A year ago on Purim, when we visited our youngest children and grandchildren in Nashville, Tennessee, we participated in that community’s first women’s reading of Megillat Esther. My daughterin-law, Cara, learned her chapter by using Jofa tapes. In a strong, beautiful voice—and perfect trop—Cara passionately sang out the words accusing Haman of planned genocide against the Jews. As she and the other readers sang out this ancient tale of Diaspora Jews confronting lethal antisemitism, the melody of their female voices symbolized for me women’s journey toward the center of Orthodox Jewish life over the past half-century.
Women’s active involvement and participation in public Judaism—once a rarity—is now mainstream in many communities, enabled by increased access to intellectual knowledge and skills such as “learning” rabbinic texts; liturgical competence and confidence in leading prayer services; and the reading of Torah and other sacred documents.1 Institutions that nurture and support women’s involvement have grown simultaneously: worship environments encouraging female participation, institutions to accredit women as religious leaders and scholars, and associations for support, friendship, information sharing, and affirming mutual values. These transformations reflect the fluidity and mutual influence between American and Israeli Jews. Supported by efforts in both countries, throughout the first decades of the twenty-first century, Jewish women were active participants in the opening up of broader access to Jewish education and scholarship, as well as participation in public Judaism, religious leadership roles, and cultural expression.
A Panorama of Transformation from 1970 to 2020
I personally—and painfully—remember that in real time, our experiences of working toward Jewish feminist goals often seemed frustratingly elusive and were frequently surrounded by controversy and contention. But if—with 20/20 hindsight—we create a panorama of transformations, quickly listing some of the benchmarks of change (and some of the women and male allies who made that change possible), a picture emerges of both the incremental nature of change and the breathtaking sweep of the journey of Orthodox women.
As a graduate student and young mother, I participated in some of the changes that emerged piecemeal in the early 1970s, embedded in the profound— and often disruptive— social changes sweeping through America, including (but not limited to) second-wave feminism, which focused attention on women’s roles, and the civil rights movement, which focused attention on racial and ethnic inequities and on diverse ethnic traditions. In 1972, Rabbi Joseph Dov Ber Soloveitchik delivered a shiur (class) in Talmud at Yeshiva University’s Stern College for Women (SCW—my alma mater), creating one of the first openings for women’s study of rabbinical materials “on an advanced university level.”2 The first women’s tefillah groups (WTGs), in which mostly Orthodox women conducted traditional Jewish religious services in Hebrew and read from the Torah scroll, began in the early 1970s in several locations across the United States. In a suburb of St. Louis, an Orthodox WTG in which I participated had an unofficial, wonderful posek in Rabbi Simcha Krauss, zt”l. WTGs greatly elevated Orthodox women’s liturgical skills and confidence because of the single-gender environment that allowed them to halakhically lead services and assume leadership roles. Although in many coeducational Modern Orthodox schools, girls and boys both studied in a mixed-gender environment and prayed together (albeit separated by mehitzah ̣ dividers), female familiarity with certain aspects of the prayer service was minimized by the fact that girls were not permitted to assume any liturgical or leadership roles due to the presence of boys in the room. Among pioneering entities in Israel during the same time period, Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies was founded in Jerusalem in 1973 as nondenominational and offered coeducational programs for men and women that provided the opportunity to engage in the study of classic Jewish texts in an open environment.
Roles of women were changing across the face of American Jewry, and that context is an important part of the picture. For example, a group of women, some of whom were participants in the New York Havurah, coming from primarily Conservative and Orthodox backgrounds, joined together with like-minded friends to form Ezrat Nashim, an activist women’s study group agitating for religious gender equality. In 1972 the first female Reform rabbi was ordained. During the same year, Ezrat Nashim appeared at the convention of the Conservative Movement’s rabbinical association (the RA), ultimately influencing the movement’s Committee on Jewish Law (CJL) to vote that women should be counted for a minyan in 1973.3 In 1974 the first female Reconstructionist rabbi was ordained. The Conservative Movement ordained its first female rabbi in 1985.
