Jewish Bodylore: Feminist and Queer Ethnographies of Folk Practices by Amy K. Milligan (review)

In the introduction to Jewish Bodylore, Amy Milligan, whose slim volume at times slips into an intimate tone, allowing readers to feel like they are reading both textbook and messages from a friend, tells a personal story (one of several) in which she realizes that "everyone deserves to see representations of herself" (1). It is hardly controversial to say that Judaism traditionally centered its rituals and performances of religious life on boys and men—or, more specifically, on cisgender male bodies. Thus, bringing to the fore the critical viewpoints, practices, and representations of women and queer Jews, which Milligan aims to do, is significant. Although a girl reading from the Torah and/or Haftarah at her bat mitzvah, using her voice to claim a place in a male-dominated space, is an old story by now, there are many other ways that women and LGBTQ individuals who have lacked representation in Jewish ritual and religious life now embody their own Jewish stories.

Milligan uses bodylore as her frame of analysis. This is a kind of folklore methodology that, as the terminology suggests, focuses on the body. The body, here, is a text: political, cultural, personal. The body makes statements by virtue of where it is (the female body including her voice, as noted, in a traditionally male space), what it displays (in tattoos, clothing, ritual items, hair), and what we do with it (ritualistic acts).

One example of Jewish bodylore that Milligan provides a thick description of is the feminist upsherin. It is on the male body, traditionally, that the ritual of upsherin is inscribed; this first haircut, given when a boy turns three years of age, marks a child as mature, a maturity restricted to his sex. With his haircut and subsequent reading of the Hebrew alphabet, according to traditional and some precincts of contemporary Orthodox Judaism, the boy is no longer an infant tied to his mother. Rather, he can now be identified as a bocher, a young scholar of Torah, wedded to the (serious and important) world of his father. Although there are some Orthodox sects of Judaism that have created an equivalent of this tradition for Jewish girls—for instance, in Chabad circles, it's common for a three-year-old girl to have a celebration as big and joyous as an upsherin, featuring her first Shabbat candle-lighting—Milligan focuses on a non-Orthodox innovation, a new feminist ritual for girls that retains the haircut but gives it new meaning. Rather than separating the child from her mother, the feminist upsherin positions the girl within a community of women and female spirituality. For Milligan, this practice is "inventive" rather than "adaptive," a distinction she holds to be critical, suggesting the former is far more meaningful. The feminist upsherin is not an "add women and stir" approach, she argues, channeling Vanessa Ochs (55). There are moments when I am not wholly compelled by claims that these innovations aren't adaptations (or appropriations of male rituals and roles), or that the parallel candle lighting ceremony, which elevates the traditionally female roles to be on par with male ones, isn't the more feminist version. But nevertheless, I am fascinated by the feminist upsherin as well as the other Jewish Renewal, queer, and feminist rituals detailed in the book.

The example of the upsherin is perhaps the most developed, but the book does offer explanatory notes for a good number of examples of queer and feminist Jewish embodiment of ritual. Jewish Bodylore is divided into an introduction, five chapters, and a conclusion. Each chapter is discrete. The first two chapters elaborate different ways in which "the bodies of women become the literal intersecting point of contemporary politics" (21). Here we see how imbued synagogue life (space, ritual, garb) is with maleness and thus how political a statement it is for a woman to enter the fray. The third chapter discusses the feminist...