Lucy Dawidowicz was not a feminist, nor was she Orthodox, yet much in her life experience and in her intellectual contributions will resonate with JOFA readers. She was often the only woman in a room filled with opinion-shaping men. She was sometimes given lesser recognition for her work than her contributions to a project deserved. […]
In the Bible, there are many important female figures—although many fewer than the male figures—occupying a variety of roles far beyond the traditional domestic ones, including judge, queen, warrior, and “wise woman.” If Proverbs 31:10–31—the Eishet Hayil— can be taken as a description of the ideal wife, she is far from a meek homebody. If
among Haredi Women If you are tired of Ḥaredi women being portrayed as oppressed, uneducated, and subservient to their husbands, Michal Raucher’s Conceiving Agency provides a much-needed corrective, reframing our notions of reproductive agency and religious meaning in the ultra-Orthodox community. Using the tools of ethnography and anthropology as well as the academic literature around
Conceiving Agency: Reproductive Authority Read More »
How do we make sense of the suffering of the COVID-19 pandemic within a Jewish framework? Rabbi Dr. Erin Leib Smokler has gifted the broadly defined Jewish community with a compilation of essays by a diverse range of authors offering a variety of thought-provoking ways in which we can understand our modern plague. Torah in
Torah in a Time of Plague: Historical and Contemporary Jewish Responses Read More »
A core task of scholarship is to rescue from obscurity works of merit that have been overlooked. It is to just such a task that Dr. Julia Schwartzmann turns in publishing The Path of Moses, an essay dealing with the position of women in Jewish religious life. She makes the case admirably on behalf of
The Path of Moses: A Scholarly Essay on the Case of Women in Religious Faith Read More »
Volume II of Hilkhot Nashim, edited by Rahel Berkovits, ̣ is a gift to any person looking to engage seriously with questions of women’s obligation in, and performance of, mitzvot. The volume focuses on four areas. The first three—Kiddush, Hamotsi, and Havdalah—are specifically about the laws of Shabbat and holidays; the fourth and final section
Hilkhot Nashim, Volume II Read More »
In her superbly written and deeply engaging book, Gila Fine takes us on a journey exploring talmudic stories, in particular those that feature six of the few named women who appear in Bavli aggadot. Although, as the author points out, a number of studies have examined women as characters in talmudic narrative, this book is
The Madwoman in the Rabbi’s Attic:Rereading the Women of the Talmud Read More »
Uncovered by Rabbanit Nechama Goldman Barash is a relatively compact volume that nonetheless manages to delve deeply into many issues relating to women’s role in Jewish practice in the twentyfirst century. Goldman Barash, a yoetzet halakhah and teacher of halakhah and Talmud at various educational institutions in Israel, is a masterful educator whose facility with
Uncovered: Women’s Roles, Mitzvot,and Sexuality in Jewish Law Read More »
Why Rain Comes From Above, a new anthology of essays by masterful scholar and teacher Dr. Devora Steinmetz, offers a way of engaging imaginatively with the texts of our tradition. Steinmetz explores how we might read these texts not literally—as if they express propositional truths—and not metaphorically—as if they give expression to our deeply-held values—but
Why Rain Comes from Above:Explorations in Religious Imagination Read More »
In the past few years, the traditional selling of hametz ̣ to a non-Jew before Passover has been having what I can only describe as “a moment.” As more rabbis turn the sale itself into a ritual experience to which congregants are invited, our most well-known loophole is coming into its own. It is no
Circumventing the Law: Rabbinic Perspectives on Loopholes and Legal Integrity Read More »