Among pioneering entities in Israel during the same time period, Rabbi Chaim Brovender founded a school in Jerusalem in 1976 (now known as Michlelet Lindenbaum and initially the women’s component of Yeshivat Hamivtar) that included a Talmud program taught in the classic ḥevruta (study partner) method for non-Israeli “gap year” students, many of whom had the opportunity there to study with Israeli teachers and students. In 1976 as well, Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein zt”l published a halakhic argument in favor of women’s Talmud study, and a year later, in 1977, Rav Soloveitchik gave the founding lecture for Yeshiva University’s Stern College for Women’s Beit Midrash program. Rabbi Saul Berman, then chairman of the Department of Jewish Studies at Stern College, was a primary force helping to plan SCW programs of systematic Talmud study,4 teaching Talmud at SCW for many years, and serving in diverse ways as a mentor and Orthodox male feminist thought leader. In 1999, a new program was established, officially known as the Graduate Program for Women in Advanced Talmud Studies (GPATS). Drisha, an innovative American adult women’s learning environment under Orthodox leadership, was founded by Rabbi David Silber in 1979 and opened a full-time study program in 1984; it later played an active role in offering opportunities for women’s roles in public prayer. Blu Greenberg published her iconic Orthodox feminist book On Women and Judaism in 1981.
The path to ordination for Orthodox female rabbis was less straightforward than that of their Reconstructionist, Reform, Conservative, and transdenominational colleagues. A small number of individual women were quietly ordained in private arrangements from the 1990s onward, involving some Orthodox rabbis whose names remain secret, as well as the late Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, Rabbi Jonathan Chipman, and Rabbi Aryeh Strikovsky.5 Organized institutional programs to train and credential women regarding mastery of classical rabbinical texts also emerged in the 1990s. The Israeli Nishmat women’s learning program was founded in 1990, and Rabbi Shlomo Riskin challenged the Israeli religious legal system by starting a program to train female toanot (rabbinically trained female advocates in divorce cases) in the early 1990s. In 1994, Drisha created a credentialing Scholars Circle program intended to parallel rabbinic ordination. Nishmat created its yoetzet halakhah program, a talmudic training program for women focused on halakhic questions concerning marital issues, in 2000. Jofa, the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance, was organized in 1997, bursting into communal consciousness with a founding conference that attracted more than 1,000 international participants and giving a formal institutional address to women who had been creating and advocating for change, but who previously felt isolated in these enterprises. New York’s Drisha Minyan offered women the opportunity to lead the preliminary morning service (p’sukei dezimrah) in a groundbreaking High Holiday service in 2001.6 That same year, Shira Ḥadasha, an Orthodox partnership minyan, was created in Jerusalem,7 and the nondenominational independent minyan Kehillat Hadar was founded in New York; Mechon Hadar, an educational institution, was founded in 2006.8 Rabbi Dina Najman was privately ordained by Rabbi Daniel Sperber in 2006, and currently serves as Rosh Kehillah of an Orthodox congregation. Rabba Sara Hurwitz was ordained by Rabbis Avi Weiss and Daniel Sperber in 2009, in conjunction with the founding of Yeshivat Maharat, “the first yeshiva to ordain women to serve as Orthodox clergy.”9 In Israel, Beit Hillel created an “Attentive Spiritual Leadership organization” reportedly involving “over 170 Religious-Zionist Rabbanim and Rabbaniot,” with the goal of “increasing the involvement of women in the study and teaching of Torah, in sharing communal and public leadership roles.”10 In 2015, Har’el Beit Midrash ordained two women pursuant to a traditional rabbinic training program. Because of these and other institutions and programs, being a woman and an Orthodox rabbi—a role that many of us thought would not be realized in our lifetimes—is an achievable goal for Orthodox women today.
Jewish Education for Girls and Women Is Key to Contemporary Changes
In most contemporary observant Jewish communities, access to highlevel Jewish education for women is virtually universal, and, despite substantive differences, all wings of American Judaism include women credentialed as clergy. All these changes were built on systemic availability of Jewish education for girls and women. In most traditional Jewish cultures, religious text education was the necessary ticket to those aspiring to religious leadership roles in the Jewish community—but women were denied both highlevel education and the credentialing as rabbis. At least as important as the creation of Orthodox female rabbis is the fact that now, female rabbis and scholars can be fullfledged Jewish educational professionals, competing for positions that were long reserved for (male) rabbis, such as Jewish day school headmaster/head of school/principal or Hillel chaplain or director, as well as in established or new positions in institutions of higher learning. Not least, on the grassroots level, the vast majority of American Modern Orthodox girls today participate in meaningful bat mitzvah ceremonies in which their intellectual and liturgical competence is manifest—a celebration of religious majority that was once rare but, at least in the United States, is now ubiquitous.
Jofa constantly creates and supports policies that support Orthodox women rabbis and scholars in their careers.
