Shiksa: The Gentile Woman in the Jewish World [Hardcover]

Christine Benvenuto (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 18, 2004 | ISBN-10: 031231146X | ISBN-13: 978-0312311469 | Edition: 1st

She is feared and desired. She is the symbol of a family's failure and a culture's dissolution. She is a courageous ally, a loyal fellow traveler, and a mother struggling for the survival of the same family and culture whose destruction she supposedly seeks.

The gentile woman has been all these things and more to the Jewish people. Her almost mythic status has its roots in the dawn of Jewish history and repercussions that extend beyond our own time to shape the Jewish future. It also entails more baggage than any woman could possibly hope to carry.

Shiksa: The Gentile Woman in the Jewish World, unpacks that baggage. Shiksa tells the stories of gentile women and women converts living in the Jewish community today, sharing insights from rabbis, Jewish feminists, educators and therapists. The book explores relationships between Jewish and gentile women, particularly Jewish mothers and their gentile daughters-in-law, as well as those between Jewish men and gentile women. And it looks at some of the fascinating Biblical figures whose stories startle with their relevance to today's most intimate issues of Jewish identity.

At a time when the Jewish community is rife with concern over intermarriage, Shiksa offers a fearless examination of the gentile and converted women residing within its gates, occupying embattled yet permanent places as partners, daughters, sisters, mothers, friends.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

At best exhaustive and provocative, and at worst exhausting and inflammatory, this study addresses the role gentile women ("shiksas") played in the Bible and, to a point, explores the role their contemporary sisters play in American Judaism today. Discussion of biblical gentile women is thorough, from the better known Hagar and Jezebel to the lesser known Cozbi and Zimri. However, though journalist Benvenuto concedes that her contemporary subjects "are individuals, each with her own history and perspective" and are "not intended to represent the full range of gentile women raising children in, or on the edge, of the Jewish community," a tone of strident indignation permeates the book. Benvenuto tells a tale of relentless exclusion, of gentile wives being shut out of shul life. Of her almost 30 interviewees, only two women have enough self-conviction to be comfortable in their choices, and Benvenuto dismisses as "implausible" one Jewish leader's claim that she has never heard "any negative attitudes towards non-Jewish women expressed." Although only two men are featured, one alone and one as part of a couple, Benvenuto offers the generalization that "young Jewish men still seem to count shiksas before they fall asleep at night, [while] married men... tend to deny that a partiality for gentile women played a role when they chose their non-Jewish wives." Few topics within Judaism are as volatile or as potentially divisive, and this account appears more likely to fan the flames than contribute to serious, constructive dialogue.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Within the Jewish community, gentile women--shiksas--are the stuff of legend, stereotype, and myth, who fill roles laden with expectation, insult, and elevation. Feminist journalist Benvenuto recounts that, for 4000-plus years, Jewish males have fantasized about the gentile woman's alleged supersexuality and availability, and at the same time, the gentile woman became a lightning rod for Jewish fear of loss of cultural identity through assimilation. Sex kitten or reviled outsider--"worse than Hitler," according to one group's campaign against intermarriage--gentile and converted women have always been part of Judaism. Benvenuto's work confronts the complicated controversy over them by using gentile women's and converts' personal accounts, including her own path from Italian Catholicism to Judaism, to illustrate realities in today's Jewish society while examining biblical figures' influence on contemporary perceptions. Though her experiences included Jews who would have barred her from the "exclusive club" of Judaism, her compelling convert's tale and those of others contribute greatly to the literature on some interreligious and women's issues that haven't been adequately explored. Whitney Scott
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press; 1st edition (March 18, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 031231146X
• ISBN-13: 978-0312311469
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.7 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #786,566 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Christine Benvenuto grew up in Brooklyn, New York, and graduated from Sarah Lawrence College. In the interests of earning a living she has polished paperweights, taught journalism and edited and ghost-written highly complex works on science and technology that she did not understand in the least. Her fiction and essays have appeared in many publications. She is the author of SHIKSA: THE GENTILE WOMAN IN THE JEWISH WORLD and the forthcoming SEX CHANGES. She and her three children live in New England.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Long Overdue Discussion, October 26, 2006

By 

C. Gombar "christinagombar" (Saunderstown, RI) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Shiksa: The Gentile Woman in the Jewish World (Hardcover)

I'm so glad Benvenuto wrote this book, because it launches a discussion about issues that have long troubled me. I am a gentile woman raised to be open, welcoming and respectful of the beliefs of others, who married into a Jewish family with mixed feelings about gentiles in the family.

