Women's Voices: New Perspectives for the Christian-Jewish Dialogue (review)

This book presents the fruits of a dialogue group of Jewish and Christian women who have met in London since 1997. Eight years into the dialogue the group has grown to become a circle of friends who support each other spiritually as well as practically in their respective journeys through life. With Women's Voices, this group of eight women goes public to share their particular way of dialoguing with a wider readership. The aim of this collection of essays is to contribute another set of voices to the growing field of endeavors and publications related to Christian-Jewish relations.

Frustrated by the absence of recognition for a distinctively female approach to dialogue and of the under-representation of feminist engagements with Jewish and Christian traditions in institutional Christian-Jewish dialogue, the eight women embarked on a journey of their own. In many ways this is an exploratory collection, aiming to open up pathways for women to empower themselves in their own traditions and to seek out the female "other" in each other's tradition. Five Jewish and three Christian women, each at home in various Jewish movements and Christian denominations (there are, as yet, no representatives of Jewish or Christian Orthodoxy), meet regularly to share in the discussion of a paper presented alternately by a Jewish and a Christian participant. These are not academic papers, but personal investigations of relationships into one's own tradition in light of the other tradition, based on personal experience and often inspired by experiences at the time of writing. A selection of these papers is gathered together in the present volume, excluding the discussion which followed each presentation.

Since the group was born out of the experience of alienation and exclusion from institutional or mainstream Christian-Jewish dialogue, the theme of marginalization of women's experiences and perspectives in both traditions looms large in this volume. The collection is organized into three parts which speak to different areas of the project of engaging Jewish and Christian traditions in dialogue with each other: Theology, Scripture, and Spiritual Journey. Under these broad headings, a series of sub-topics which occupy institutional dialogue are gathered together: the theological perception of the other tradition, interpretations of the Messiah, the significance of the Holocaust for Jews and Christians and for their relations with each other, reading difficult biblical texts (here these are texts difficult for women and texts difficult with respect to women from the other tradition), as well as central elements of religious life such as prayer and the Eucharist, alongside significant life cycle events such as death and childbirth. Throughout, the dialogical nature of this enterprise is emphasized as each contributor considers possible implications of her observations for women of the other tradition and refers back to observations made in previous contributions to the book.

This volume is commendable for letting a wider public glimpse such an intensely personal process. On a scholarly level there is little that has not been discussed elsewhere already and with greater sophistication. But broadening feminist scholarship on Jewish-Christian relations is not the aim of Women's Voices. Rather, following in the footsteps of those publications of the 1980s which jointly explore feminist perspectives on Jewish and Christian traditions and practice, such as Carol Christ's and Judith Plaskow's collection Womanspirit Rising, this volume takes institutional Christian-Jewish dialogue to task for overlooking a variety of perspectives that are useful for forging encounters between Jews and Christians and for passing over the enrichment that may be brought to the lives of individuals from both traditions by sharing in sustained and deeply personal religious explorations. For this contribution alone, Women's Voices should receive a broad readership. Scholars conducting research into the varieties of Jewish-Christian relations and dialogue in the present may also find this volume helpful as a source documenting a particular initiative.