Jofa Galvanized, Educated, and Supported Women’s Goals
This rapid listing of the benchmarks of change shows that Jewish feminist institutions were critically necessary in helping women accomplish their goals. Jofa grew “from a small group that gathered around founding President Blu Greenberg’s kitchen table into a professionally staffed, international alliance.” Jofa’s works include running international conferences; producing the Jofa Journal, halakhic guidance material, and educational curricula on issues affecting women and girls; sponsoring local and regional programs, including the Jofa college campus fellowship; and advocating for expansion of the roles of Jewish girls and women in a broad variety of settings. Female Orthodox scholarship covering basic rabbinic and halakhic texts that support women’s ritual and leadership roles in Orthodox Judaism is featured in Jofa’s seminal Ta Shma Halakhic Source Guides. Its seasonal Shema Bekolah publications provide holiday insights, divrei Torah, and halakhic essays. Jofa is a primary supporter and enabler of grassroots participation in public Judaism by girls and women. Among other materials usable either in home settings or educational institutions, audio recordings for women learning how to read the Torah and various holiday scrolls are available. Such learning aids are used by females of all ages, from their teens to their senior years.
Jofa constantly creates and supports policies that support Orthodox women rabbis and scholars in their careers. For example, some of the initial graduates from Yeshivat Maharat were enabled to serve in clergy positions thanks to a generous grant from Jofa board member and philanthropist Zelda R. Stern.11 More recently, the Devorah Scholar Grants, “an innovative program designed to seed the American landscape with women spiritual leaders,” partners with Orthodox congregations by providing substantial challenge grants to hire female rabbis in clerical roles. It is sponsored by the Micah Foundation and was initiated by foundation trustees Ann Pava (also a Jofa board member) and Jeremy Pava. Pam Scheininger, former president of Jofa, recently commented on the success of this program, “Judging by the number of inquiries and applications we received from women and men across the United States and Canada, Israel, and Australia, it is clear that there is a demand for women’s leadership roles in Orthodox synagogues around the world.”12
Jofa’s broad-reaching educational efforts continue to have a powerful impact. In part, because women 7 have become competent to participate in both lay and leadership roles, recent studies demonstrate that on a grassroots level, attitudes toward and assumptions about women and their religious expressions have changed. According to Nishma Research’s “Survey of the Modern Orthodox Community in the United States” (2017), 80 percent of American Modern Orthodox Jews agree that their synagogue should offer coed religious classes, study sessions (shiurim), and other learning opportunities; 75 percent that the mehitzah ̣ (gender-divided prayer partition) should be “woman friendly”; 75 percent that women should be eligible to serve as synagogue president; 69 percent that women should say the mourner’s Kaddish out loud and alone if no man in the room has a Kaddish obligation, and that women should give talks from the pulpit; and 53 percent that women should have some type of expanded synagogue clergy roles.13
Today there is little gender difference in types and years of Jewish education received for American Jews under age 35, according to the Sheskin Decade 2000 data set; furthermore, in their study of Gender and American Jews, Harriet and Moshe Hartman note that in the NJPS 2000–01 survey gender differences “have almost disappeared” among Orthodox and Conservative Jews aged 18 to 44.14 In recent decades, girls and women’s access to Jewish educational materials has been further enhanced by the availability of online resources. Sefaria, which developed from a concept by author Joshua Foer and former Google project manager Brett Lockspeiser in 2011, became a nonprofit organization offering a huge free library of Jewish texts in Hebrew and English, through interactive interfaces. During the pandemic, Sefaria added more materials to its database and gained more users of its free online services, an enormous boon to Talmud studies by women and people in locations with limited Judaic studies resources. This helped women join the in-person and virtual ranks of daf yomi, the daily group study of one page of Talmud, which was formerly the province of mostly men. Without a doubt, Sefaria was instrumental in making possible events like International Women’s Talmud Day on April 25, 2021. Rabbanit Sara Wolkenfeld, chief learning officer at Sefaria, has said that its mission is to “democratize all Jewish texts.”15
The impact of this decades-long expansion of women’s Jewish learning was on full view with the first international daf yomi siyum event that took place in early 2020 and celebrated the completion of the 7.5-year cycle by large numbers of women, putting daf yomi on the map for women. Huge numbers of women, especially in the United States and Israel, congregated in person and over Zoom each day as 2019 became 2020, to participate in an international group protocol of daily Talmud study. The daf yomi phenomenon generated a deeply impressed New York Times profile on “A Revolution in Jewish Learning, with Women Driving Change” (Jan. 4, 2020)16—a title that could appropriately be used to describe the entire subject of Jewish education for females. Jewish education for girls and women is the seminal gendered change that made all the other gendered religious changes possible, although the ordination of female rabbis, discussed later, has perhaps attracted the most public attention. As the international daf yomi study brilliantly illustrated, today the image of girls and women in serious study, bent over Hebrew texts, has become commonplace in the world’s two largest Jewish communities, the United States and Israel. Many American women participating in the women’s daf yomi protocol engage daily via virtual study with Israeli Rabbanit Michelle Farber, under the auspices of Hadran, an Israeli organization dedicated to women’s text study. In terms of social psychology, the normalization of the visual imagery of the studying girl was an important contributory element in the eventual acceptance of women’s high-level rabbinic text study, making possible a whole range of socioreligious reversals.
