Trauma, Gender, and the Stories of Jewish Women: The Other Within

ABSTRACT

This paper explores how trauma (individual, cultural, and historical) experiences and gender stories of women behaving more like men become intermingled. Drawing upon stories of women in Jewish literature (Beruriah and Yentl), psychoanalytic theories of gender, and intergenerational transmission of trauma, the author unpacks how women carry vulnerability and helplessness whereas men are seen as stronger and agentic. The author believes that gender performance and passing highlight how gender becomes enlisted as a mode of traumatic transmission and possibly 1 type of internal psychic reparative resolution to complex traumatic experiences.

Acknowledgments

I thank Rabbi Burton L. Visotzky for introducing me to midrash and Beruriah; Dr. Anne Lapidus Lerner for elaborating the feminist enterprise in the context of the Beruriah legends; Rabbi Judith Hauptman for her thoughtful comments and encouragement on this paper; Carole Maso for her acumen and wonderful encouragement; and Adrienne Harris for her insights on gender, tomboys, and so much more.

Notes

¹ The Nazi regime targeted all Jews, both men and women, for persecution and eventually death. The regime frequently subjected women, however, both Jewish and non-Jewish, to brutal persecution that was sometimes unique to the gender of the victims. … In both camps and ghettos, women were particularly vulnerable to beatings and rape. … The Germans established brothels in some concentration and labor camps, and the German army ran roughly 500 brothels for soldiers in which women were forced to work (see U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum (2014), “Woman During the Holocaust”).

² There is some speculation that there was more than one person who was referred to in the Talmud by the name Beruriah. In the Tosefta she is referred to as the daughter of Rabbi Hananiah ben Tardion and if this is true she would have either seen or known of his being martyred by the Romans in the aftermath of the Bar Kokhba revolt (32 C.E.). For a much fuller discussion see Tal Ilan (1999), Chapter 6.

³ This is much like our current academic/scientific adherence to citing of whose scholarship one is utilizing whether to support or refute an argument.

⁴ My Fair Lady is a musical based on the play Pygmalion written by George Bernard Shaw in 1912.

⁵ It is not possible to fully explore the aspect of these stories having been written by men. However, it is worth entertaining how different the legends of Beruriah and the story of Yentl might be if recorded and/or imagined by women.

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Notes on contributors

Jill Salberg

Jill Salberg, Ph.D., A.B.P.P., is clinical adjunct associate professor of psychology and clinical consultant/supervisor at the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis and the Stephen Mitchell Center for Relational Studies. She has conceived of and co-edits a new Routledge book series, Psyche and Soul: Psychoanalysis, Spirituality and Religion in Dialogue. She is in private practice in Manhattan.