"As gender equality spreads throughout society, including its religiously observant sectors, traditional communities turn to their guiding sources to re-examine such questions. This book highlights the wealth of Jewish legal material surrounding gender and prayer, with particular focus on traditional services and the communal quorum, or minyan"--Provided by publisher"--
Although recent scholarship has examined gender issues in Judaism with regard to texts, rituals, and the rabbinate, there has been no full-length examination of the education of Jewish children in day schools. Drawing on studies in education, social science, and psychology, as well as personal interviews, the authors show how traditional (mainly Orthodox) day school education continues to re-inscribe gender inequities and socialize students into unhealthy gender identities and relationships. They address pedagogy, school practices, curricula, and textbooks, as along with single-sex versus coed schooling, dress codes, sex education, Jewish rituals, and gender hierarchies in educational leadership. Drawing a stark picture of the many ways both girls and boys are molded into gender identities, the authors offer concrete resources and suggestions for transforming educational practice.
Often when people have become alienated from their religious backgrounds, they access their traditions through lifecycle events such as marriage. At times, modern values such as gender equality may be at odds with some of the traditions; many of which have always been in a state of flux in relationship to changing social, economic and political realities. Traditional Jewish marriage is based on the man acquiring the woman, which has symbolic and actual ramifications. Grounded in the traditional texts yet accessible, this book shows how the marriage is an acquisition and contextualises the gender hierarchy of marriage within the rabbinic exclusion of women from Torah study, the highest cultural practice and women's exemption from positive commandments. Melanie Landau offers two alternative models of partnership that partially or fully bypass the non-reciprocity of traditional Jewish marriage and that have their basis in the ancient rabbinic texts.
Winner of the National Jewish Book Award for 1998. How can women's full participation transform Jewish law, prayer, sexuality, and marriage? What does it mean to "engender" Jewish tradition? Pioneering theologian Rachel Adler gives this timely and powerful question its first thorough study in a book that bristles with humor, passion, intelligence, and deep knowledge of traditional biblical and rabbinic texts.
The term Niddah means separation. During her menstrual flow and for several days thereafter, a Jewish woman is considered Niddah -- separate from her husband and unable to practice the sacred rituals of Judaism. Purification in a miqveh (a ritual bath) following her period restores full status as a wife and member of the Jewish community. In the contemporary world, debates about Niddah focus less on the literal exclusion of menstruating women from the synagogue, instead emphasizing relations between husband and wife and the general role of Jewish women in Judaism. Although this has been the law since ancient times, the meaning and practice of Niddah has been widely contested. Women and Water explores how these purity rituals have affected Jewish women across time and place, and shows how their own interpretation of Niddah often conflicted with rabbinic views. These essays also speak to contemporary feminist issues such as shaping women's identity, power relations between women and men, and the role of women in the sacred.
The rise of Jewish feminism, a branch of both second-wave feminism and the American counterculture, in the late 1960s had an extraordinary impact on the leadership, practice, and beliefs of American Jews. Women Remaking American Judaism is the first book to fully examine the changes in American Judaism as women fought to practice their religion fully and to ensure that its rituals, texts, and liturgies reflected their lives. In addition to identifying the changes that took place, this volume aims to understand the process of change in ritual, theology, and clergy across the denominations. The essays in Women Remaking American Judaism offer a paradoxical understanding of Jewish feminism as both radical, in the transformational sense, and accomodationist, in the sense that it was thoroughly compatible with liberal Judaism. Essays in the first section, Reenvisioning Judaism, investigate the feminist challenges to traditional understanding of Jewish law, texts, and theology. In Redefining Judaism, the second section, contributors recognize that the changes in American Judaism were ultimately put into place by each denomination, their law committees, seminaries, rabbinic courts, rabbis, and synagogues, and examine the distinct evolution of women’s issues in the Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, and Reconstructionist movements. Finally, in the third section, Re-Framing Judaism, essays address feminist innovations that, in some cases, took place outside of the synagogue. An introduction by Riv-Ellen Prell situates the essays in both American and modern Jewish history and offers an analysis of why Jewish feminism was revolutionary. Women Remaking American Judaism raises provocative questions about the changes to Judaism following the feminist movement, at every turn asking what change means in Judaism and other American religions and how the fight for equality between men and women parallels and differs from other changes in Judaism. Women Remaking American Judaism will be of interest to both scholars of Jewish history and women’s studies.
This book addresses a range of topics, including gendered readings of texts, legal issues in marriage and divorce, ritual practices, and women's literary expressions , along with feminist influences within the Muslim and Jewish communities and issues affecting Jewish and Muslim women in contemporary society.The volume focuses attention on the theoretical innovations that gender scholarship has brought to the study of Muslim and Jewish experiences. At a time when Judaism and Islam are often discussed as though they were inherently at odds, this book offers a reconsideration of the connections between these two traditions.