Orthodox Women “Influencers” Reach Diverse Groups
Women’s ordination as rabbis and scholars of rabbinic literature has done more than unlock doors; it is in the process of changing the religious culture on a deep psychological level. As the image of women as highly skilled experts in rabbinic texts has increasingly become accepted, observers have hypothesized that using gender as a lens for examining classic rabbinic and biblical texts might generate substantive changes in the way those texts are studied, understood, and implemented. Rabbanit Dr. Michal Tikochinsky has asked: Have the changes moved “beyond the simple rectification of a historical injustice” to “indicate a qualitative change?”17 Orthodox feminist icon and philosopher Professor Tamar Ross’s 2004 classic treatise, Expanding the Palace of Torah: Orthodoxy and Feminism, declared that women’s participation would produce not just a spectrum of practical changes in educational, intellectual, and spiritual expectations for Orthodox women, but also profound underlying social and values transformation. Ross, who grew up in Detroit and moved independently to Israel in her teens, predicted that women as “religious authorities” would create “sociological” changes, such as a “special focus on issues of concern to women.” Female Talmud scholars would “refuse to resolve policy issues at the cost of women’s interest,” raising scholarly and communal awareness and inevitably challenging “the scale of values governing public policy,” Ross wrote.18 Philosophy Professor Ronit Irshai, an Israeli gender scholar mentored by Ross, writes penetrating analyses about the quintessential philosophical and practical “maleness of halakhah.”19
Rabbinical schools and higher-level institutions of Talmud study have been enriched in both dramatic and subtle ways by the influence of female rabbis and mentors. Female rabbinic scholars with Orthodox backgrounds have become public “influencers” in nondenominational educational institutions. For example, at Drisha, Rabbanit Leah Sarna, a Yale University graduate who received rabbinical ordination from Yeshivat Maharat in 2018, was appointed associate director of education and director of high school programs in 2020, offering classes on topics such as a Talmudic exploration of bias, “womb Torah,” head coverings for men and women, and food and intimacy.20 Dr. Erica Brown, a Jewish educator and author whose thoughtful books, columns, and blogs gained her a following far beyond her formal position as director of George Washington University’s Mayberg Center for Jewish Education and Leadership, was named as director of the Sacks-Herenstein Center at Yeshiva University, a newly created institute to “mentor emerging Jewish leaders based on the values of Rabbi Jonathan Sacks,” a mentor of Brown herself.21 Dr. Mijal Bitton, who emigrated from Argentina, serves as a scholar in residence at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America and the Rosh Kehillah (communal leader) and co-founder of the Downtown Minyan of New York City.22
Conclusion
Ideals and theories are important, but they don’t always translate to improvements in individual lives and societies. The Jewish Orthodox feminist goals of Jofa have come to fruition in many ways, as this essay’s “Panorama of Transformation” illustrates. Over the past fifty years, women’s roles, expectations, and opportunities in American Jewish Orthodox communities have expanded and deepened in ways that were nearly unimaginable when Jofa’s original leaders were growing up—and for many, a distant dream even when they founded Jofa. Today, Orthodox communities have a dramatically different understanding of women and their religious, spiritual, and intellectual capacities.
For me, thankfully, the successes of Jofa and Orthodox feminism are flesh-and-blood realities. My daughter and daughters-in-law participate with joyful competence in partnership minyanim, often stepping up to leadership positions. And beyond my immediate family, in my grandchildren’s generation, I see inspiring female rabbinic leaders and a laity of young Orthodox women who pray regularly and devoutly, whose textual competence enables them to study demanding Judaic texts with friends (and sometimes with romantic significant others). Triumphalism is not appropriate because many significant problems remain, especially concerning the agunah issue. But hakarat hatov—the recognition of goodness—that many believe to be the basis of morality demands that we realistically and gratefully acknowledge Orthodox feminism’s many accomplishments.