Читать книгу In Search of Identity and Spirituality in the Fiction of American Jewish Female Authors at the Turn of the 21st Century - Dorota Mihulka - Страница 11

Chapter 1 Jewish Women in American Society

The year 2020 commemorates the 366th anniversary of Jewish settlement on the North American continent. On American soil, the Jews built a new life and devised new, effective methods of expressing their Jewish heritage and beliefs. Although not completely devoid of anti-Semitism and discrimination, the experience of the Jews in the United States has been regarded as uniquely positive. Successive waves of Jewish immigrants and their descendants, including Sephardim, Ashkenazim, Holocaust survivors, and Soviet Jews have defined the development of the American Jewish community, and the organizations and institutions established in the United States have, in turn, changed the ‘outward appearance’ of Judaism itself. Today, the American Jewish community together with the Jewish community in the modern State of Israel constitute two major centers of world Judaism.

Chapter 1 discusses Jewish immigration to America from the perspective of Jewish women. Moreover, the second part of this chapter is devoted to the presentation and discussion of the vital role of Jewish women in the development of the four branches of American Judaism, that is: Reform Judaism, Conservative Judaism, its offshoot – Reconstructionist Judaism, and Orthodox Judaism as well as more radical Jewish movements such as Humanistic Judaism and Jewish Renewal. The third part of Chapter 1 attempts to assess the impact of the general feminist movement and Jewish feminism on the American Jewish community, paying special attention to the changes in Jewish women’s lives.

1.1 Jewish Immigration into the United States

There have been four major waves of Jewish immigration, and Jewish women played a vital role in each. Indeed, it was the arrival of women that marks the beginning of Jewish settlement in America. As it is widely recorded, Jews date their presence on the North American continent to September 1654, when twenty-three Jewish settlers, including men, women, and children, arrived in New Amsterdam (present-day New York). They were Sephardim¹ of primarily Portuguese origin, ←17 | 18→fleeing the Portuguese Inquisition in Recife, Brazil. History also records that other Jews had arrived earlier, but unique to the Recife group were the six women among the twenty-three settlers, whose presence meant that families could grow, and communities could be built. The Recife group are considered the first Jews to ever settle down and form a permanent Jewish community in North America (Ben-Ur, 2008: 2). Later generations, while looking back at the past, celebrated these refugees as the “Jewish Pilgrim Fathers.”²

In each immigration group, women came as members of families, as wives and daughters. Quickly they set down family roots and added stability to the developing Jewish communities. However, a large majority of them also came as single women, pioneering spirits who had to face the dual challenges of being uprooted from their homes in the old country and adapting to a new culture and language in the New World (Greenberg, 2006: 554).

Pretty quickly, the first Sephardic Jews in New Amsterdam were granted by Governor Peter Stuyvesant, the Dutch administrator of the colony of New Netherland, the right to settle down and trade openly throughout the colony as well as they won the right to worship in the privacy of their homes (Sarna, 2004: 2–3). Although they did not call themselves Orthodox – the term ‘Orthodoxy’ did not enter the lexicon until the mid-nineteenth century, in response to the rise of European Reform Judaism – their religious behavior and manners of worship were governed by the same principles of Rabbinic Judaism that later was designated ‘Orthodox Judaism.’

Up until 1720, the Jews in the New World were predominantly descendants of Iberian Jews, and even when some Ashkenazim³ arrived they adopted the ←18 | 19→Sephardic rites and rituals. The synagogue-community developed by the Sephardic Jews, in reality the Jewish communal government responsible for preserving and maintaining local Jewish life, was the paradigm that shaped America’s Jewish settlements. Thus, until the beginning of the nineteenth century, the only Jewish institution in a given community was the local Sephardic synagogue, which provided for the ritual needs of its members and punished religious transgressors for disobedience to authority. Orthodox practice prevailed within the walls of such Sephardic synagogues which meant that colonial Jewish women sat apart in upstairs galleries during services and participated in worship only passively (cf. Sarna, 2004: 12–20; Raphael, 2003: 43; Faber, 1998: 268).

The American Revolution, the ratification of the Constitution, and the passage of the Bill of Rights in 1791 contributed to the transformation of Jewish religious life in America. On the one hand, these momentous events resulted in “equal footing” for all religions in America but, on the other hand, as Jonathan Sarna points out, “the nationwide democratization of religion that followed from these developments” culminated in the 1820s “in the first dramatic turning point in the history of American Judaism: the collapse of the unified ‘synagogue-community’ and its replacement by a more pluralistic and diverse ‘community of synagogues’ ” (2004: 37, xvii–xviii).

In truth, this pioneering Sephardic immigration of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries could hardly be called a wave. The Jewish population remained relatively small: in 1700 there were as few as 200 Jews in the New World, and according to the first federal Census of 1790, approximately 2,500 Jews – less than 0.1 percent of the population – lived in the thirteen states on the East Coast of the United States (Pencak, 2008: 10). By 1820, there were still only about 6,000 Jewish settlers in the United States, dispersed in small communities throughout the country. The first Sephardic community dwindled because of assimilation and intermarriage, but they still maintained a strong sense of connection with the world Jewry. They lived as patriotic citizens, yet, at the same time, they were trying to hold on to their distinct Jewish identity. Jewish women carried the major responsibility for maintaining the household and transmitting the practice of their faith to the next generation, as they had done for centuries wherever they lived (cf. Karesh and Hurvitz, 2006: 537; Raphael, 2003: 46; Greenberg, 2006: 554–555). Eli Faber summarizes their roles and positions in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century America in such a way:

←19 | 20→

[…] Jewish women in colonial North America occupied traditional positions and played traditional roles within the Jewish community as well as the larger society. They could not serve in positions of leadership in either the Jewish or the general community, and they are not known to have had their own social organizations. (1998: 267)

Hasia R. Diner and Beryl L. Benderly in their classic work on the history of Jewish women in America, Her Work Praise Her, give evidence that a striking number of Jewish women entered business in colonial America as well, although few functioned as businesswomen in their own right. The majority of Jewish women, whether married or single, who were active in business, either cooperated with their male relatives or served as ancillaries to their husbands, assisting them as clerks or administering their businesses when they traveled (2002: 43–60).

The second major immigration wave took place between 1820 and 1880, when approximately 200,000 Jews arrived from Central Europe. It was this new group of Ashkenazi emigrants from Central Europe, mostly Germany, who revitalized the American Jewish community as they arrived in large numbers after 1840. In 1840, there were 15,000 Jews in America; 20 years later, in 1860 there were between 150,000 and 200,000 (Sarna, 2004: 375). These Jews settled farther inland than the first Sephardic wave of immigrants, dispersing across almost every state and territory of the United States, from New England, through the Midwest, the Great Plains, the South, to the Far West, although they also settled down in New York and Philadelphia and other cities that had already had well-established Jewish communities. The majority of these second-wave immigrants were non-Orthodox who had already embraced liberal Reform Judaism in Europe propagating a Jewish identity that was wide open to acculturation and assimilation in the New World. Thousands of Jewish men and women migrated to America with a view to taking advantage of ‘golden’ opportunities rather than finding relief from persecution. They succeeded to a considerable extent, both personally, culturally and economically, and they built grand synagogues in major cities throughout the United States (Greenberg, 2006: 555).

The early American Jewish communities were characterized by male majorities. In most American Jewish communities, women tended to arrive later, after their husbands had achieved some economic stability. The new Jewish immigrant men worked hard to fit into American society and achieve their goals, beginning as peddlers and often becoming successful shopkeepers or businessmen. So widespread was Jewish peddling that in 1840, 46 percent of all Jewish men made a living this way, and by 1845, the number rocketed to 70 percent (Diner, 1998: 503–505).

Jewish women who emigrated from Central and Eastern Europe to America came from the same social classes and had the same incentive as the men did. As Hasia R. Diner points out, “[a];s daughters of the poor, they not only left to follow or meet potential spouses, but they too were victims of economic change [that is], the modernization of economies of much of Central Europe which severely undermined the basis of traditional Jewish economy” (1998: 502). Jewish women ←20 | 21→in this period worked mostly as the wives and daughters of petty shopkeepers. The success of dry-goods stores owned and operated by the Jews in almost every Jewish community depended equally upon the labors of men and women, adults and children. Jewish immigrant women of this period, whether married or single, worked in other ways as well. Many of them created their own businesses, such as boarding enterprises, clothing businesses, dry-goods stores, grocery stores, in essence, as Diner remarks, “keeping alive what seemed to have been a long standing European Jewish tradition” (1998: 504). It goes without saying, that Jewish women of this period played a crucial role in the family economy; without their contribution, it could not have existed and thrived.

It can truly be said, as Stanley Nadel notices, that “German Jews shaped and reshaped in fundamental ways much of the culture and many of the institutions that characterize Jewish America” (2008: 24). Strongly influenced by the Haskalah (the Jewish Enlightenment), they brought with them from the Old Country ideas of religious reform, establishing Reform congregations, independent benevolent societies and social service organizations, such as burial societies, orphanages, day nurseries, old-age homes, medical clinics, maternity hospitals, soup kitchens, shelters for widows, and the like. Many of these philanthropic organizations were created, operated, and supported by Jewish women, for example Ladies’ Hebrew Benevolent Societies, popular in many Jewish communities throughout the United States, and a National Council of Jewish Women (NCJW) formed in 1893 to promote “Jewish religion, philanthropy and education, and the work of social reform – as well as opposing all religious persecution” (Nadel, 2008: 32). These Jewish women’s associations, which did quite well at fund-raising, put a lot of effort and money into providing charitable relief to the Jewish poor, paying special attention to alleviating the suffering of the Jewish female poor. Thus, all those charitable organizations built by liberal Jews in the nineteenth-century America not only helped Jewish women to integrate into the new American society, but they also served as powerful models for Jewish women of future generations (Diner and Benderly, 2002: 110–116).

The era of the German Jewish immigration also changed women’s relationship to Judaism as a religious system. Migration to America challenged the division of Judaism into public and private spheres, which corresponded to the male and female domains respectively. The migration made the observance of home-centered, private Jewish ritual life, closely tied to women’s activities such as, for example, abiding by kashrut (the dietary laws) and niddah (the family purity laws), more difficult and less frequently fulfilled. As far as the public sphere is concerned, it has to be noted that over the course of the period between 1820 and 1880, Jewish women began to assume a more public presence in the observance of Judaism. American Jewish women began to attend synagogues on a regular basis much more often than they would have if they had remained in Europe. Consequently, the public, synagogue-centered practice of attending services became an important area of women’s piety. Although they continued to sit in the women’s section, the female worshippers often outnumbered men during Sabbath morning services. The ←21 | 22→preponderance of women at Sabbath services may have influenced the leaders of Reform Judaism who began to call for mixed seating in synagogues. By allowing family pews in Reform synagogues, they hoped to bring the men back to services, which to a certain extent turned out to be a successful move (Diner and Benderly, 2002: 123–125; Diner, 1998: 506–507).

