movement is known as Bais Yaakov or Bais Ya’acov, following the Ashkenazi (Western) pronunciation.

6. Some institutions have begun ordaining women, but these ordinations have not been accepted by mainstream Orthodox organisations, such as the Israeli Rabbanut, the Orthodox Union or the Rabbinical Council of America.

7. In the 2013 elections, a group of ultra-Orthodox women attempted to inaugurate their own party, but were mostly unsuccessful in achieving office.

8. My own translation from the Hebrew.

9. Many rabbis opposed the idea of establishing an educational system for women, and it was only when she broached the idea to the Belzer Rebbe that Schenirer at last received the rabbinical approbation that she needed. Later, she received the support of other spiritual leaders, notably the Gerrer Rebbe; however, the greatest victory for Bet Yaakov came when the Hafetz Hayim, one of the greatest spiritual leaders of twentieth century European Jewry, pronounced that ‘Insofar as the people of our generation teach their daughters so much unseemly frivolity, it would certainly be worthwhile to teach them Torah’ (qtd. in (Weissman 1995, 284).

10. This is a pun. The phrase is a quote from the Talmud (Kiddushin 36b), whose literal meaning is that it is forbidden to eat new grain until the appropriate sacrifice is made at the Temple. The Chatam Sofer often used this quotation in his responsa with the meaning that innovation is forbidden in religious life. (See for example 1:29.)

11. My own translation from the Hebrew.

12. Shakespeare, of course, nurtured social aspirations to rise beyond the middle class, as embodied by his coat of arms. Nevertheless, he was reared in bourgeois context; he retired to his home town; and he was a businessman who worked for a living.

13. Perhaps this also explains the initial strong rabbinical opposition to the founding of Bet Yaakov.

14. As a result of this experience, when I now teach Shakespeare to undergraduates and graduate students, I vary my methods, using both performance and more traditional lecture-discussion.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Bar-Ilan University Presidential Fellowship for Outstanding Scholars.