{"id":1568,"date":"2009-10-01T10:00:49","date_gmt":"2009-10-01T14:00:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/practicalmattersjournal.ecdsdev.org\/?p=1568"},"modified":"2016-04-04T16:54:19","modified_gmt":"2016-04-04T20:54:19","slug":"women-remaking-american-judaism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pmcleanup.ecdsdev.org\/2009\/10\/01\/women-remaking-american-judaism\/","title":{"rendered":"Women Remaking American Judaism"},"content":{"rendered":"
Download PDF:\u00a0Prell, Women Remaking American Judaism_Prell_Imhoff–JS–Finalized–7-2-09<\/a><\/h5>\n
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By\u00a0Riv-Ellen Prell (Editor)
\nDetroit: Wayne State University Press, 2007.\u00a0 352 pages.\u00a0 $25.95.<\/h3>\n
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No serious observer could deny the influence of gender on religion in contemporary America.\u00a0 But many scholarly treatments of women continue to be compartmentalized and often insulated from the main narratives of religious experience and history.\u00a0 However, in\u00a0Women Remaking American Judaism,\u00a0<\/em>editor Riv-Ellen Prell brings alive the controversies and contributions of women in American Judaism.\u00a0 The volume, created from a 2004 academic conference at Wayne State University, continues the conversation about how Jewish feminism has shaped and reshaped American Jewish thought and practice.<\/p>\n

Although only the best edited collections seamlessly integrate their selections,\u00a0Women Remaking American Judaism<\/em>\u00a0skillfully presents one overarching\u00a0yet compelling argument: if one wants to understand American Judaism, one must understand the influence of women.\u00a0 Without losing the specificity of the individual chapters, the volume insists that every aspect of American Jewish life has been – and continues to be – shaped by women.\u00a0 Prell’s introduction asserts that “Jewish feminism is best studied ‘locally,'” (3) that is, in individual synagogues, women’s groups, rituals, objects, and study sessions.\u00a0 Using a variety of sociological, ethnographic, and historical methods, the scholars of these focused studies highlight particular loci of Jewish women’s experiences in detail.\u00a0 The cumulative effect of this volume of locally focused scholarly essays is a strong sense of the transformative nature of Jewish feminism on American Jewish life.<\/p>\n

Prell divides these studies of Jewish women’s religious contributions into three related sections.\u00a0 The first section explores how women are “revising” the tradition through feminist encounters with text.\u00a0 The second turns to how they are “redefining” what it means to practice Judaism through changing Jewish denominational life and practices.\u00a0 Finally, the contributions of the third section examine how women are “reframing” the relationship between Judaism and womanhood through the creation of new (or recovered) rituals.\u00a0 Although the authors are conscious of the history of these changes, which many trace back to the 1970s, they present Jewish feminism’s influence as an ongoing process: women “are remaking” rather than “have remade” the tradition.\u00a0 American Judaism is a work in progress,\u00a0Women Remaking American Judaism<\/em>\u00a0argues, and women have been its often unappreciated workers.<\/p>\n

The volume as a whole treats the ways feminism and feminists have worked within Judaism with nuance.\u00a0 Rather than presenting a kind of triumphalist narrative for either “feminism” or “Judaism,” the authors describe how women’s practices have been both radical in their challenges but also accomodationist in their compliance with community and Jewish law.\u00a0 In her essay on adult bat mitzvah, for example, Lisa Grant observes one of the continuing challenges for women claiming greater roles in Jewish practice: “The problem… was that as women claimed their egalitarian rights, they began to realize that they lacked the knowledge and skills to perform them” (293).\u00a0 One of the ways the women dealt with this problem was an accomodationist approach of increasing their knowledge and participation within existing forms and rites such as bat mitzvah.\u00a0 More radical approaches – like the explicit critiques offered by many of American Judaism’s first generation of women rabbis discussed by Pamela Nadell, and the demands of outspoken Conservative women described by Shuly Rubin Shwartz – also changed the way women encountered Judaism.\u00a0 But the volume’s strength lies in its ability to hold both challenging and accomodationist approaches together, despite the tensions between them.<\/p>\n

Women Remaking American Judaism<\/em>\u00a0also represents a significant contribution to the field of ritual studies in two aspects.\u00a0 First, the volume offers a sustained analysis of women’s rites and ritual objects in contemporary American Judaism: the authors consider Miriam’s cup, Miriam’s tambourine, adult bat mitzvah, Rosh Hodesh ceremonies, Orthodox women’s prayer groups, and what these mean to the lives of Jewish women.\u00a0 Collectively these articles argue that these feminist practices and materials are not just incidental objects or epiphenomena, but they structure the ways women experience Judaism.\u00a0 Vanessa Ochs, for instance, highlights the primacy of ritual objects and practices in her insightful discussion of rituals and the presence of the biblical figure of Miriam.\u00a0 Furthermore she takes seriously the idea that the ritual objects of Miriam’s tambourine and Miriam’s cup served as the basis, or even the genesis, of certain recently popularized practices.<\/p>\n

But the volume’s attention to religious practice extends beyond these treatments of particular rituals and ritual objects, and herein lies its second important contribution.\u00a0 Even the essays in the text-centered section attend to important matters of the body and religious practice.\u00a0 Perhaps it is because of the authors’ clear sophistication in women’s studies and feminism that such attentiveness is a priority.\u00a0 Regardless of the reason, the contributors consistently analyze their subject material with questions about the body and ritual in mind.\u00a0 For instance, Nadell’s essay considers what it means to embody the role of rabbi when one is a woman and how one uses that position to relate to a community made of women and men.\u00a0 Adriane Leveen explores how women encounter and form community around the Bible-based novel\u00a0The Red Tent<\/em>, by Anita Diamant.\u00a0 Deborah Dash Moore and Andrew Bush argue that Mordecai Kaplan’s rich understanding of “folkways” actually helped enable the logic and practices of Jewish feminism to take root in the Reconstructionist movement.\u00a0 Along with several recent monographs,\u00a0Women Remaking American Judaism<\/em>\u00a0stands in the vanguard of seriously considering the interplay of ritual, practice, and embodiment with text and textual study in American Judaism.<\/p>\n

Of course every volume must by necessity exclude certain topics, and one lamentable omission here is the experience of women in the generally understudied Sephardi Jewry in the United States.\u00a0 But\u00a0Women Remaking American Judaism<\/em>\u00a0also contains an unexpected bonus: a timeline detailed with events in Jewish women’s history and women’s history more generally.\u00a0 Although the volume’s primary focus is not historical – in the sense of charting and explaining change over time – the inclusion of the timeline hints at the important stories that came before the women and the rituals described in the volume.\u00a0 The essays make no claim to be an authoritative historical narrative of Jewish women and feminism.\u00a0 Instead the authors diligently focus scholarly attention on what grammarians call the present progressive tense: “remaking,” the ongoing action of transformation.\u00a0 For scholars and practitioners alike,\u00a0Women Remaking American Judaism<\/em>\u00a0should serve as a call to reconsider how feminism continues to contribute to American Jewish life.<\/p>\n

Sarah Imhoff
\nUniversity of Chicago<\/p>\n

<\/h5>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Download PDF:\u00a0Prell, Women Remaking American Judaism_Prell_Imhoff–JS–Finalized–7-2-09 By\u00a0Riv-Ellen Prell (Editor) Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2007.\u00a0 352 pages.\u00a0 $25.95. No serious observer could deny the influence of gender on religion in contemporary America.\u00a0 But many scholarly treatments of women continue to<\/p>\n

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