Women of Valor: Orthodox Jewish Troll Fighters, Crime Writers, and Rock Stars in Contemporary Literature and Culture by Karen E. H. Skinazi (review)

Karen E. H. Skinazi's Women of Valor: Orthodox Jewish Troll Fighters, Crime Writers, and Rock Stars in Contemporary Culture threads a very fine needle: the project is at once recuperative and critical of Orthodox Jewish womanhood. This monograph's focus on the literature of Orthodox women unsettles contemporary culture's common view of Orthodox women as mere symbols of their culture's backwardness and oppression. Skinazi introduces and interprets numerous works created by and about Orthodox Jewish women in North America and the United Kingdom in a variety of popular genres, including memoir, the mystery novel, the graphic novel, rock music, and film. These all fit within a "feminocentric cultural canon," which attests to a "creative tension that ensues in the nexus of Orthodox women's artistic yearnings and a culture of gender segregation" (28).

Skinazi begins with the assumption that Orthodox women are modern, post-secular agents, who are capable in their artistic production of championing as well as critiquing women's status within Orthodoxy. This leads to what is perhaps the book's most compelling theoretical contribution: borrowing the term allochronistic (or anachronistic) from postcolonial theory, Skinazi critiques and rejects the common representation of Orthodox Jewry as out of time, or from another historical era, and therefore "alien to the contemporary world" (5).

Moreover, as Skinazi delineates, Orthodox women have an uneasy relationship to the dominant historical narrative of American Jews that supports a "secularization thesis" and a Jewish American literary canon whose key texts often frame Jewish religious tradition as a site of rejection. Skinazi therefore explains that the contemporary women who "stayed Orthodox" pose a challenge to the Jewish American literary tradition of Abraham Cahan's Yekl (1896) or Anzia Yezierska's Bread Givers (1925). However, as Skinazi explores in the book's first chapter, the growing body of contemporary narratives of leaving Orthodoxy (colloquially termed OTD, short for "off the derech," literally meaning, "off the path") perpetuate the secularization thesis and have rich connections to classic Jewish American immigrant literature. This is a significant point of connection between Skinazi's canon and the Jewish American canon more classically defined and should urge scholars to see contemporary texts created by and about Orthodox Jews not as outliers but as an integral part of the Jewish American literary tradition.

Another, perhaps more submerged, insight in this book is that contemporary Orthodox literature consistently represents "Jewish difference" on the level of religion rather than ethnicity or culture, however defined. This aspect of Jewishness is often neglected in current scholarship on Jewish American literature but one that must be attended to in these texts. Highlighting religion leads to a productive comparative framework in Skinazi's book between religious Jewish and Muslim women and their representations in North American literature and culture.

Furthermore, because Orthodox women's literature constitutes a religiously imbued Jewish literature, Skinazi frames the texts explored in her book as liturgical (adopting the term from Jewish American author Cynthia Ozick). Ozick's vision of an emerging Jewish literature that "will not be didactic or prescriptive; on the contrary, it will be Aggadic, utterly freed to invention, discourse, parable, experiment, enlightenment, profundity, humanity" (qtd. in Skinazi 13), is, as Skinazi rightfully notes, a nearly impossible, idealistic literary project. In Skinazi's estimation, of the texts discussed in Women of Valor, perhaps only Allegra Goodman's novel Kaaterskill Falls (1998), discussed in chapter 4, reaches toward this standard. (Although I would also include Rama Burshtein's film Fill the Void [2013], which Skinazi discusses in chapter 5). Most of the works, however, miss this strikingly high ethical-aesthetic mark. In fact, some of the texts discussed are most distinctive in their didacticism, such as Faye Kellerman's Decker/Lazarus mystery novels, discussed in chapter 2, which Skinazi interprets as "primers of Orthodoxy" (75). Skinazi's...