Part I: Creating Gender
From "The Soul of the Stranger," Dr. Joy Ladin:
...in this story [of the creation of Adam and Eve], the difference between male and female bodies is much less important than what human beings have in common. Those physical differences would surely have been striking to a man who had never seen a human body other than his own, but Adam ("the [human]") notices first the woman's physical kinship to him, the shared humanity he didn't find in other creatures: "This one at last is bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh."
That recognition of common humanity inspires Adam to invent gender, that is, to interpret the differences between male and female bodies as implying different but intimately related identities: "This one shall be called Woman [ishah], for from man [ish] was she taken." This moment, when Adam begins to give human meaning to divinely created (but thus far not divinely interpreted) maleness and femaleness, represents the biblical genesis of gender, and the first budding of the gender binary...
The binary man/woman demotes Adam from a supreme, species-defining individual to someone who is defined in relation to the woman, just as the woman is defined in relation to him. Adam doesn't mind the demotion; in fact, he is delighted, because being defined by the gender binary means he is no longer alone.
From "Gender Trouble," Dr. Judith Butler:
Gender is not something one is, it is something one does.
Part II: Gendered Mitzvot
(ז) כָּל מִצְוֹת הַבֵּן עַל הָאָב, אֲנָשִׁים חַיָּבִין וְנָשִׁים פְּטוּרוֹת. וְכָל מִצְוֹת הָאָב עַל הַבֵּן, אֶחָד אֲנָשִׁים וְאֶחָד נָשִׁים חַיָּבִין. וְכָל מִצְוַת עֲשֵׂה שֶׁהַזְּמָן גְּרָמָהּ, אֲנָשִׁים חַיָּבִין וְנָשִׁים פְּטוּרוֹת. וְכָל מִצְוַת עֲשֵׂה שֶׁלֹּא הַזְּמָן גְּרָמָהּ, אֶחָד אֲנָשִׁים וְאֶחָד נָשִׁים חַיָּבִין. וְכָל מִצְוַת לֹא תַעֲשֶׂה, בֵּין שֶׁהַזְּמָן גְּרָמָהּ בֵּין שֶׁלֹּא הַזְּמָן גְּרָמָהּ, אֶחָד אֲנָשִׁים וְאֶחָד נָשִׁים חַיָּבִין, חוּץ מִבַּל תַּשְׁחִית וּבַל תַּקִּיף וּבַל תִּטַּמָּא לְמֵתִים:
With regard to all mitzvot of a son with regard to his father, men are obligated to perform them and women are exempt. And with regard to all mitzvot of a father with regard to his son, both men and women are obligated to perform them. The mishna notes an additional difference between the obligations of men and women in the performance of mitzvot: With regard to all positive, time-bound mitzvot, i.e., those which must be performed at specific times, men are obligated to perform them and women are exempt. And with regard to all positive mitzvot that are not time bound, both men and women are obligated to perform them. And with regard to all prohibitions, whether they are time-bound or whether they are not time-bound, both men and women are obligated to observe them, except for the prohibitions of: Do not round the corners of your head, and: Do not destroy the corners of your beard, which are derived from the verse: “You shall not round the corners of your head and you shall not destroy the corners of your beard” (Leviticus 19:27), and a prohibition that concerns only priests: Do not contract ritual impurity from a corpse (see Leviticus 21:1). These mitzvot apply only to men, not women, despite the fact that they are prohibitions.
וְנֵילַף מִתַּלְמוּד תּוֹרָה! – מִשּׁוּם דְּהָוֵה לֵיהּ תַּלְמוּד תּוֹרָה וּפְרִיָּה וּרְבִיָּה שְׁנֵי כְתוּבִים הַבָּאִים כְּאֶחָד, וְכֹל שְׁנֵי כְתוּבִים הַבָּאִים כְּאֶחָד אֵין מְלַמְּדִים.
The Gemara asks: But why not derive the opposite from Torah study: Just as women are exempt from Torah study, so too they should be exempt from all positive mitzvot that are not time bound. The Gemara answers: One cannot derive an exemption for women from their exemption from Torah study, because Torah study and procreation are two verses that come as one, as in both cases women are exempt, despite the fact that these are not time-bound mitzvot. And any two verses that come as one do not teach a precedent.
Part III: Gender Variance and Punishment
From “Unheroic Conduct,” Dr. Daniel Boyarin:
The paradoxical role of Yiddish can be read as exemplary of this dual movement, for on one hand Yiddish was explicitly marked as the language of female spaces--the kitchen and the marketplace--but on the other hand, it was the vernacular of the quintessentially male space of the Study-House. The texts were in "masculine" Hebrew, but the language of study was in the "feminine" Yiddish, thus marking the intimate connection between the Yeshiva-Bokhur* male ideal (the later mentsh**) and the domestic and female.
The Westernization process for Jews, clearly then not to be simply identified with modernization [without qualification], was one in which mentsh as Jewish male ideal became largely abandoned for a dawning ideal of the "New Jewish Man," "the Muscle-Jew," a figure almost identical to his "Aryan" confreres and especially the "Muscular Christian," also born at about this time.
* Hebrew, "Jewish-school boy"
** American Yiddish, "virtuous man"
From “How Jews Became White Folks, and What That Says About Race in America,” Dr. Karen Brodkin:
Where the Jewish mother stereotype developed in the 1950s, that of [Jewish American Princesses (JAPs)] peaked in the 1970s. As Riv-Ellen Prell so insightfully argues, JAPs are Jewish men's projections of their own nightmares about whiteness onto Jewish women. Such projections of course neatly avoid confronting the thought that men might have the same values themselves. Where Jewish mothers hovered and smothered and guilt-tripped their sons into forsaking the hard-earned pleasure of white middle-class masculine materialism, JAPs were the metastasizing cancer of that materialism. Perhaps they emerged a decade or two after the Jewish mother stereotype because they reflected anxieties that came from several decades of life in mainstream consumer culture.