Lisa Silverman, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee

JEWISH STUDIES HAS MUCH TO LEARN from gender studies. When Simone de Beauvoir challenged readers to rethink women’s position in society in Le Deuxième Sexe (1949, translated as The Second Sex, 1953), she defined femininity in terms that reverberated for decades to come. Beauvoir posited that “femininity” was not a natural state, but rather a social construction according to which Man was the absolute subject — the representative of the human norm — and Woman his Other. According to the terms of this hierarchical structure, Woman’s status as Other is imposed by Man. Whether exhilarated or horrified, de Beauvoir’s readers found her powerful claims difficult to dismiss.

Given de Beauvoir’s intimate romantic and intellectual relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre, it is no coincidence that her critique of the Man/ Woman dialectic bears many similarities to Sartre’s discussion of the relationship between antisemite and Jew in his influential Réflexions sur la question juive (1946, translated as Anti-Semite and Jew, 1948). There is, however, one fundamental difference between the two. De Beauvoir’s contention that “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman” crystallized the formation of a critical theory of gender implicitly organized around the socially-constructed, mutually-constitutive, hierarchical categories of Man and Woman. These categories form the foundation of a system for critically analyzing all texts — not merely those by or about women — according to their level of engagement with its terms. In contrast, Sartre’s much-quoted observation “If the Jew did not exist, the anti-Semite would invent him” positions the Jew as an Other constructed by the antisemite, rather than by the non-Jew. In this formulation, the counterpart to the Jew is not its antithesis, but its opponent. Sartre thus renders the socially constructed Jew central to the study of antisemitism, rather than to Jewish studies.