The period of the German Jewish immigration brought approximately 200,000 Jews to the United States from Central and Eastern Europe. Women accounted for half of the immigrants, and as Diner accurately describes, they played a vital role, “[…] in the functioning of a family economy that allowed for steady and modest economic mobility, for the formation of communities from the ground up, which in turn provided services for the needy and for the emergence of a modern, American Judaism” (1998: 507). Moreover, by the middle of the nineteenth century, the position of American Jewish women had evolved from being “the domestic helpmeet[s]; of the main religious actors,” that is Jewish men, into “the true guardians of Jewishness” in both home and the community, to borrow Diner and Benderly’s expressions (2002: 126).

The major immigration wave of Jews began in the later part of the nineteenth century. From 1880 until 1924, when the American government imposed a restrictive quota system, more than 2 million impoverished Eastern European Jewish immigrants arrived, fleeing anti-Semitic persecution, discrimination, and poverty in their countries of origin. 44 percent of all Jewish immigrants to the United States were women, a figure far greater than for other immigrant groups arriving during the peak of mass immigration (Hyman, “Eastern European Immigration,” 1998: 346).

It was the established German Jews⁴ in the United States who were affected badly by the arrival of the new group of mostly Orthodox Jews. The Eastern European Jews, the majority of whom came from the Pale of Settlement,⁵ did not fit the modern, sophisticated profile that the ‘German Jews’ had worked for decades to ←22 | 23→achieve in the American milieu. They were traditional in religious practice, Yiddish-speaking, little educated in modern ways, and destitute.⁶ Their intention was to settle down in America, make new lives as Americans, and raise American families. Their gradual acculturation in America took a heavy toll on their traditional way of life, which is clearly demonstrated by the fact that a substantial number of both Orthodox men and women quickly abandoned the religious restrictions with which they had grown up. Yet, those who remained Orthodox, were deeply committed to their way of life, and this commitment reflected itself in their work for their families and communities in which they lived. The highest piety and social prestige for any Orthodox Jewish man was to devote himself to religious learning in the house of study. A Jewish woman, on the other hand, expressed her piety not by participating in the scholarly discourse or synagogue worship, but through the sacred work of making and running a Jewish home, thus making the life of her scholarly husband possible and bearable. In many cases, however, that sacred woman’s work included earning some or all of the money to support her scholarly husband and her family (c.f. Greenberg, 2006: 555; Diner and Benderly, 2002: 137–142, 176). In practical reality, as Diner and Benderly remark, “the breadwinning mother, responsible not only for the household’s daily functioning but often also for its finances, frequently dominated family decision-making” (2002: 143). This model of the Jewish family, in which the wife takes the role of the family’s breadwinner, whereas the husband studies, still prevails even nowadays in the stricter Ultra-Orthodox American Jewish communities, particularly among the Hasidim (Jacobs, 1995: 593).

Immigrant Jews, both female and male, arrived in America with considerable experience of urban life in a capitalist economy. Unlike many other migrants to America, they had not been peasants in the old country. In the Pale of Settlement as a whole, Jews constituted 38 percent of those living in cities or towns (Hyman, “Eastern European Immigration,” 1998: 346). On arriving in the United States, Eastern European Jews settled primarily in the cities in the eastern part of the country. Crowding into ethnic enclaves, such as New York’s Lower East Side, Boston’s North End, Philadelphia’s downtown, and Chicago’s West Side – to name a few of the better known of these densely populated ghettos in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – the Eastern European Jews lived side by side with German Jews, in Kleindeutschland (Little Germany), creating congestion and drawing the attention of non-Jews (cf. Nadel, 2008: 29; Goren, 1980: 581). Many Jewish immigrants worked in the thriving garment industry or in shops which were often owned by descendants of an earlier immigrant wave ←23 | 24→of Central European Jews. On the whole, immigrant Jewish males usually entered the American economy as skilled workers and peddlers, whereas the majority of newcomers from other European immigrant groups began their working lives as unskilled laborers during the peak of mass immigration to America.

The relationship between the prosperous German Jews and the newly arrived penniless Easterners was full of tension. Fearing that the Easterners’ distinctive appearance would provoke anti-Semitism, the high-status German-Jewish community established extensive social service organizations and sponsored a number of settlement projects such as the Jewish Alliance of America, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, the Hebrew Orphan Asylum, the Galveston Plan, and the Industrial Removal Office, in order to disperse the Eastern Europeans into rural settlements and to make improvements to their condition (cf. Karesh and Hurvitz, 2006: 538; Nadel, 2008: 34, Sorin, 2008: 40–41). Jewish philanthropic associations also spent a lot of money from their budgets on assisting the families of deserted wives, and the families of widows.

Apart from that, German-Jewish leaders, who were themselves mostly Reform, funded the revitalization of the Jewish Theological Seminary to reinforce Conservative Judaism with a view to providing a more traditional synagogue where the new immigrants would feel more comfortable than they did in the established, more liberal Reform congregations (Karesh and Hurvitz, 2006: 538). Indeed, many Eastern European Jewish immigrants did their best to preserve as much of the old piety they knew from the Old World as the new circumstances in the New World would allow. Although many private, ritual practices and old customs, such as wearing tefillin (phylacteries) and tallit (prayer shawls) by Jewish men for daily prayers, or wearing sheitels (wigs) and attending mikveh (the ritual bath) regularly by married Jewish women, were abandoned, there are examples of some more visible public observances which endured. The great majority of immigrant balebustes (Jewish housewives), for example, carefully maintained kashrut and made elaborate preparations for the holidays such as Yom Kippur, Sukkot, Hanukkah, Purim and Passover throughout the Jewish calendar year. In the great majority of Eastern European immigrant households in America, the traditional Sabbath continued to be observed with the candles being lit and a festive dinner being served for all the family members on a Friday night. Despite the above-mentioned examples of the maintenance of traditional piety and Sabbath observance, the statistics indicate that by 1906, fewer than 10 percent of East Europeans remained strictly Orthodox, in the sense of adhering to the many rules, requirements, and restrictions of their faith. Under the glare of Americanization, Sabbath observance declined, so did synagogue attendance, membership, and Torah study within the group of Orthodox Jews (Diner and Benderly, 2002: 228–229).

The position of women in immigrant Jewish society in America was influenced by two groups of factors, namely cultural and economic ones. Both the Ashkenazi Jewish culture brought from the Old World, and the American culture encountered in the United States as well as the economic realities of urban capitalistic America had a great impact on the position of Jewish women in the late nineteenth ←24 | 25→and early twentieth centuries. Once settled in America, Jewish women worked together with men to support their families because they could not survive on the husbands’ wages alone. Their work patterns depended on their domestic obligations. Married women had full responsibility for managing the household, and the obligations of mothers were particularly heavy. As Paula Hyman notices, “[i];ndeed, women and men alike assumed that wives would quickly develop skill in stretching their husband’s wages; their role as baleboostebs [efficient housewives] – shopping, cooking, and cleaning – complemented their husbands’ role as breadwinners” (“Eastern European Immigration,” 1998: 348). Many autobiographies, works written by the children of immigrant women as well as fictional texts praise not only the Jewish mothers’ self-sacrifice and their ability to deal successfully with economic hardships but they also emphasize the central role that the Jewish mothers played in the emotional life of families.⁷

Apart from the involvement in the household responsibilities, many married Jewish women and most adolescent girls worked outside the home, especially in the garment industries, in order to contribute to their families’ income. Due to the fact that the division of labor and the amount of earnings were determined by gender in general, Jewish immigrant women working full time in garment shops and factories earned no more than 60 percent of the average male wage. Moreover, they were also expected to hand over most of their earnings to their parents, fulfilling in this way their filial duties to their families. Although they were put at a disadvantage with regard to the difference in wages and family obligations because of gender, young Jewish women managed to develop a sense of freedom which was reinforced by their participation in the labor force. Like other urban working-class girls, Jewish women generally immersed themselves in American popular culture, making good use of the leisure-time activities offered by American cities, such as cinemas, dance halls, amusement parks, and theatres (Glenn, 1994: 67–68, 84; Diner and Benderly, 2002: 167–177).

Jewish women also perceived education as the key to the freedom that America symbolized. This perception combined with the general belief in the great value of education in traditional Jewish culture encouraged many immigrant Jewish women to supplement their insufficient formal education by taking part in free public evening classes and lectures organized by Yiddish cultural organizations and settlement houses. Many immigrant women, therefore, had the opportunity to acquire secular education, at the elementary, high school, and even more advanced levels, of which they had been deprived in their countries of origin due ←25 | 26→to economic conditions and governmental discrimination (cf. Hyman, “Eastern European Immigration,” 1998: 351; Diner and Benderly, 2002: 177–178).

As far as Jewish education is concerned, there were even fewer opportunities for women on the grounds that the traditional exemption of women from formal Jewish study continued in the American immigrant community. The situation began to improve after World War I when more Jewish girls were admitted to Jewish schools; yet their education was frequently limited to Sunday school. It was also during this time that the Jewish religious leaders were beginning to realize that a “healthy Jewish education” for all Jewish girls was extremely important to the transmission of Jewish identity to the younger generation, and that into the hands of Jewish women “[was] entrusted the fate of the future of [their] own history” (Hyman, 1997: 117).

Despite their secular knowledge and involvement in political life – they were active members of the labor unions in the United States – immigrant Jewish women were generally perceived by social reformers, both gentile and Jewish ones, to be obstacles to the successful Americanization of their families. This opinion assumed that since Jewish women’s daily lives and religious expression were confined mostly to the domestic sphere, they were most likely to be transmitters of the Old-World values to their families. Yet, at the same time, American Jewish social reformers acknowledged that immigrant women had the enormous potential as agents of assimilation, most likely to introduce middle-class standards of behavior and good taste into their homes, provided that they were directed and taught appropriate gender roles and behavior in accordance with the American middle-class paradigm (Hyman, “Eastern European Immigration,” 1998: 351–352).

