Book Reviews

The Yiddish book, Meneket Rivkah, “The Nursemaid of Rebecca”, was likely the first book written by a Jewish woman. This book of ethics for women, first printed in 1609, is often talked about, but this edition now makes it accessible to English speaking readers. Frauke von Rohden provides a Yiddish text with a separate English […]

It is rare that we review a book that is printed privately. But this 282-page volume marked a very special occasion – the 25th anniversary of the founding of the Montreal Women’s Tefllah Group. It is a beautifully produced book and contains the history of the group, and personal essays, together with biblical, midrashic, halakhic

Yael Unterman has written a long, but very readable volume devoted to the biography, scholarship and impact of the renowned Tanakh teacher Nehama Leibowitz who died in 1997 at the age of 92. Unterman’s focus is on how Nehama has been remembered by friends and pupils and those she influenced and to whom she was

Sefer Mitzvot Nashim (Eyn Schoen Frauenbuechelein) by Rabbi Benjamin Slonik was the most popular of the Yiddish books written for Jewish women in the 16th century to explain how the women’s mitzvot, (niddah, taking of hallah and candle lighting) were to be observed First printed in 1577 in Cracow, the text was reprinted many times

Many JOFA members have had the privilege of hearing Avivah Zornberg give her remarkable “parashat hashavua” shiurim in Jerusalem. While her two earlier books focus on Genesis and Exodus, here Zornberg takes twelve biblical narratives, and examines midrashic and Hasidic readings of these narratives, drawing on a wealth of literary and psychoanalytic sources ranging from

Many recent novels have focused on the lives of women of the Jewish past, including female biblical figures. In this volume, Alice Becker Lehrer, who teaches at the David Weissman Institute of Montreal’s Bronfman Jewish Education Center, “conducts interviews” with a range of women from Tanakh and Jewish history. The author’s focus is to show

The author, an associate professor of rabbinic literature at HUC-JIR in Los Angeles, uses the topics of yibbum and halitza as a window into both the role of the Jewish family in talmudic times and rabbinical interpretation and shaping of the biblical law found in Deuteronomy 25:5-10. The tractate, Yevamot, in the Mishnah and Tosefta,

There are few autobiographies of Jewish men or women in medieval and early modern history. The memoir of Gluckel of Hameln is unique for opening up the life and world of a woman who was born in Hamburg around 1645, was betrothed at the age of 12 and married at 14; worked with her husband

Naftali Rothenberg, senior research fellow and Jewish Culture and Identity Chair at Jerusalem’s Van Leer Institute and town rabbi of Har Adar, explores the concept of love in all its manifestations, both spiritual and physical, in an extensive survey of Jewish sources. He shows that, contrary to what many may expect, interpersonal love, spiritual development,

In recent years there has been a wealth of scholarship on topics relating to Jewish women. This volume aims to make this scholarship more generally accessible. Its ten essays are by leading scholars, including Sylvia Barack Fishman, Judith Hauptman, and Chava Weissler. They are all clearly written, present a survey of the academic work done