A Breath of Life: Feminism in the American-Jewish Community (review)

116 SHOFAR Summer 1994 Vol. 12, No.4 and shape to their own needs even the normative public rituals in which they now take part. When they attend synagogue services, for instance, they look forward to the reading of the Torah, not because they can follow the chanting of the sacred text (indeed they can hardly hear it from the women's gallery), but because they believe that the time when the Torah is raised is particularly efficacious for making personal requests of God on behalf of their families. "This is a case in which an official ritualsynagogue attendance-has given the external form to the personal religious content ofguarding family members." The women are particularly enthusiastic about pilgrimages to the tombs of famous sages. Such visits are believed to earn the right to ask the saints to intercede on behalf of their families, since the ritual of pilgrimage, like most other rituals performed by the elderly women, is directed towards helping their loved ones. In old age the ritual expertise these women have developed over their lives is now exercised in the public sphere, but the focus remains personal. From a normative point of view, Sered's illiterate and inarticulate subjects would seem to have little to tell us about Judaism or Jewish life, yet her study suggests a long alternate tradition ofMiddle Eastern women's rituals which is now rapidly being destroyed by the pressures of both modernity and a male-oriented religious establishment. Studies such as hers, which shift attention from what men have written about women to what women say about themselves, emphasize again the centrality of women and the home in continued Jewish survival as well as the narrowness of a tradition which attempts to belittle or ignore female spirituality. Judith R. Baskin Department ofJudaic Studies State University of New York at Albany A Breath of life: Feminism in the American-Jewish Community, by Sylvia Barack Fishman. New York: Free Press, 1993. 308 pp. $22.95. In April 1974, the newly founded Jewish Feminist Organization issued the following statement: "We are committed to the development of our full human potential and to the survival and enhancement ofJewish Iifecommunal , religious, educational and political. We shall be a force for such creative change in the Jewish community." This succinct declaration Book Reviews 117 combined contemporary feminism's mandate for female achievement in all areas of life with an explicit statement of Jewish identification and commitment. At the same time the statement delineated the various arenas in which Jewish feminism would seek creative change. Sylvia Barack Fishman's comprehensive and objective new study carefully examines the impact of this new Jewish movement on the American Jewish community over the past twenty years. Jewish feminism, she finds, has been a source of great moral vigor and religious renewal to an American Jewish community in desperate need of revitalization, but not without causing controversy and upheaval in certain segments of American Jewish life. Fishman's book divides into two equal segments offive chapters each. The first section of the volume is primarily concerned with social changes in American society which affect virtually all women, feminists or not. Contemporary American Jewish women, for example, face previously unimagined challenges in the areas of family formation, higher education, choice of career paths, sexuality, religious and spiritual expression, and political and civic activism. Significant transformations in all of these spheres are not a consequence of feminism, as some detractors of feminism, both on the larger American scene and in the Jewish community , would maintain, but are the consequences of revolutionary changes in technology, social attitudes, and economic expectations over the half century since the Second World War. The issue for Jewish feminists, according to Fishman, is how feminism can help the American Jewish community respond meaningfully to a society in a seemingly continuous state of transformation. Traditional Jewish societies, organized according to the principles of rabbinicJudaism, mandated separate gender roles and responsibilities. This strikingly stable system, well suited for life in an often hostile and dangerous Diaspora, protected and respected women who complied with its customs, showering praise on the wife and mother who enabled her husband and sons to fulfill their religious obligations...