Some American Jewish historians, for example Paula Hyman, Hasia Diner and Beryl L. Benderly, however, reveal a far more complex role for Jewish women in the adaptation of immigrant Jews to American conditions. They argue that the analysis of oral history interviews, memoirs, and women’s fiction from that time seems to show a much more positive image of the immigrant Jewish mother and her centrality in the home than the one presented by the acculturated American Jewish social reformers. Hyman characterizes this positive image of Jewish women in such a way:

[…] immigrant women, in fact, used their domestic position to mediate between home life and the public world of school, work, and recreation. […] [Jewish] mothers supported their [daughters’] aspirations and desires for independence and education. […] Immigrant mothers [are also depicted] as wielding their influence, not always successfully, to mitigate a father’s rigid religious traditionalism that would deny their daughters freedom to choose a spouse or to go off to study. (“Eastern European Immigration,” 1998: 353)

This quote seems to indicate that there might have been a transfer of power within the immigrant Jewish community from the father to the mother who seems to have occupied a more central position in the home, which is visible in her having a bigger say in the domestic matters. The fact that women gained a greater sense of ←26 | 27→independence from significant others in the family might have also had a broader impact on the position of women within the Jewish community as well as their Americanization.

Historical research into gender and assimilation in the nineteenth and early twentieth century European and American Jewish communities conducted by Paula Hyman (1995) and Marion Kaplan (1991) suggests that Jewish women have played a greater role than Jewish men in the transmission of Jewish culture and identity: men have focused their energy on acculturating themselves to the workforce and general public sphere, whereas women have maintained religious standards and customs in the home. Both researchers have noticed that in the nineteenth century, gender limited assimilation of Jewish women in Central and Western Europe as well as in the United States, by confining them, similarly to other middle-class women of that time, to the domestic scene and thereby restricting their economic, social, cultural and educational opportunities in the realm of public life. In this way, both Jewish men and women had adapted themselves, and their Judaism, to the prevailing bourgeois model of female domesticity, the so-called ‘cult of domesticity,’ which put an emphasis on the women’s creation of a peaceful domestic environment, and the preservation and transmission of traditional morality through greater involvement in religion. In other words, as Deborah Dash Moore aptly puts it, Jewish women “adopted American mores that placed religion within the feminine domain” (1998: 96). Jewish men, on the other hand, bearing the burden of supporting their families, were forced by external circumstances to abandon traditional Jewish culture and limit their religious expressions to periodic synagogue attendance. This contributed to Jewish men’s quicker assimilation into the larger society in comparison with Jewish women who, fulfilling the dominant societal expectations of women pursuant to the ‘cult of domesticity,’ assumed the role of guardians of religion (Hyman, 1997: 25–26). Although the twentieth century provided women with more educational and employment opportunities, “gender divisions and the presumptions of the appropriate female behavior that had developed in the nineteenth century retained much of their power, only gradually succumbing to the blurring of the boundaries between domestic and public realms” (Hyman, 1997: 19). On the basis of Hyman’s and Kaplan’s studies we might draw a conclusion that for most of the modern period, Jewish women have displayed fewer signs of radical assimilation than Jewish men.

However, it must be remembered that the situation of Orthodox Jewish women in Eastern Europe during the same period frequently looked the reverse. Apart from being vested with the important task of maintaining the fundamental rituals in the private domestic life, the Jewish wife was often the sole breadwinner of the Jewish family, which meant that she was forced to participate in the economic public world of the larger Russian or Polish societies. Hence, it was already in the Old World, before their emigration to the United States, that many Orthodox Jewish women were exposed to secularism, new Western ideas, and radical political opinions challenging traditional Jewish Orthodoxy. According to Susan A. Glenn, the powerful transformations initiated at the turn of the twentieth century in ←27 | 28→Europe, which resulted in a massive emigration of Eastern European Jews to America, “would also open the possibilities for reconstructing the relationships between women and men and between women and Jewish society” (1994: 9). Consequently, the emigration to the New World and the resulting assimilation of Jewish emigrants from Eastern Europe reversed dramatically the traditional Jewish family roles typical of the Old World: a Jewish man was no longer able to lead a life of an ‘idle’ Talmud scholar in America, but was expected to seek employment in order to support his family, whereas an industrious Jewish wife striving to make her family prosper in the Old World, was expected to conform to ‘the cult of domesticity’ in accordance with the American middle-class paradigm, similarly to other immigrant Jewish women from Western and Central Europe (cf. Glenn, 1994: 68–80).

Additionally, in her book The Making of the Jewish Middle Class: Women, Family and Identity in Imperial Germany, Marion Kaplan also demonstrates that there appears to have been a significant difference in Jewish practice and religious identity between Jewish males and females. Jewish men were depicted as thoroughly assimilated Jews, and yet they lived in families where their wives practiced domestic Judaism, and were fully devoted to the observance and maintenance of the laws of kashrut, the Jewish calendar and Jewish rituals. Moreover, Jewish women seem to have persisted in ritual observance even after their husbands had abandoned these practices (1991: 69–84). Hyman further observes that “this gendered difference in religious behavior was by no means limited to the European scene in the second half of the nineteenth century.” This trend could also be observed among “second-and third-generation Jewish families of Central European origin in America” (1997: 24) in the twentieth century. More recent sociological studies also seem to support the expectations that American Jewish women will express stronger Jewish religious identities than men, and stronger attachment to the Jewish people than men (cf. Fishman and Parmer, 2008; Hartman and Hartman, 2009).

The Jews, who emigrated to America from Eastern Europe during the third wave of Jewish immigration, set up vibrant communities with social services and Yiddish culture, which helped to build a bridge between immigrants and native-born American Jews. Socialism and Zionism, the secular ideologies brought by many of the emigrants from Eastern Europe led to new disagreements within the Jewish communities, yet they also provided new theories and programs that “transcended ghetto parochialism,” to borrow Goren’s expression (1980: 583), and invigorated Yiddish culture, making it more responsive to immigrants’ needs.

Immigrant Jewish women of the third wave, in particular, found that their new lives in America were directly influenced by the economic, social, and cultural factors of their migration. On the one hand, they enjoyed more freedom and autonomy in comparison with other groups of immigrant women, but on the other hand many Jewish women felt constricted by the economic circumstances in America. Moreover, American perception of success also limited Jewish women’s aspirations in America. According to this middle-class understanding of success, married women were not supposed to get engaged in paid work if they wanted to ←28 | 29→be regarded as appropriately feminine. It was their husbands’ responsibility to support the family financially. Because of this, the majority of Eastern European immigrant Jewish women who wished to make the most of their leisure time by seeking meaningful work, committed themselves to volunteer social work. Similarly to an earlier generation of Jewish women, they also founded a number of local organizations, such as day nurseries, maternity hospitals and old-age homes, in the hope of providing tzedakah (charity) to America’s Jewish poor and improving the lives of present and future generations of Jewish women.

The fourth wave of immigration, consisting of some 400,000 Jews,⁸ began in the 1930s prior to World War II and resumed again after 1945, intersected by the war. The pre-war group, escaping from Hitler’s dominance as it spread across Europe, consisted mostly of German Orthodox refugees who escaped the Third Reich in the 1930s or those who fled German-occupied countries and arrived in the United States before 1945. The post-war immigrants, on the other hand, were Jewish Holocaust survivors, who hoped to rebuild their lives in the aftermath of the war, having been granted refuge in the United States. In subsequent decades, the Holocaust population expanded as Jews from Poland, Hungary, Romania, Czechoslovakia, and former republics of the Soviet Union emigrated to the United States as well.

Both pre-war and post-war groups included Ultra-Orthodox Jews who were part of the pre-war yeshiva worlds of Poland and Hungary as well as Hasidic Jews, representatives of some of the great Hasidic dynasties of Eastern Europe. However, the total number of European Ultra-Orthodox Jews who emigrated to the United States in this period was relatively small. This is due to the fact that before World War II, Jews in Europe were actively discouraged by Orthodox rabbis and Hasidic rebbes to emigrate to America which they considered an unholy land, a place where strict observance of the Halakhah would be endangered by the open society. Those who eventually reached America were the surviving remnants of the destruction of European Jewry (see also Section 1.2.4.1 in this chapter). In addition to the relatively small number of Haredim who managed to escape or survive the war, the immigrant population of the fourth wave also included Modern Orthodox and liberal Jews. Among the refugees of the fourth wave were distinguished Jewish scholars, teachers and charismatic leaders who made a large impact ←29 | 30→on all the major movements within Judaism over the next several decades. Each of the groups along the Orthodox spectrum, in turn, contributed to an increase in membership among Orthodoxy, which had suffered severe depletion in the process of Americanization of previous waves of Jewish immigrants (cf. Greenberg, 2006: 556; Prell, 2008: 124–126; Caplan, 2008: 179–182).

In the post-war period, American Jews began migrating to the suburbs and sunbelt cities in the southern and western United States. In unprecedented numbers, they left the East Coast and the Midwest and established new homes and communities in Florida, Texas, and California. Jewish prosperity in the post-war years, combined with the decline in racial and religious discrimination and the removal of educational and social barriers thanks to the implementation of the G.I. Bill in 1944, created new chances for the Jews of the post-war generation. In the second half of the twentieth century, Jews entered the law, medical and managerial professions in large numbers. Thanks to their efforts, the American Jewish community was “transformed from a community of struggling wage laborers and marginal traders into an educated, upwardly mobile, and creative section of the American middle class” (cf. Goren, 1980: 592–593; Karesh and Hurvitz, 2006: 538; Diner and Benderly, 2002: 273).

The most salient difference between the American and the European experience of Jews was the degree of anti-Semitism; in the United States, it was less significant than in Europe, and as Riv-Ellen Prell points out, “[…], anti-Semitism in the United States has, practically speaking, never been state sponsored, nor has the state sanctioned violence against Jews, [in contrast to Europe]” (2006: 589). Anti-Semitism has taken various forms in different periods and regions of the United States, ranging from a series of widely circulating negative stereotypes of Jews,⁹ through social discrimination, to examples of physical violence. Some scholars, such as for example Marc Lee Raphael (2003: 40) and William Pencak (2008: 11), report that a few incidents of anti-Jewish desecration or graffiti occurred during the colonial period, but there was very little violence until the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Hasia Diner and Beryl L. Benderly further observe that “[t];he prejudice, discrimination, and social isolation that plagued Jews in Europe found no place in the rough, fluid, democratic life on the frontier. People – at least white people – judged one another by individual character and behavior, not by religion or background” (2002: 84). Despite some incidences of anti-Semitism, such as the ←30 | 31→Leo Frank lynching in 1915, Henry Ford’s publication of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in 1920, anti-immigration quotas in the 1920s, as well as the pre-war pattern of social discrimination, American Jews have managed to feel economically, politically, and socially secure in the American society. As anti-Semitism declined during the post-war decades, the religion of American Jews gained widespread recognition as America’s ‘third faith’ alongside Protestantism and Catholicism. Apart from that, as Jonathan Sarna remarks, “[t]hanks to federal and state legislation, pressure from returning veterans, government and media exposure […], and the stigma of being compared to the Nazis, discrimination against Jews in employment, housing, and daily life also markedly declined” after World War II (2004: 275–276).¹⁰

All things considered, the United States has offered the Jews an extraordinary opportunity to live openly as Jews. Some have chosen to remain in more traditional venues, such as in Orthodox or Conservative communities, others have chosen to participate in new American Jewish movements such as Reconstructionist Judaism and Jewish Renewal, and still others have chosen to express themselves as Jews through Humanistic Judaism or only via volunteer social work. Such issues as Jewish identity, assimilation, accommodation, and intermarriage remain important topics of discussion within the American Jewish community nowadays.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, American Jews celebrate their place in the American society. They constitute a well-integrated body of American citizens who accepted the values and mores of the United States – and at the same time, to a large extent, achieved acceptance themselves – and entered the American public life with great energy and few inhibitions. Even though encountering barriers since their arrival in America, Jews have profoundly influenced American society and significantly shaped the American culture. Jews have had a major impact on American literature, theatre, and television, and on many disciplines in academia. Jews have also established successful careers as politicians, businesspeople, professionals, and athletes. They have also established numerous philanthropic organizations and social projects which offer temporary financial support, aid the new immigrants in accommodating to the American society as well as provide for the welfare of the less fortunate among the Jewish communities.

