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5 “A Lady Sometimes Blows the Shofar” women’s religious equality in the postwar reconstructionist movement deborah waxman In 1922, Judith Kaplan, daughter of Reconstructionist ideologue Mordecai Kaplan, became the first girl to celebrate a bat mitzvah at the Society for the Advancement of Judaism (SAJ), the flagship synagogue of Reconstructionist Judaism. Although the creation of a solo coming-of-age ceremony for a girl introduced into Jewish religious life a degree of unprecedented gender parity, the content of Judith Kaplan’s ceremony differed from a boy’s bar mitzvah, and her postceremony status as an adult female remained distinctly more limited than her male counterparts ’. In 1945, a full generation later, the adolescent girls of the SAJ initiated a campaign for greater religious recognition. They lobbied first to carry the Torah on Jewish holidays and then to be called to the Torah for honors on occasions other than the day of becoming bat mitzvah. In 1950, their efforts culminated in the granting of full religious equality for women within the congregation, through the democratic vote of the membership. In the years following World War II, women affiliated with the Reconstructionist movement—an approach to Judaism developed in the 1920s and 1930s and designed to address the aspirations and preoccupations of first- and second-generation American Jews—in many ways inhabited the domestic realm prescribed for American women by the dominant ideology. Largely middle-class and college educated, many of them stayed at home to raise children. In the synagogues they attended and frequently helped to found, they focused on education and occupied roles conventionally held by women, such as hostessing kiddushes (literally, a blessing over wine, but in this usage referring to the refreshments served after a synagogue service), raising funds, and maintaining ritual objects. Yet in critical ways women within the Reconstructionist movement engaged in religious activities that veered sharply from that postwar domestic ideology articulated in The Feminine Mystique. Reconstructionist ideology promoted full religious equality for women, and women within the movement took forceful steps to translate this 87 principle into their lives, taking on religious practices traditionally performed only by men—most notably, receiving aliyot (Torah honors) and being counted in a minyan (prayer quorum). From a traditional Jewish perspective, and from an American social perspective , the equal status achieved by Reconstructionist women during the postwar years proved unusually progressive. The Reconstructionist movement’s ideological and practical changes in this area both anticipated and seeded the movement toward feminist Judaism that emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and the fact of the movement’s efforts in the 1940s and 1950s suggests a need to reexamine the periodization that locates the emergence of feminist Judaism entirely in later decades. Reconstructionist consideration of gender equality in the postwar period included the ordination of women as rabbis but, in a manner distinct from, and more comprehensive than, other religious approaches of the era, sought to completely redress the status of women within traditional conceptions of Judaism. The Reconstructionist approach to women’s religious equality emerged directly out of Reconstructionist philosophy, developed primarily by Mordecai M. Kaplan in the middle third of the twentieth century. A Conservative rabbi with graduate training in sociology and anthropology, Kaplan sought to revitalize Judaism in response to the impact of modernity on Jewish life and Jewish selfunderstanding , and in response to an unprecedented openness—the openness that American society presented to the masses of Jews who had emigrated from Eastern Europe in the decades around the turn of the twentieth century.1 Since the early nineteenth century, modernity and the prospect of social integration had created both opportunity and crisis for Jews living in democratic societies, and no religious, political, or social movement had been able to stem the resulting fragmentation of the Jewish community and of Jewish self-understanding. In Reconstructionism, Kaplan strove for a positive, modern explication of Judaism that would be compelling to American-born Jews and would help to reestablish a premodern sense of “Jewish unity.”2 Reconstructionist ideology centered around the definition of Judaism as the evolving religious civilization of the Jewish people. It posited that modern Jews in America lived in two civilizations, the Jewish one and the American one, and that these civilizations could mutually and beneficially influence one another. “Civilization” spanned the full spectrum of Jewish life—religion, arts, culture, philosophy, food, language, ethics, and more—and therefore provided multiple entry points for Jews.3 Through this model, religion played...

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