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

In Women of Valor, Karen E. H. Skinazi challenges portrayals of Orthodox Jewish women in popular culture as meek, oppressed, and dowdy. She contrasts representations of women in literature, visual art, and film with cultural works created by community insiders and with the reality of women's experiences. Using literary analysis, she discusses the lives of Orthodox women and their cultural works to demonstrate that women have voices, express agency and are far more complex than they are often portrayed as being by those outside of their communities.

Focusing on Hasidic and Yeshivish women, Skinazi debunks a number of stereotypes. She posits that with rising fundamentalism in the Orthodox world, outside writers and filmmakers have mistakenly presented Orthodox women as too subjugated to tell their own stories. For example, despite a burgeoning Orthodox women's arts scene, secular books and films often present Orthodox female artists as silenced. Likewise, Skinazi points out the misperception in the mainstream media that Yeshivish and Hasidic women are mainly housewives and that working outside the home is a source of conflict. In fact, women commonly work outside the home in these communities, frequently as primary breadwinners supporting husbands who are engaged in full-time Torah study.

While acknowledging the greater restrictions some Orthodox communities have placed on women in recent years, Skinazi challenges the idea, believed both in and out of the community, that by increasing strictures and religious observance, these communities are returning to tradition. She shows that contemporary Orthodox society is actually not stuck in the past or traditional at all. Rather, leaders are creating their own alternative modernity which is, in great part, a reaction to secular liberalism. What is truly innovation is recast and legitimized as tradition. For example, Hasidic leaders of one community issued an edict that women were not allowed to drive. Leaders and followers presented this decision as a return to traditional standards of modesty. But Skinazi points out the irony in an interview with a male member of the community, who stated that his mother drives and his mother-in-law drives, but his wife does not, because, "this is our tradition" (7). In addition to innovating for the future, history is often rewritten to support the new "traditions," as I have pointed out in my own research.

Skinazi states that while these alternative modernities (plural—they take on different iterations in different Orthodox communities) result in new restrictions impacting men and women, they more often target women, who "have no say in their making" (168). Indeed, many segments of the Orthodox community are embroiled in culture wars, figuring out their place vis-à-vis the secular world and modernity. In all segments of the population, women are at the heart of these conflicts. As one example, in Modern Orthodoxy, this manifests in the fights over women in clergy roles; as another, in the Yeshivish community, this is evident in the increasingly challenged policy of refusing to publish pictures of women in the media. In all of these cases, tradition is invoked as the value that should determine practice.

The author brings examples of women's reactions to prescriptive literature written by Orthodox men for women, specifically regarding women's roles and modesty. There has been a resurgence of this kind of writing in recent years, some of it with misogynistic undertones. Like other prescriptive literature, these writings are not necessarily descriptive. They often do not reflect the actual practice of women, and Skinazi brings several examples of women writing critiques of these new directives. She further shows that Orthodox women have means of self-expression by citing examples of women who have become elected officials in the community's districts, published authors, filmmakers and visual artists. But at times her insistence that Hasidic and Yeshivish women have a voice crosses into overcorrection. Yes, the...