←31 | 32→

The United States with its freedom and equality had a significant impact on the evolution of the American Jewish community as well, leading to “a multiplicity of religious outlooks, successful absorption of diverse subgroups, and a broad choice to identify with the Jewish collectivity” (Goren, 1980: 597). At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the American Jewish experience continues to be full of surprises and developments, yet at the same time American Jews are still eager to search for new ways to ensure their survival.

1.2 Religious Dimensions of American Jewish Community

American Judaism is as unique, dynamic, and diverse as American Jewry, whose variety, as Nicholas de Lange points out, “reflects the different waves of [Jewish immigrants] and their experiences of adapting themselves to a free and open society” (2002: 13). The three dominant Jewish religious movements of twentieth and early twenty-first century America are: The Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox Movements which emerged as a response to both the Enlightenment and Emancipation. These three movements have their own separate congregational associations, rabbinical assemblies and rabbinic seminaries. A later offshoot is Reconstructionist Judaism, which developed only in the United States with its own institutions, and in recent years there has been a proliferation of less formal, ‘alternative’ Jewish religious groups as well (cf. Lange, 2002: 14; Raphael, 2003: 4).

The major focus of Section 1.2 in Chapter 1 is on the presentation and discussion of the role of Jewish women in the development of American Judaism as well as the position they occupy in the particular branches of American Judaism nowadays. Concurrently, the main differences between the various strands of Jewish religion on American soil are also highlighted and briefly discussed in this section.

1.2.1 Women in Reform Judaism

Reform Judaism, also known as Liberal or Progressive Judaism, was the first branch of American Judaism to be formally organized into a denomination. In the last quarter of the twentieth and the first decade of the twenty-first centuries, it became the largest Jewish denomination in the United States with respect to the number of formally affiliated members – Pew Research Center Survey of U.S. Jews conducted in 2013 indicates that slightly above one-third (35 percent) of all American Jews identify with the Reform movement (“A Portrait of Jewish Americans,” 2013: 10).

Beginning in Germany early in the nineteenth century, the Reform movement quickly spread to the United States, where it has enjoyed its greatest institutional success ever since. The basis for American Reform Judaism was initially laid down by Rabbi Isaac M. Wise in the Cleveland Platform (1855), and later extended in the Pittsburgh Platform (1885) to include some more radical formulations. The more radical reformers, led by Rabbis David Einhorn, and later by his son-in-law ←32 | 33→Kaufman Kohler, sought a more Americanized expression of Judaism and wished “to reshape Judaism anew, and jettison most of the rituals connected with the diet, circumcision, the Shabbat and festivals” and adopt new ones so that Judaism could function in the modern world (Unterman, 1999: 202). They perceived the Bible as containing the obsolete ideas of the past although still highly valued as the source of Judaism, and believed that only the moral teachings of Judaism could be binding, together with any rituals which sanctified the life of the modern Jew (cf. Unterman, 1997: 166; Unterman, 1999: 203).

Since the nineteenth century, the Reform movement in the United States has faced numerous challenges, including religious laxity, lack of ideological clarity, and severe criticism from more traditional Jewish denominations. Orthodoxy, in particular, does not recognize the authority of Reform rabbis and refuses to accept proselytes converted by them as Jews. Neither does it recognize mixed marriages between Jews and Gentiles performed by Reform rabbis as valid on the grounds that there are no religiously reliable witnesses present. Any children born from such marriages, that is between a Jewish father and a gentile mother, are not regarded as Jews by Orthodox rabbis according to the principle of matrilineal descent. Finally, one of the on-going serious issues between Reform and Orthodox Judaism is the divorce procedure used by the former. A married woman who does not undergo a traditional divorce is still considered by the Halakhah as married and cannot remarry. Any children born from a subsequent marriage are mamzerim,¹¹ and this stigma is permanent, transmitted over all the mamzer’s future generations (Unterman, 1999: 204).

As far as the Jewish women’s evolving role in Reform Judaism¹² is concerned, it must be observed that the leaders of Reform Judaism in the United States have often emphasized and celebrated their movement’s central role “in emancipating Jewish women from the many restrictions that Judaism has traditionally imposed upon women’s ability to participate in and lead public worship” (Goldman, 2006: 533). It was only in the United States – as opposed to Germany, where the German Reform ←33 | 34→leaders made half-hearted attempts to ensure women’s equality – that practical innovations adopted by the Reform movement actively redefined the nature of women’s participation in public worship. The most important among Reform Judaism’s liberating innovations were the abolition of a separate women’s gallery within the synagogue in the 1850s,¹³ the ordination of the first American woman rabbi, Sally Priesand, in 1972, and the first female cantor, Barbara Ostfeld Horowitz three years later. What is more, many Reform congregations employed choirs of mixed male and female voices, challenging in this way kol ishah (Hebrew for ‘the voice of a woman’), the usual Orthodox prohibition against allowing women’s voices to be heard during worship services. Furthermore, the introduction of the confirmation ritual, seen as the primary adolescent rite of passage, indicated to some extent at least, their regard for the Jewish religious education and identity of not only Jewish boys but also girls (Goldman, 1998: 1136–1137).

In addition to these important institutional changes, Reform congregations have also enabled Jewish women to find appropriate venues where they could make sense of the tensions between changing societal expectations for women and the roles associated with traditional Jewish practice. First of all, the activation of female energy for the benefit of the congregation, for example by encouraging them to attend to the physical, charitable, and social needs of the community, was an essential step in the direction of extending the synagogue sphere beyond the formal worship service. The Reform Movement’s National Federation of Temple Sisterhoods, under the leadership of Carrie Obendorfer Simon, was created in 1913. The aim of this Reform organization as well as its Conservative and Orthodox counterparts, founded in 1918 and 1926 respectively, was to coordinate the work of local groups that were crucial to shaping their communities and defining Jewish women’s public roles (cf. Nadell, “National Federation of Temple Sisterhoods,” 1998: 979–982; Goldman, 2006: 535–537; Goldman, 2008: 108).

The progress towards equality for women in the Reform movement went erratically through the 1950s and 1960s, as the larger society became more interested in the questions of gender egalitarianism and equality of opportunity. The validation of women’s participation in synagogue life as well as their intense involvement in and support for the Reform movement through their practical work for the sisterhoods directly contributed to the transformation of women’s political status within Reform Judaism. The next two decades finally saw the recognition of women’s religious voice, and Jewish women were granted full participation and access to formal religious leadership in Reform Judaism.

←34 | 35→

The ordination of Sally Priesand, and approximately 300 Reform women rabbis in the subsequent years, is perceived by many as the ultimate realization of women’s religious equality by the Reform movement during the last quarter of the twentieth century. Despite the fact that women rabbis initially encountered hostility and are still frequently faced with constant challenges, they also began to reshape Reform congregations and American Judaism in profound ways. Reform women rabbis began to view, through the lens of their own experience, Jewish ceremonies, rituals, liturgies, and texts in a new light, which contributed to the creation of ceremonies, previously disregarded by a male-centered tradition. Moreover, Reform women rabbis have also participated in the creation of feminist midrash, re-examinations of biblical texts from the perspectives of female participants, and in emerging critiques of traditional Jewish liturgy. It is apparent then that the embrace of equality for women at every level of religious leadership and life is considered a fundamental principle of Reform Judaism (cf. Goldman, 1998: 1138–1139; Goldman, 2006: 541–542). Last but not least, Reform Judaism accepts LGBT Jews in Jewish life, homosexual rabbis and same-sex marriages. These revolutionary changes within Reform Judaism which were initiated as early as the 1970s and continued over the subsequent decades until the present times aimed at the full inclusion and acceptance as well as the equal rights of the lesbian, homosexual, transgender and bisexual Jewish individuals (“Stances of Faiths on LGBTQ Issues: Reform Judaism”).

Nevertheless, despite the above-mentioned significant progress that Jewish women have found within the Reform movement, it must be remembered that there still remain issues requiring to be addressed in contemporary American Reform Judaism such as for example, salary inequalities between men and women within similar rabbinic positions, high underrepresentation of women in the most influential rabbinical and university posts, as well as some more general matters like outreach and neo-traditionalism in its ritual life.

1.2.2 Women in Conservative Judaism

In the spectrum of American Jewish life, Conservative Judaism occupies the ‘middle position,’ seeking to maintain Jewish traditions while at the same time allowing for change. Members of Conservative synagogues have historically been perceived as more traditional than members of Reform congregations and less traditional than their Orthodox counterparts. Of all the major denominations in American Jewish life (Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox), Conservative Judaism is regarded both as the latest to appear and the most uniquely American.¹⁴ ←35 | 36→Though scholars trace its intellectual roots to nineteenth-century Germany, Conservative Judaism – unlike Reform or Orthodoxy – became a popular movement only in the United States and Canada. According to the 2013 Pew Research Center Survey of U.S. Jews, Conservative Jews constitute the second largest Jewish denominational movement in the United States and account for 18 percent of all American Jews (“A Portrait of Jewish Americans,” 2013: 10), a decline by about half in comparison with the results of the North American Survey of 1995–1996, however, which showed that approximately 36 percent of the American Jews were affiliated with Conservative Judaism in the 1990s (Gordis, 2003: 334).

Conservative Jews, similarly to Reform Jews, stress that Judaism has evolved historically to meet the changing needs of the Jewish people in various eras and circumstances. They also believe that Jewish law should continue to evolve in the present and future. In contrast to Reform, situated to its theological left, Conservative Judaism insists on the binding nature of Halakhah, and maintains the traditional opinion that Jews must obey and observe the will of God through the commandments, just like Orthodox Judaism. But unlike Orthodoxy, which stands to its right, Conservative Judaism teaches that Halakhah can be interpreted flexibly to fit new conditions (cf. Grossman, 2008: 82; Gordis, 2003: 334; Karesh and Hurvitz, 2006: 99).

