Feminism Encounters Traditional Judaism: Resistance and Accommodation

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” that she believes can lead to unexpected connections beyond ostensibly insurmountable contradictions. She does not avoid hard questions but looks for new models for a healthy relationship between feminism and traditional Judaism. Particularly fascinating is her detailed discussion of how, after being discouraged by not being able to make her own synagogue more inclusive of women, she and Elie Holzer founded Shira Hadasha in Jerusalem, a “partnership minyan” which aims at extending the range of religious, spiritual, and emotional possibilities to both men and women. This is an engaging book, both scholarly and deeply personal, by an individual with the ability both to make things happen, and to reflect on her practices and beliefs in an honest and constructive way