Book Reviews

In this book, which won the Jewish Book Council Award for Women’s Studies in 2007, Tova Hartman, well known to JOFA conference attendees, brings tradition and feminism into dialogue with one another. With intellectual clarity, Hartman draws on her own life, her experience as an academic and psychologist, and Jewish scholarship, to discover “creative tensions” […]

First published in Hebrew in 2002, this book has become the accepted guide in the Israeli national-religious community to marriage and the laws of family purity. The English version offers young couples a clear discussion of issues relating to marital intimacy and sexuality, providing halakhic guidelines and sources in an accessible manner and dealing respectfully

Many JOFA readers have had the privilege of hearing Bryna Levy lecture at MaTaN or other venues in Jerusalem. This book is based on lectures that Levy gave at MaTaN exploring the biblical and liturgical readings associated with the Tishri holidays from Rosh Hashanah through Simhat Torah. Levy, one of the leading biblical scholars in

This volume, the runner-up for the 2008 Barbara Dobkin Award for Women’s Studies, contains a rich collection of articles by Jewish feminists across the spectrum. It represents all denominations and includes international as well as American voices. It looks at the flowering of Jewish feminism, its accomplishments, and the variety of challenges that Jewish feminists

As readers of this Journal know, increasing work has been done in recent years to make prayers recited by Jewish women accessible to a wider audience. Aliza Lavie, a lecturer in political science at Bar-Ilan University, makes a major contribution to this endeavor. The original Hebrew version has been a huge bestseller in Israel since

Leora Tanenbaum has written this fascinating book dealing with Catholic, mainline Protestant, Evangelical, Muslim, and Jewish women who are challenging their religious faith communities from a position of commitment and not of alienation. Woven into the book is Tanenbaum’s own story as a woman frustrated by many aspects of the position of women in Judaism,

This volume, revised and expanded from the first edition published in 1992, is a valuable window into the spiritual lives of women, past and present. With a broad definition of spirituality, it sets out to present selections from the prayers, personal letters, memoirs, poems and other writings by Jewish women through the ages, who sought

This book is a study of literary interconnections within the Bible. Judy Klitsner, Senior Lecturer at the Pardes Institute in Jerusalem where she has taught for the last 18 years, shows that often parallel passages serve as what she terms “subversive sequels” to texts that precede them and can be seen as “reconsidering” earlier concepts

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