Conservative rabbis are expected to act in accordance with the standards of the movement which have been approved by the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards (CJLS), and the Rabbinical Assembly. At present, there are four such standards: rabbis and cantors are prohibited from officiating at intermarriages in any way; rabbis may not perform remarriages if the previous partner is alive without an acceptable get (‘Jewish divorce’) or haf’kaat kidushin (‘annulment’); Jewish lineage is determined by matrilineal descent only; and conversions to Judaism require mikvah immersion for females and both brit milah (‘circumcision’) and mikvah immersion for males. A Conservative rabbi who deliberately violates these standards may be forced to resign or be expelled by the Rabbinical Assembly (Karesh and Hurvitz, 2006: 99).

Many American Jews affiliate with Conservative Judaism because they desire the ‘Judaism of the Golden Mean,’ to borrow a term coined by Rabbi Kohut, a satisfactory balance between the two extremes, namely Orthodox and Reform. Conservative Judaism has introduced many innovations in the synagogues, among which are the mixed seating of men and women, recitation of certain prayers in English, and the incorporation of organ music into the service. Additionally, the place of the rabbi and cantor during the service has been altered; in the Conservative synagogues, they are permitted to turn to face the congregation instead of facing forward to the ark as it is practiced in Orthodox synagogues. The Conservative movement has also adopted the bat mitzvah ceremony for girls upon reaching the age of twelve (originally one of Kaplan’s innovations), which became so widespread that nowadays it is practiced in many Reform and Orthodox congregations as well.

←36 | 37→

However, the movement’s stance on the role of its women has been ambivalent since the very beginning. On the one hand, Conservative Judaism for decades dedicated itself to maintaining traditional roles for women in accordance with Halakhah which prescribes separate religious obligations for men and women. On the other hand, it was the first movement which had seriously attempted to adapt Jewish law to find a solution to crucial problems for Jewish women, thereby showing its commitment to change within Halakhic framework. Because of the tension between tradition and modernity that is characteristic of the movement, as Shuly Rubin Schwartz points out, “the role of women in Conservative Judaism is both the most complicated and the most all-encompassing among the Jewish denominations” (2006: 545).

It was in the 1950s and 1960s that the Conservative movement made the first two important decisions enhancing the role of women. In 1955, synagogues were given the option of calling women up for aliyot (to read the Torah) and in 1968 the agunah problem (the ‘chained’ woman) was finally solved by giving rabbis the power to annul a marriage if the husband would not give a religious divorce to his wife. These decisions, however, further widened the gap with contemporary Orthodoxy which refused to authorize both innovative changes (Grossman, 2008: 84–86).

The tumultuous events of the 1960s and early 1970s in the United States, such as the counter-culture generated by the civil rights and anti-war movements, as well as the emerging wave of feminism deeply affected the Conservative movement and contributed to its gradual decline. Many young Jews turned against their parents’ patriarchal, materialistic, culturally repressive, and unspiritual synagogues. It has to be noted that many of the early activists of Jewish feminism came from Conservative homes, where their religious life was often restricted by gender distinctions and the male domination in the arena of public Jewish worship and synagogue ritual.

However, Conservative Judaism was determined to undergo some fundamental changes in order to counteract the decline and the negative self-image, and connected its future to feminism and to what was to be called later egalitarianism. The first indication of feminism’s impact on Conservative policy occurred in 1973, when the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards gave rabbis the option of counting women in the minyan (‘the ten-person quorum necessary for communal prayer’). The greatest change occurred in 1983 when the committee finally approved of the Conservative ordination of women and Amy Eilberg became the first Conservative woman rabbi in 1985 (cf. Grossman, 2008: 86–88; Goldman, 2008: 109; Schwartz, 2006: 549–551).

Since 1985, Conservative women rabbis have begun to exert an impact on the movement and the decisions of the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards. Although women serve as rabbis in only 4 percent of Conservative synagogues in the United States, they have succeeded in establishing new ceremonies, rituals and prayers for women marking important events in their lives. Thanks to partial or full equality in religious services in Conservative synagogues, more and more ←37 | 38→Jewish women have begun to don religious clothes such as tallit, tefillin or kippot (skullcaps), similarly to Jewish men (cf. Schwartz, 1998: 278).

All in all, the Conservative movement made great progress during the twentieth century by displaying its strong commitment both to Jewish law and to gender equality. The movement’s attention to issues such as the religious education of Jewish girls supported by Rabbi Salomon Schechter since 1902, the status of the agunah (‘deserted wife,’ or ‘chained woman’), equal participation of women in ritual, and the ordination of women does confirm its willingness to change and expand the position and role of Jewish women within the halakhic framework. Nevertheless, one must not forget that egalitarianism has not been universally embraced by the movement and there are still certain Jewish legal issues which have not been resolved, the most important being the inadmissibility of women as witnesses in Jewish legal matters and the issue of intermarriage. The future will show whether and how the Conservative movement will resolve the above-mentioned problems as well as cope with the persistent decline in membership. It has to be emphasized, though, that one serious and controversial issue facing the Conservative movement since the 1970s, namely the religious status of homosexuals, was finally resolved at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Since 2007 LGBT students have been admitted to the Jewish Theological Seminary of America (JTS) in New York, and since 2012 homosexual marriages have been accepted by the Conservative movement (“Stances of Faiths on LGBTQ Issues: Conservative Judaism”).

1.2.3 Women in Reconstructionist Judaism

Unlike Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox Judaism, Reconstructionist Judaism is an American-born Jewish movement which was initiated in the early decades of the twentieth century, and has experienced significant growth since the 1970s when it broke away from the Conservative Movement, constituting a separate and distinct denomination. Following the teachings and writings of Rabbi Mordecai M. Kaplan, who is regarded as the father of Reconstructionist Judaism, Reconstructionists define Judaism not only as a static, unchanging religious system, but as the evolving religious civilization of the Jewish people, complete with its own language, music, art, and culture (Kaplan, 2001: 178). Based on that definition, Reconstructionists “seek to understand the historical contexts in which Jewish beliefs and practices emerged and changed, and to adapt and reinvigorate those ideas and practices in the lives of contemporary Jews” (Staub, 2005: 4: 2247). It was this conviction that enabled Kaplan to advocate changes and make innovations in women’s roles in Jewish life as well as embrace philosophies, such as democracy, which had previously been overlooked in the Jewish tradition.

Theologically, Reconstructionism explains that Judaism grew out of the social and historical experiences of the Jewish people, emphasizing the evolving nature of Judaism, as Jews adapt its rituals and customs to their own lives in the modern world. It does not insist upon a belief in a supernatural God, divine intervention, ←38 | 39→Jews as the Chosen People,¹⁵ the Messiah, transcendent revelation, or the binding nature of any of its tenets (Unterman, 1997: 165–166). Moreover, it values personal autonomy and the individual’s right to choose, over Jewish law and theology.

Reconstructionist Judaism has been an egalitarian tradition from the start thanks to Rabbi Kaplan’s loyal commitment to democratic principles and the full equality of women in Judaism. The Society for the Advancement of Judaism (SAJ), a synagogue founded in 1922 by Kaplan, did guarantee mixed seating for men and women in worship services from the outset. In addition to introducing mixed seating into his congregation, Jewish women were included in the minyan and allowed to come up to the Torah for aliyot as early as the mid-1940s, but it was not until the late 1960s that major changes were introduced in the Reconstructionist Movement. Jewish women themselves, under the influence of second-wave feminism, began to demand changes, finding Reconstructionism a movement conducive to their viewpoints. The greatest change occurred in 1974 when Sandy Eisenberg Sasso became the first woman ordained from the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, only two years after the ordination of the first woman rabbi ever in the history of American Judaism. The next important change took place in 1980 when the movement finally resolved the agunah issue which had turned out to be so problematic for the Conservative and Orthodox movements. It did so by creating egalitarian marriage documents and by declaring that either spouse could initiate divorce on the grounds that Halakhah was considered not binding. In this way, Jewish women would no longer be dependent on their husbands to grant them a divorce (Schwartz, 2006: 553).

Reconstructionist Judaism is truly egalitarian with respect to gender roles, ordaining not only women but also members of marginal groups such as gays and lesbians, and including them in every aspect of Jewish life. In 2015 the Reconstructionist Movement introduced another ground-breaking change, namely it allowed the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College to accept rabbinical students in interfaith relationships, making Reconstructionism the first branch of Judaism to officially approve of rabbis in relationships with non-Jews (Hostein, 2015).

Inspired by Kaplan’s views and unencumbered by a dedication to Halakhah, Reconstructionist Judaism has been at the forefront of developing creative rituals that give voice to Jewish women’s experiences. Most of the focus was on women’s life-cycle events, previously not celebrated religiously, such as childbirth, heterosexual weddings and lesbian commitment ceremonies, divorces, conversions, and the onset of menarche and menopause. The Reconstructionist women rabbis have also contributed to the promotion of gender-neutral language about God and to the creation of new liturgical forms that agree with feminist ideas. Moreover, in 1993, ←39 | 40→Reconstructionist rabbis passed a resolution recognizing and supporting rabbis’ participation in the same-gender commitment ceremonies. As far as intermarriage is concerned, it is estimated that about half of Reconstructionist rabbis will officiate at an intermarriage, but they are free not to do so (cf. Alpert, 1998: 1134; Schwartz, 2006: 553; Karesh and Hurvitz, 2006: 418).

Although statistically, Reconstructionist Judaism is the smallest Jewish denomination in the United States, comprising approximately 1 percent of American Jews (“A Portrait of Jewish Americans,” 2013: 48), its ideas were so widespread that they profoundly influenced the religious views of many Conservative rabbis in the 1950s and 1960s. Moreover, it pioneered many innovations that other denominations have adopted, including the introduction of the first bat mitzvah ceremony in Jewish history in 1922. Most importantly, however, the movement has played a significant role in creating an environment of equality for women in Judaism. Although Reconstructionism and its philosophy have undergone numerous changes since Kaplan’s death in 1982, women’s equality still remains its core principle and its distinctive feature.

1.2.4 Women in Orthodox Judaism

Orthodoxy – derived from the Greek term orth doxa, meaning ‘right doctrine’ – is a Jewish religious movement that advocates the full observance of Halakhah, interpreted in traditional ways, and is critical of modernity and its values. Because of this, Orthodox Judaism has resisted modern pressures to modify its observance and has preserved such practices as daily worship, kashrut, traditional prayers and ceremonies, regular and intensive study of the Torah, and separation of men and women in the synagogue. It also commands strict observance of the Sabbath and religious festivals and does not permit instrumental music during communal services (“Orthodox Judaism”).

