Women and Judaism: New Insights and Scholarship (review)

Woman and Judaism: New Insights and Scholarship is the second title in the new Jewish Studies in the Twenty-First Century series edited by Frederick E. Greenspahn for New York University Press. The series aims, according to its website, to communicate the latest research in Jewish Studies to "a wider public of students and educated readers outside of the academy." This laudable goal presents authors and editors alike with a series of challenges involving such issues as selection, audience, and level. How exactly does one take a wealth of recent scholarship, much of it very specific, and contextualize and construct it to engage and educate a lay readership?

The volume opens with an introduction by Judith Baskin, and includes sections entitled Classical Tradition, History, Contemporary Life, and Literature. Frederick Greenspahn provides an epilogue. In her introduction, Baskin, an historian who has written and edited works covering the whole range of the Jewish experience, offers a broad synthetic look at changes in women's status over time. This allows her to refer to the articles included within a narrative context rather than in the glorified list form often employed in edited volumes. The articles that follow are of uniformly high quality, but differ in their interpretations of the imperatives of the genre.

Some of the articles' authors seem to have seen the volume as an opportunity to point interested readers to further secondary reading. Harriet Pass Freidenreich's essay on "How Central European Jewish Women Confronted Modernity" is a salient survey of the scholarship. Freidenreich includes her own work, but also that of the other scholars who have opened up this area of inquiry in recent decades. In her contribution on "Women and Torah Study in Aggadah," Dvora E. Weisberg surveys scholarly approaches to the recovery of women in rabbinic sources.

Nehama Aschkenasy and Renee Levine Melammed, on the other hand, give their readers access to primary sources. Aschkenasy's essay on Israeli women's fiction narrows in on the writing of a handful of contemporary Israeli writers. Through her analysis, and without much reference to other literary scholars, Aschkenasy brings out important themes in all of the women's writing and provides readers with an entrée into what might otherwise be foreign territory. Melammed's lengthy essay on "Women in Medieval Jewish Societies" focuses on the Mediterranean area and presents readers with a wealth of examples of women's lives and voices from the Cairo Geniza and the Inquisition in Spain.

Yet another approach was to articulate an overarching theme to help make sense of a certain era or topic. Sara Horowitz describes a progression from "critique to creativity" in the relationship of Jewish women to Jewish American fiction. She does not reveal previously undiscovered writers, but provides a framework for reading well-known ones. Similarly, Chava Weissler's article, while covering the tkhines, a subject she is largely responsible for bringing to scholarly attention in writing over the last two decades, offers a new and intriguing framing. She presents the tkhines not just as a form of women's religious practice, but as a manifestation of the mystical turn of the Early Modern period. Her article does not present new scholarship on the tkhines, but it provides a useful context within which to understand them.

Both Pamela S. Nadell and Sylvia Barack Fishman submitted essays that could easily be put to use in the college classroom. Nadell's historical survey of women in American Judaism and Fishman's sociological take on "Women's Transformations of Contemporary Jewish Life" would both ably supplement the textbooks used to teach American Jewish history and sociology that often marginalize women's experiences.

Several of the authors take the opportunity of this volume aimed at a non-scholarly readership to express personal opinions. Judith Hauptman, a respected expert on Rabbinics, offers a cogent approach to the development of scholarship on women in Jewish law. Her article also uses the first person freely...