As someone who attended Catholic services (which include a reading of the "Old Testament" as well as the "New") weekly for about twenty years, I am much more familiar with my husband's faith than he is with mine. This book details the anochronism, in this liberal modern age, where racial and ethnic prejudice is tabboo, of a religion where exclusion is integral to the definition of the faith itself.

I can see how the point of view here would be very offensive to Jews, and is probably the reason why it wasn't widely covered in the national media.

The author details many horror stories of gentile women who married into unwelcoming Jewish families, who nonetheless, decided to join that exclusive club themselves. Me, I have great respect for the Jewish tradition, I loved learning Hebrew, attending services and studying the Torah, but can't get past the "us and them" mentality. I was raised to believe I was a spiritual descendent of Jews, and suffered from no such sense of danger and betrayal in marrying out of my faith.

My only criticism is I'd rather hear from a few more actual people --especially the husbands and the "problematic" Jewish mother-in-laws who were so often unwelcoming, and a bit less of the Biblical scholarship, though that was enlightening.

Another important book to check out in a similar vein: The Faith Club, in which a Christian, Jewish and Muslim woman discuss their misperceptions about each others faith.

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a must for everyone interested in Judaism, June 24, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: Shiksa: The Gentile Woman in the Jewish World (Hardcover)

Benvenuto's book is a compassionate, critical, excellently written, well argued and thoroughly researched discussion of the role of gentile women in Judaism. Although not a fiction, it reads jut as fast. Benvenuto's is both a scholarly argument and an account of women's life in Judaism. She finds a perfect balance between personal stories (based on a selection of interviews she conducted), Biblical scholarship, journalistic presentation of opposing opinions and contemporary statistics and research. The subject, as the opposing reviews demonstrate, incites passion both for and against the book. It is precisely the negative reactions that prove Benvenuto's point, which is that gentile women still face hostility in some parts of the Jewish community. Yet Shiksa does not present a negative view of Jewish communities. Some of the gentile women she interviewed found their place in Judaism (even to the extent of becoming rabbis). The passion that motivates Benvenuto is a passion for Judaism that survived centuries without strategic exclusion of gentile women (some of the Biblical stories Benvenuto retells are about gentile women who were accepted in Judaism). Intermarriage is not a new phenomenon, Benvenuto argues. It has always existed and it will always exist. What seems to have changed is that in contemporary America, where Judaism is increasingly secularized, definitions of Judaism rely more on vague racial and cultural characteristics than religion. Thus while a gentile woman who converts to Judaism might become a respected rabbi and a Jewish community leader, from a secular point of view she can never become a "real" Jew. Acknowledging this contraditcion is crucial for the survival of Judaism. Let's hope that Benvenuto's book reaches not only the silent shiksas to whom Benvenuto's book gives voice for the first time, but also Jewish communities that can decide that inclusion is a much better policy than exclusion if they care about the preservation of their traditions.

13 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This is a must read, April 8, 2004

By A Customer

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Shiksa: The Gentile Woman in the Jewish World (Hardcover)

After reading the previous review I decided for myself to figure out whether this title was as bad as they said. All I can say is that this is an astounding work and is going to be a controversial one. Those two responses are certainly not mutually exclusive.

As the author suggests, the idea of even talking about the outsider in Judaism is one that engenders strong response. But this is not a book by a crank who could have just "posted a blog" on the internet to express her views. This is an incredibly thoughtful, well-researched, balanced and heartfelt exploration of contemporary religion from the point of view of someone who truly loves Judaism. The very fact of her taking the chance to question the tradition's exclusion of the Other and, by extension, the need for the Other (in this case, the gentile woman) to, in fact, define the tradition is a point that no serious scholar (or Jew) should ignore.

As a university-level instructor in religious studies, I'd challenge my colleagues to not only read, but also really study this text with the kind of thoughtfulness it deserves and care with which it was written.

A fantastic book!