In its adherence to the laws, customs, social patterns, and beliefs of the ancestors, Orthodoxy portrays itself as the faithful continuation of traditional Jewish society. In many ways, however, Orthodoxy should be regarded as a movement of the modern era, whose birth occurred at the end of the eighteenth century, as a direct reaction to the challenges presented by Reform Judaism, secularization, and assimilation in Western and Central Europe. The term was first used in a Jewish context in 1795 and today is applied to those Jews who do not share the modernist beliefs of Conservative or Reform Judaism (Unterman, 1997: 150–151).

Orthodox theology accepts the literal interpretation of traditional doctrines, such as the election of Israel, divine providence, reward and punishment in the world-to-come, and the future coming of the Messiah. The belief system of Orthodox Judaism rests on the idea that Torah in its entirety was handed down from God to Moses at Mount Sinai. The majority of Jews who consider themselves Orthodox accept divine source of the Written Law (the Torah) and the Oral Law (codified in the Mishna and interpreted in the Talmud), and their eternal, unchanging nature. Perceiving the law as a divine revelation and a direct expression of God’s will, ←40 | 41→Orthodox Judaism refuses to narrow down the Halakhah to historical, sociological, or psychological foundations. Unlike Conservative Judaism, Orthodoxy does not accept halakhic rulings based on such considerations (cf. Brown, 2003: 311; Karesh and Hurvitz, 2006: 369).

The history of Orthodox Judaism begins with a rabbi named Hatam Sofer (1762–1839), the unquestioned leader of the Orthodox Jewish community of Hungary. He resisted the modern world through a program of neo-traditionalism that vehemently opposed any change or reform on the grounds that “The new is forbidden by the Torah,” a motto that later became the banner of radical Orthodoxy. He believed so strongly in the traditional lifestyle that he encouraged a complete separation from modernity, allowing the minimum contact necessary for work or survival. Neo-traditionalists also rejected Enlightenment, Emancipation and the involvement of Jews in western society and culture. In comparison with Hungarian extremism, German Orthodoxy’s response to modernity was noticeably moderate. Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch (1808–1888) developed the Neo-Orthodoxy Movement from the viewpoint that traditional Judaism could be compatible with the modern world and with emancipation (see Section 1.2.4.2 in this chapter). In Eastern Europe, in turn, the representatives of Orthodox Jewry, the Hasidim and Mitnagdim, developed a unique Orthodox response to modernity and secular Jewish ideologies (see Section 1.2.4.1 in this chapter). What was observed in Eastern Europe was a discernible movement towards increased (mystical, spiritual) piety and religious conservatism among both Hasidim and Mitnagdim and within the major rabbinical academies, most of which prohibited the study of secular subjects.

From the last decades of the nineteenth century until the Holocaust, Orthodox Judaism both in Eastern and Western Europe underwent a worsening crisis which was caused by the fact that increasing numbers of young Jews abandoned religion for a secular way of life. By doing so, they rejected an anachronistic way of life offered by Orthodoxy, which they viewed as an outdated and unnecessary remnant of the past. The rapid deterioration in the overall condition of Orthodoxy resulted in a trauma that had an impact on Orthodox Judaism for many decades. It was also during this time that many Orthodox European Jews planned to emigrate, either to the land of Israel or the United States. European Haredi leaders did discourage emigration to the land of Israel and the United States, a country in which the full observance of the Halakhah was rare and difficult in their opinion. However, the objection was not too harsh, and as Benjamin Brown points out, “practically, Orthodox Jews’ immigration to these countries continued nonetheless, thus preparing the infrastructure for their becoming future religious centers” (2003: 317).

In fact, Orthodox Jews had already started emigrating to the United States in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, many of them from Eastern Europe.¹⁶ Although most of the immigrants were not concerned about religious ←41 | 42→matters as much as they were about the difficulties of everyday life, Orthodox Jews managed to establish new communities, synagogues, yeshivot, and even genuine Hasidic courts in the New World. Moreover, the Hasidic rebbes, who fled from Eastern Europe to the United States in the 1940s, together with some distinguished Talmudic and Halakhic sages, were able to reverse the tendency of decline that was characteristic of Orthodoxy until World War II, resulting in its unprecedented thriving and growth decades later (Brown, 2003: 317–318; Nadler, 2008: 97–98).

The survey of U.S. Jews conducted by Pew Research Center in 2013 finds that even though Orthodox Jews constitute the smallest of the three major denominational movements with only 10 percent of all American Jewish population,¹⁷ they are much younger, on average, and tend to have much larger families than the overall Jewish population. In the past, high fertility rate in the American Orthodox community was at least partially balanced by a low retention rate. The 2013 Pew Survey of U.S. Jewry demonstrates – as opposed to previous studies, for example the 1990 and 2000–2001 National Jewish Population Surveys (NJPS) – that the Orthodox unequivocally have the highest retention rate of all Jewish denominations nowadays. The survey also shows that the fall-off from Orthodoxy appears to be declining at a much slower rate than in other branches of Judaism, and is significantly lower among younger than older people (“A Portrait of Jewish Americans,” 2013: 10, 48, 51). According to the researchers, this suggests that “unless there is a dramatic reverse in the current trends, […] Orthodoxy’s place among the active and strongly connected American Jewish population will only expand in the coming decades” (Ferziger, 2015: Introduction).

←42 | 43→

By contrast, population surveys of American Jews conducted shortly after World War II and throughout the 1960s and 1970s demonstrated that in the group of Orthodox Jews, higher percentages of Orthodox Jews were located in the 18–34-year-old group than in middle-age groupings; but the highest percentage of Orthodox Jewish population in any age category was over 65. Moreover, those surveys repeatedly found that younger Jews from Orthodox homes intended to abandon an Orthodox identification and defect to more liberal Jewish denominations. According to sociologists and historians, the findings of these surveys could be interpreted as a source of future weakness for Orthodoxy rather than its future strength (cf. Wertheimer, 1989: 71–74, 80–82; Shapiro, 1995: 243; Sarna, 2001). For example, Wertheimer claimed that Orthodoxy, even though maintaining its attractiveness to its youth, would have to confront continuous depletion of its members through the death of its older population, a group that was considerably more numerous than its youth population. Thus, his conclusion regarding American Orthodox Jews’ future was rather pessimistic: “despite higher birth rates, Jews who identify as Orthodox are not likely to increase in the near future” (1989: 81).

Although this assessment proved incorrect in the long term, it accurately described the more visible trend in the American Orthodox life at that time. This negative population trend among Orthodox Jews has started to change gradually since the last decades of the twentieth century.¹⁸ Thanks to the revival of Orthodoxy, the movement achieved significant credibility in the eyes of both non-Orthodox Jews and non-Jews, as well as dynamism. Orthodoxy became more attractive to the younger generation of American Jews due to the introduction of numerous programs, whose major aim was to inculcate a strong sense of allegiance among its youth. As a result, nowadays Orthodox youth constitute the most numerous age group among Orthodox Jews, and its numbers are significantly higher than those of their more liberal counterparts. The programs introduced by Orthodoxy have been so successful that they continue to be increasingly imitated by the other denominations that also wish to attract and retain their younger Jews (Wertheimer, 1989: 108–113; Ferziger, 2015: Introduction).

According to American Jewish sociologists and historians, there are at least two major factors that account for Orthodoxy’s impressive revival and success in the last decades of the twentieth and early decades of the twenty-first centuries. They claim that Orthodox ultimate success has been primarily attributed ←43 | 44→to its formal and informal educational institutions which bear full responsibility for formal education and socialization of the young people in the Orthodox community. Equally important, all-day religious schools provide an environment in which a strong attachment to the Orthodox group is built by advising proper standards of religious behavior and disseminating strong ideological indoctrination among their young students. Orthodox synagogues, in turn, provide separate religious services as well as a range of social, educational, and recreational programs in an Orthodox environment for the youth outside of school. In addition, Orthodox groups have invested heavily in vacation resorts and summer camps, which provide an all-embracing Orthodox experience during vacation months. Finally, it has become the norm for Orthodox teenagers to spend some time in Israel, again in an Orthodox ambience (Wertheimer, 1989: 73, 114–115; cf. Sarna, 2004: 289–291, 326–329).

A second factor that contributed to the revitalization of Orthodoxy in the second half of the twentieth century was the participation of Orthodox Jews in the post-war economic boom that brought exceptional wealth to Americans in general. A large number of Orthodox Jews, similarly to Jews from other denominations, acquired college and graduate degrees and entered the professions, fully taking advantage of American life while adhering to traditional observance. An important consequence of this newly acquired wealth has been the ability of Orthodox Jews to isolate themselves more effectively from the larger American Jewish community. Living in separate communities with their own synagogues, day schools, recreational programs, kosher restaurants, and summer camps, has helped, as Jack Wertheimer remarks “to foster an élan among Orthodox Jews and a belief, particularly conveyed to the young, that the Orthodox community constitutes the saving remnant of American Judaism” (1989: 116).

Orthodox Judaism is far from homogeneous, as can be seen not only in religious differences but also in the complex of institutions that organize social and political life within Orthodoxy. In the contemporary world, Orthodox Judaism is divided into two main subgroups, namely ‘Ultra-Orthodox,’ and ‘Modern Orthodox.’ In general, Orthodox Jews are defined by a more traditional and strict observance of Halakhah than Reform and Conservative Jews. ‘Ultra-Orthodox Jews,’ a group that comprises but is not limited to Hasidic Jews, tend to view their adherence to the commandments included in the Torah as largely incompatible with secular society. As a result, they are “self-segregated and relatively disconnected from the rest of the Jewish community,” as characterized by Steven Cohen, Jacob Ukeles, and Ron Miller (2012: 22). The Modern Orthodox movement, on the other hand, seeks to follow traditional Jewish law while simultaneously maintaining a relationship with modern society. As Modern Orthodox Rabbi Saul J. Berman explains, “[t];his approach does not deny that there are areas of powerful inconsistency and conflict between Torah and modern culture that need to be filtered out in order to preserve the integrity of Halakha” (2001). The three sections below are devoted to a more detailed discussion of the two subgroups within American Orthodox Judaism as well as the problematic position of Jewish women in this branch of Judaism.

←44 | 45→

1.2.4.1 ‘Ultra-Orthodox’ Judaism ¹⁹

The ‘Ultra-Orthodox’ or ‘Haredim’ (‘Men of Awe,’ ‘the Fearful,’ ‘God-fearers,’ ‘Tremblers’) are those separatist, fervently observant Jews who oppose acculturation and who adhere to a restorative Eastern European Jewish ideology (Lange, 2002: 69–70). They hew to the strictest interpretations of Halakhah, in particular those that prohibit compromises with modern culture and secular studies. Ultra-Orthodox Jews minimize social contact and intellectual engagement with those outside their community, except in cases of economic necessity. Ultra-Orthodox Jews constitute only a minority of contemporary American Jewry. Jews represent about 2 percent of the total U.S. population; about 12 percent of American Jews are Orthodox; and of that group, about two thirds are Haredi (“A Portrait of Jewish Americans,” 2013: 48).

