Women Remaking American Judaism (review)

Few chapters in contemporary Jewish life are as overwhelmingly positive as the flowering of Jewish women’s accomplishments in virtually every area of Judaic scholarship and artistic enterprise. As a result, any book that sets out to explore the impact of feminism on what is arguably a contemporary American Jewish renaissance does well to include expertise in a broad range of disciplines. Happily, this highly recommended anthology, edited by Riv-Ellen Prell, with a foreword by David Weinberg, gives readers a good taste of the range of Jewish feminist scholarship. Prell’s “Introduction” sets the interdisciplinary tone, offering a cultural anthropologist’s analysis of the cover image by Betsy Teutsch: a colorful Purim tambourine showing Queen Esther as Rosie the Riveter, flexing her beautiful biceps under stacks of bangles, fixing the viewer with a no-nonsense gaze, and declaring, “I did it my way!” The juxtaposition of the biblical figure and the American World War II heroine is telling, as Prell points out, since “most of the changes demanded by and for women in Judaism,” no matter how particularistic to Jewish life, “reflect the norms of the societies in which they lived” (p. 7).

The book is divided into three sections. Part One, “Reenvisioning Judaism,” looks at the images that inspired many Jewish feminists. Rochelle Millen carries on the interdisciplinary spirit of the volume by tracing “the development of Jewish feminist theology through the writings of Judith Plaskow, Marcia Falk, Tamar Ross, and Rachel Adler”—three theologians and a poet. With impeccable scholarship, Millen illuminates the intersections of morality, sexuality, and familial and communal concerns in their works, arguing that Jewish feminism has “forced us to explore some of our deepest assumptions” (p. 44). Chava Weissler looks at the “Meanings of Shekhinah in the ‘Jewish Renewal’ Movement,”¹ first laying the groundwork of the various positive, negative and ambivalent presentations the figure of the Shekhinah has evoked historically, and then cleverly exposing the cultural and political implications of those portrayals, including a recent tendency for some feminists to celebrate an essentialist vision of women’s nature.

Finally, Adriane Leveen compares biblical texts and traditional exegesis, contemporary biblical scholarship, feminist biblical criticism, and Anita Diamant’s popular novel The Red Tent. She finds Diamant’s book curiously uninformed by the richness of either the biblical text itself or the rich critical dialogue that has grown up around it over the centuries, to the extent that it actually pushes the reader away from both. The Red Tent, Leveen concludes, “both misses out [on] what is most exciting and compelling” about ancient or modern critical analysis, and “precludes a direct engagement with the far more complex (and subtle) original” (p. 99).

Part Two, “Redefining Judaism,” examines the changing role of women in the various wings of American Judaism. Karla Goldman’s “Women in Reform Judaism” contrasts Reform egalitarian rhetoric with the actual situation, noting that although women were “prime shapers of Reform Judaism,” quickly dominating many Reform services as worshippers, the “movement’s leadership structures had always been exclusively male” (p. 121). Women in Reform leadership roles largely waited for American societal changes, Goldman notes. “Mitzvah, Gender, and Reconstructionist Judaism,” by Deborah Dash Moore and Andrew Bush, skillfully teases out the underlying assumptions in Mordecai Kaplan’s writings. The authors argue that Kaplan’s concept of “folkways,” in addition to all the other ways it was influential, enabled him to act on his “egalitarian impulses” (p. 139).

The Conservative movement’s evolving treatment of gender issues is examined by Shuly Rubin Schwartz, who turns her historian’s eye on rabbinic and lay attitudes, especially as expressed in Conservative publications. “We can marvel” at the extraordinary changes within Conservative Judaism, Schwartz writes, but considerable ambivalence about true egalitarianism—and its cost— still remains. “The First Generation of Women Rabbis” is presented by Pamela Nadell, who looks at the innovations these women created beyond their rabbinic status, such as prayers and sermons that dealt with pregnancy, childbirth and miscarriage. Norma Baumel Joseph examines the paradoxes of...