articles make it a durable resource. Juschka balances

the broad lineaments of discussion with specific

examples, effectively making complex theory clear.

In sum, this book is comprehensive, accessible,

and accomplished, a resource of longstanding value

for the analysis of those equally complex artefacts of

human culture, ‘‘gender’’ and ‘‘religion.’’

Randi R. Warne

Department of Philosophy/

Religious Studies

Mount St. Vincent University

Halifax, Nova Scotia

Canada, B3M 2J6

As Susan Kahn points out in this engaging and

important book, new reproductive technologies, such

as IVF, received a great deal of critical attention in the

1990s from feminist anthropologists, such as Marilyn

Strathern, who saw in their disruption of ‘the facts of

life’ a set of important implications for the long-

standing debate about the nature–culture distinction,

and its implications for the idea of ‘biological facts.’

According to Strathern, the extent to which IVF could

displace the authority of the ‘naturalness’ of hetero-

sexual intercourse as the basis of procreation, while at

the same time described as ‘just like’ nature demon-

strated something important about the knowledge

practices of Euro Americans—notably that the very

essentialisms on which kinship systems (or, by impli-

cation, gender systems) are seen to be based are

indeed much more flexible, contingent, and contra-

dictory, especially in the service of individual choice.

Recently making the parallels to her own arguments

about gender explicit, Judith Butler has similarly

drawn attention to the twists and turns that character-

ise kinship thinking in and around the question of

lesbian and gay families.

Kinship trouble is nowhere better documented

than in Susan Kahn’s magnificent contribution to

these debates in her study of assisted conception in

Israel. With the highest rate of IVF in the world, and

complex religious prohibitions intersecting with cul-

tural assumptions about physical bodies, naturalness,

and purity of lineage, Israel makes a perfect case

study for the question of whether there is any such

thing as a biological fact. What makes a Jew?

Matrilineage can do a lot of the work, but as Kahn

points out, Jews are not so much born as made, and

reproduction is above all a cultural achievement

rather than a natural consequence of human biology.

Kahn uses her beautifully written ethnographic

tour of Israeli IVF labs, surrogacy laws, artificial

insemination procedures, and egg donation debates

to push the arguments of Butler and Strathern a bit

further—asking, for example, what is meant by a

genetic tie? For Orthodox Jewish Rabbis, artificial

insemination of a Jewish woman with Jewish sperm

is both polluting and adulterous, whereas non-Jewish

sperm ‘is the perfect kinship cipher; it is there and yet

it is not there; it creates a child and yet does not leave

a trace of relatedness’ (105). In other words, non-

Jewish sperm procreates, but does not reproduce.

This displacement of the effect of a paternal tie is

at once strange and familiar—the hallmark of anthro-

pological argument. After all, we are all familiar with

the ways in which some ‘blood ties’ are recognised,

celebrated, and consequential, whereas others are

disavowed or simply ignored despite being explicitly

known. Consequently, we might say that new repro-

ductive technologies do not so much displace, or

challenge, or threaten existing kinship beliefs, as

make them work differently, in ways that are already

familiar, but are now being more consciously and

strategically deployed.

The question of what makes the ‘biological facts’

of kinship (or gender) appear and disappear takes on

added importance in the context of both the consumer

(‘enterprise’) culture that concerns theorists, such as

Strathern, and the pro-natalist national (Israeli) cul-

ture that Kahn seeks to explore. For when it comes to

using Palestinian sperm, for example, the flexibility

of beliefs about genetic traces or effects suddenly

disappears: ‘God Forbid,’ as Kahn reports one Israeli

IVF clinician’s response to the suggestion of using

Arab gametes. Therefore, while Kahn claims that in

rabbinic thinking, ‘genetic relatedness does not enjoy

the same position of conceptual authority it does in

Euro American thinking,’ and that ‘on the contrary,

[it] is considerably more plastic [because] it can be

conceptually erased, made invisible, or otherwise

reconfigured’ (165), it is possible she is overstating

the case somewhat, as we can observe this same

‘flexibility’ of ideas about blood relatedness not only

in terms of reproduction, but often in terms of race,

gender, and ancestry in general.

The take-home message from much of the recent

feminist work on kinship in the context of new

reproductive and genetic technologies confirms in a

Reproducing Jews: A Cultural Account of

Assisted Conception in Israel by Susan MarthaKahn, 228 pages. NC: Duke University Press,Durham, NC. 2000. UK £12.95 paper.

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Book Reviews152

spectacular way the arguments of Butler, Haraway,

Strathern, and others about the nonbiological base of

the so-called ‘facts of life.’ Indeed, biology itself is

‘queering’ the egg and sperm story with new life

forms, such as Dolly the cloned sheep. Susan Kahn’s

conception narratives from the world’s leading test-

tube baby nation, where the orthodox traditions

merge seamlessly with the latest laboratory techni-

ques for manipulating gametes, make compelling

reading as both critical feminist scholarship and

intriguing parables of our time.

Sarah Franklin

Department of Sociology

Lancaster University, Lancaster

England LA1 4YL, UK

Tel.: +44-1524-594187

Fax: +44-1524-594256

E-mail: s.franklin@lancaster.ac.uk

PII S0277-5395(02)00223-6

Book Reviews 153