Ultra-Orthodox Jews reject the values of modernity – they perceive the secular world as full of corrupting influences, and because of this worldview, they live in insular communities, often speaking only Yiddish, and do not allow their children to attend universities since “secular education represents the most dangerous of these outside influences” (Rubel, 2010: 12). They believe that all of life should ideally be dedicated solely to the Torah in daily life, practice, study, and prayer. Both American Orthodoxy in the United States and Haredi Orthodoxy in Israel established yeshivot, but unlike Israeli kollelim, American yeshivot attracted relatively few young men who decided to pursue full-time yeshiva-studies after marriage. This fact, as some American Jewish scholars claim, might be one of the reasons why American Ultra-Orthodox Judaism remained relatively open to the surrounding society (Brown, 2003: 320–322, Sarna, 2004: 300–304).

Ultra-Orthodoxy²⁰ is a broad term that includes both Hasidic and non-Hasidic groups, that is Mitnagdim (the opponents of the Hasidim), who to outsiders, are often seen as a monolithic group of religious Jews, easily identifiable in the streets by the men’s black coats and hats (hence their colloquial nickname ‘black hats’) and always a beard (as prescribed in the Torah). The women, in turn, are distinguishable from other Jewish women by their modest dress and head coverings which are in accordance with the laws of tzniut (laws concerning modesty, both in dress and behavior for women as well as general conduct between the sexes) ←45 | 46→(Nadler, 2011: 344). Hasidism,²¹ which was started in south-eastern Poland in the middle of the eighteenth century by the charismatic teacher known as the Baal Shem Tov, is a populist Jewish religious movement that emphasizes mysticism and claims that “simple faith, inward passion and fervent prayer [are] as important as Talmudic scholarship” (Harris, 1985: 49). Hasidism challenged not only the authority of the rabbis, but their whole system of values, and it is therefore not surprising that its rapidly-growing popularity was met by resistance on the part of the established Jewish communities and their rabbis, that is the Mitnagdim (‘opponents’). As Nadler explains, the Mitnagdim believed that:

the Hasidim’s emphasis on […] the joyful worship of God through ecstatic prayer, song, dance, and feasting, all performed in the [presence] of the [Hasidic] rebbes, […] to whom are attributed great, even supernatural powers to intercede with God […], was a threat to traditional rabbinic Judaism, which placed Torah study at the pinnacle of the hierarchy of religious values, so they excommunicated the Hasidim and banned the rebbes’ courts. (2008: 97)

Despite this opposition, Hasidism spread very rapidly throughout Eastern Europe during the last half of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, attracting the masses of the simple, uneducated Jews, largely because it popularized optimistic and joyful doctrines of Jewish mysticism and its festive approach to religious life. Hasidic courts with charismatic Hasidic masters (known as tzaddikim, or rebbes), were established all across Eastern Europe, serving as community centers where the Hasidim gathered during farbrengens (ritual gatherings), to worship and celebrate in the presence of their revered masters. Therefore, the success of Hasidism clearly showed that it was possible to question and even overthrow the traditional values and still celebrate the immanence of God and his closeness (cf. Lange, 2002: 68; Nadler, 2008: 97).

Before World War II, Hasidism was concentrated almost exclusively in Eastern Europe with only a few thousand Hasidim living in New York City and Jerusalem. Because of the fact that Hasidic culture was thriving in Eastern Europe, and most Hasidic rebbes strongly discouraged their followers from emigrating to “[…] the treyf medinah [unkosher land], America, where Jews might survive but Judaism would die, or to Israel, the Zionist heresy established by unbelievers who wanted to reinvent Jews and Judaism” (Heilman, 1995: xiii), the overwhelming majority of Hasidim did not join the waves of Jewish immigration to North America at ←46 | 47→the beginning of the twentieth century. For these reasons, World War II and the Holocaust almost entirely destroyed Hasidic communities, along with more than 90 percent of their members. In addition to the physical assault, the Nazi occupation of Eastern Europe eradicated the great Orthodox centers, yeshivot, Hasidic rebbe-courts, which in turn led, with few exceptions, to the nearly irreversible destruction of Orthodoxy’s spiritual leadership.

A small fraction of Eastern Europe’s Hasidim who survived the Holocaust emigrated to the United States, where they managed to set up new roots and discover new strategies for their survival in the ‘treyf country.’ One of such crucial strategies was the reinvention of the Hasidic past, which used to be treated marginally in their culture. They believed that by rekindling the past, they would succeed in establishing even larger and stronger Hasidic communities than those that had existed before the Holocaust. Indeed, as Jonathan Sarna puts it, the goals of “[…] most of the reconstructed Hasidic enclave communities of the post-war period, were to resist acculturation, to distinguish themselves from the American mainstream, and to perpetuate their commitment to their own sacred path” (2004: 297) (cf. Heilman, 1995: xiii; Levine: 2011: 217–218).

In fact, after World War II, Ultra-Orthodoxy, surprisingly, managed to rebuild and reconstruct itself by establishing communities not only in the United States and Israel, but also in Belgium, Canada, Britain, and France. These Ultra-Orthodox communities have experienced tremendous population growth and have become a significant (though minority) force, particularly in post-war American Jewry, which was not anticipated by the large majority of Jewish historians and sociologists who had predicted its inevitable decline. Brooklyn, New York, with its neighborhoods such as Borough Park, Williamsburg, and Crown Heights, has become home to the major Hasidic communities in North America. Although it is difficult to ascertain precisely the population numbers of Hasidim as a whole and of specific sects – due to the fact that Hasidim are extremely suspicious of any surveys and censuses – it is generally estimated that there are today between 200,000 and 250,000 Hasidic Jews in the United States, the large majority residing in Brooklyn (Nadler, 2008: 106; Levine, 2011: 217). Moreover, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, they are the fastest growing sector of the Jewish community world-wide as a result of high fertility rates, the young age of Hasidic marriages, and low attrition rates (cf. Brown, 2003: 319; Nadler, 2011: 345).

The arrival of the sixth Lubavitcher rebbe, Rabbi Joseph I. Schneerson (1880–1950) in New York in 1940 marked the rebirth of Hasidism in the New World. There are two characteristic features which distinguish the Lubavitcher Hasidism from the other Hasidic sects. The first is its unusual combination of radical mysticism with intense intellectualism, hence the acronym for the movement: Chabad, which stands for Hokhmah, Binah, Daat (Hebrew for ‘wisdom,’ ‘understanding,’ and ‘knowledge’). The other distinction of Chabad Hasidism is its openness, evangelism and commitment to spreading Hasidic doctrine to non-Hasidic Jews all over the world irrespective of their level of religious observance. It was their late rebbe, Rabbi Menahem Mendel Schneerson who emphasized outreach to young, liberal, ←47 | 48→secular Jews (highly unusual practice among Hasidic sects) in order to help them to learn about Judaism and ideally become more religiously observant. Due to his unstinting efforts, he managed to turn the Lubavitcher Hasidism into an influential force in the world of Jewish Orthodoxy by recruiting ba’alei teshuvah (returnees to Orthodox Judaism) into the movement. Moreover, he established many Chabad centers, both in the United States and abroad and initiated many programs of humanitarian aid and social services that reached beyond the Jewish community (cf. Levine, 2011: 217; Nadler, 2008: 99–100; “Lubavitch Hasidism,” 2009).

On the other hand, the Lubavitchers’ tremendous success in the religious proselytizing campaign and its apparent engagement with modernity by using contemporary media devices for their evangelical mission have posed many religious and political challenges to the American Jewish establishment. Moreover, the Lubavitchers have also become the source of significant tensions with America’s more conservative Hasidic communities, especially the largest and most religiously extreme sect, Satmar.

The Satmar Hasidism, which was started in North America by Rebbe Yoel Moshe Teitelbaum (1888–1979) in 1947, differs radically from the Lubavitchers. First of all, as Allan Nadler points out, “Satmar remains the most segregationist and ultra-conservative of Hasidic sects, having remained hermetically sealed from all aspects of modern society other than those necessary for financial support” (2008: 101). Secondly, they tend to avoid social contact with non-Hasidim, typically using Yiddish as their first language. Although many Lubavitchers are fluent in Yiddish, they have chosen English as their language of communication in North America. Additionally, Lubavitchers are strongly Zionist, whereas Satmars display an open hostility to Zionism (Levine, 2011: 218).

Satmar Hasidim have enjoyed tremendous population growth since arriving in North America, which is attributable not only to a high birth rate and relatively low attrition, factors characteristic of all Hasidic sects, but also to “[Rebbe] Teitelbaum’s personal charisma, […], and strong survivalist instincts in the face of the most tumultuous and tragic era of Hasidism’s history” (Nadler, 2008: 100). Apart from his energy and talent for leadership, the key to Teitelbaum’s success lay in his fierce resistance to any innovations in the traditional way of life of his Hasidim. The Satmar rebbe succeeded in recreating in America an enormous amount of the Hasidic old world that the Nazis had attempted to destroy, that is a Satmar fervent religious community with its own synagogue, the houses of study and worship, mikvot (ritual baths) for women, its own strict interpretation of the Jewish dietary laws, and most conspicuously of all, its distinctive style of Orthodox dress (Mintz, 1994: 30–31). In Jonathan Sarna’s words, “it was an act of audacious spiritual revenge that simultaneously paid homage to those who had perished and proclaimed victory over those who had murdered them” (2004: 297).²²

←48 | 49→

1.2.4.2 ‘Modern Orthodox’ Judaism

Modern Orthodoxy is a movement within Orthodox Judaism that emphasizes the compatibility between traditional Judaism and modern life. Modern Orthodox Jews, similarly to the Haredim, also believe that one must adhere scrupulously to traditional Jewish law, but unlike the Haredim, their interpretation of Halakhah and Jewish customs, is more flexible. Neither do they believe that participation in the modern world and observance of Jewish law are mutually exclusive.

The founder and first leader of the new movement was a German rabbi, Samson Raphael Hirsch (1808–1888) who proposed the idea of Torah in Derekh Eretz (‘Torah with the way of the land’ or ‘Torah with worldly culture’) as its central philosophy. Thus, he advocated a new style of Jewish living that combined full observance of Halakhah in the home and synagogue, with full participation in the modern economic and cultural life of the wider society. It was such a fruitful concept that the Neo-Orthodox movement (the ideological forerunner of Modern Orthodoxy) became a dynamic, successful movement first in Germany, and then, in the twentieth century, in the United States and in Israel.

Prior to World War II, Modern Orthodoxy represented a dominant voice in Orthodox circles in the United States. It developed mainly as a reaction to the Orthodoxy of the Yiddish-speaking immigrant generation. A key dividing line between ‘old immigrant’ and ‘modern American’ Orthodoxy was the use of the English language in sermons and publications by the latter. After World War II, a ‘new Modern Orthodoxy,’ in many ways similar to its Israeli counterpart, emerged in the United States. (cf. Brown, 2003: 331; Robinson, 2011: 343). Modern Orthodoxy, however, was overwhelmed and challenged by an inundation of mostly Ultra-Orthodox rabbis who, having watched the devastation of European Jewish life during World War II, were determined to rebuild it in America. As Jonathan Sarna puts it, “[w];ith the destruction of European centers of Jewry, some felt that they could take no chances with modernity; the specter of further losses to the Jewish faith brought on by assimilation overwhelmed them” (2004: 306).²³ Jack Wertheimer claims in his influential work A People Divided: Judaism in Contemporary America (1993) that the movement lost some of its dominance in the latter part of the twentieth century, as many mainstream Orthodox Jews became more traditional. Generally; what has been observed within Orthodox Judaism since the 1970s is a move towards greater exactitude in Halakhic observance, often ←49 | 50→characterized as a ‘shift to the right.’ Many Modern Orthodox Jews today prefer the term ‘Centrist Orthodoxy,’ introduced by Rabbi Norman Lamm, to show that they have become stricter in their observance, moving towards the right on the spectrum of Jewish groups and farther away from liberal forms of Judaism.

A major difference between the Modern Orthodox and Ultra-Orthodox Jews lies in their attitude towards secular education and engagement with contemporary society as a whole. Whereas Ultra-Orthodox Jews seek to restrict secular education to the minimum possible under the law, even at the cost of reducing their children’s economic prospects, Modern Orthodox Jews perceive secular studies in general, and higher education in particular to be highly beneficial with regard to making a living in contemporary society, as well as to some extent, broadening and enriching the Torah study. As far as secular culture is concerned, Ultra-Orthodox Jews seek to minimize formal contact with non-Orthodox and secular Jews; they are also reluctant to grant non-Orthodox religious leaders or organizations any legal recognition. Modern Orthodox Jews disagree on this issue, namely some espouse organizational separation from non-Orthodox Jews, while others see positive results in Orthodox engagement with non-Orthodox organizations (cf. Robinson, 2011: 343; Sarna, 2004: 304–306).

1.2.4.3 Problematic Position of Women in Orthodox Judaism

The strict approach to Halakhah differentiates Orthodoxy sharply from more liberal strands of Judaism when it comes to the place and role of women in the synagogue and the Jewish community. Orthodox Judaism is the only denomination that continues to uphold the norms of separate seating for men and women with the presence of a mechitzah (a formal partition between the sexes) during services in the synagogues, and rabbinic ordination for Orthodox Jewish women is unlikely to be approved by the Orthodox authorities in the foreseeable future. Both Modern and Ultra-Orthodox Judaism seem to share the same attitude towards the Jewish woman’s status in family and society. The stance of Modern Orthodoxy on the position of Jewish women, despite its advocacy of a full engagement with modern western culture, is in accordance with the Halakhah, similarly to Ultra-Orthodoxy’s viewpoint. The changes that Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, the forefather of Modern Orthodoxy, actively promoted, that is a possibility for Jews to live in two worlds: the secular, public world and the sacred, private Jewish world did not affect the lives of Orthodox Jewish women. On the contrary, as Alexandra Martin observes, “Hirsch’s theoretical framework in particular, and the Jewish enlightenment in general, left traditional female roles untouched” (2004: 238).

It is worth emphasizing, however, that there have been attempts made within Modern Orthodoxy recently, which might have initiated important changes for Orthodox Jewish women. Firstly, Modern Orthodoxy, unlike Haredi Orthodoxy, has begun experimenting with new possibilities within the bounds of Jewish law for enhancing women’s religious expression. As Lawrence Grossman explains, “these have taken the form of women’s prayer groups, women reading the Scroll ←50 | 51→of Esther for the congregation on Purim, women as presidents of synagogues, and even calling women up to the Torah for aliyot” (2005: 97). Although such practices are not universally accepted in Modern Orthodoxy, they still indicate a willingness on the part of some sections within Modern Orthodox leadership to consider and introduce certain changes affecting and improving the position of Orthodox women. Secondly, in 1997 a modernist national organization called Edah with the motto ‘The Courage to Be Modern and Orthodox’ (“EDAH: Mission Statement”) articulated its definite stance on the position of women, among other things, affirming the equality of women in Judaism while preserving the Halakhic process. However, the demise of Edah in 2006 hindered those momentous changes for Orthodox Jewish women and demonstrated the organizational weakness of ideological Modern Orthodoxy which had been led by Rabbi Berman, a strong supporter of feminist Orthodoxy and fuller women’s rights within Orthodox Judaism (Robinson, 2011: 344).

Nevertheless, what has succeeded in influencing certain sectors of the entire American Orthodox community in recent decades is Jewish feminism, which has left its visible, creative, and permanent mark on it (see also Section 1.3.3 in this chapter). One area which has seen an unprecedented expansion is the area of female education in Orthodox Judaism. Even the most traditional of Orthodox Jews have realized that the new circumstances of life in secularized America necessitated that girls and young women should receive a more extensive education in comparison with their mothers’ and grandmothers’. This understanding has inspired the creation of comprehensive Orthodox school systems for girls, which have produced some outstanding Orthodox female educators and scholars. The first religiously oriented schools for Jewish girls from Orthodox families were established in 1918 in Eastern Europe under the leadership of Sarah Schenirer. Although the Yaakov school network that Schenirer founded placed an emphasis on modesty and humility more than rigorous study, it set a precedent for female education in Orthodox Judaism and was transplanted to America in 1937, where it encountered favorable circumstances for its full development in Brooklyn’s hospitable Orthodox sections.

The Bais Yaakov schools offered Orthodox Jewish girls in the United States an education both on elementary and secondary levels as well as in the seminary, having a curriculum that adhered rigorously to the Old-World ways, and underestimated consciously the importance of general secular studies. Moreover, another goal of the Bais Yaakov schools, comparable to the one of yeshivot for boys and men, was to socialize their female students against the perceived evils of general society. To achieve that goal, Bais Yaakov women, similarly to their male counterparts, were actively dissuaded from entering higher education in the secular world after achieving their teacher certification in the girls’ yeshivah. In fact, many Orthodox day schools continue to eliminate the 12th grade to make sure its graduates cannot attend college (cf. Baskin, 2011: 657; Gurock, 1998: 1011–1013). Apart from the Bais Yaakov system which attracted religious girls from the whole Orthodox community, smaller Hasidic girls’ yeshivot – such as the Lubavitcher’s ←51 | 52→Bais Rivkah schools, Satmar’s Bais Rochel schools or the Bobover girls’ schools, renowned for their high educational standards – were founded and controlled by the specific Hasidic sects that established themselves in post-war America.

The secular opportunities that have transformed women’s educational and vocational expectations in the wider American society have had an unquestionable impact on the traditional Orthodox community as well. Seeing increasing female interest and engagement in serious Jewish study, the Orthodox community in the United States agreed to provide Orthodox Jewish women with advanced educational opportunities comparable to those previously granted to Jewish men, which was symbolized by the inauguration of Stern College as a women’s college within Orthodoxy’s Yeshiva University in 1954. The opening of this women’s college not only indicated a meaningful commitment on the part of Orthodox leaders to give Jewish women access to serious Jewish study, but it also provided its female students with abundant opportunities for social engagements with potential marriage mates (Gurock, 1998: 1014). In the early twenty-first century, as Judith R. Baskin notices, “halakhically knowledgeable women [graduates of Stern College and other Orthodox yeshivot] serve as rabbinic assistants in a number of Modern Orthodox synagogues in North America and are trained to act as expert advocates on legal issues connected with women’s status in Israel” (2011: 657).

At the same time Jewish feminists, also graduates of Orthodox schools, Stern College or secular universities, have started challenging the Orthodox community by demanding that they be given a greater role in synagogue life and public ritual within the bounds of Halakhah. One of the most successful efforts of Jewish feminists was to organize Orthodox women’s tefillah (prayer) groups consisting of women who wanted to remain within the Halakhic parameters of the Orthodox community meeting regularly to conduct prayer services for women only, read Torah, and study together. Since their inception in the late 1960s, women’s tefillahs have proliferated and spread throughout North America and nowadays, as Rivka Haut notices, “tefillah groups have become a standard feature of modern Orthodoxy. From Australia to Sweden to Israel, there is hardly a sizable Jewish community that does not have a women’s tefillah group” (2003: 272).

Women’s tefillah groups have been criticized by both mainstream Orthodox rabbis and community leaders in the United States since the 1980s who prohibited integrating all organized women’s prayer groups or any other feminist activities into their synagogues’ life on the grounds that they stemmed from and imitated the secular feminist movement in America which had no serious spiritual or religious foundation. Moreover, in 1985, Orthodox feminists and their supporters, among them Orthodox rabbis, Rabbi Avraham Weiss and Rabbi Saul J. Berman, were further pilloried by a group of professors of Talmud at Orthodoxy’s Yeshiva University, who stated categorically that tefillah prayer groups were “a total and complete deviation from tradition” (Wertheimer, 1993: 133). According to Rabbi Weiss, allowing women’s tefillah groups into the synagogue by the Orthodox rabbinate would be equivalent to acknowledging them as a realistic Halakhic alternative. He maintains that as long as these groups are kept outside the synagogue, ←52 | 53→they can be viewed as a “passing fad, a kind of religious experience that is tolerated more than permitted, satisfying the whims of those attending, but lacking real legitimacy” (qtd. in Lipstadt, 2001: 299–300).

Despite this strong opposition within Orthodoxy, women’s tefillah groups have had a profound impact on American Orthodox women in a number of ways. They have given the Orthodox women an opportunity to learn and practice new synagogue skills as well as to serve as role models for their children. Additionally, some women have taken an advantage of the tefillah prayer groups as a doorway back to the Orthodox community. Women who participate in these prayer groups have spoken of “the stirring spirituality and beauty of the [women’s] prayer services” and the emotional satisfaction and inspiration they find in reading from the Torah and leading the congregation (Aranoff, 1993: 261–265). Members of these davening groups admit that they feel spiritually empowered and engaged in a prayer in a way they have not previously experienced, since ordinarily they are “sitting on the sidelines, unneeded and perhaps unwanted” (Doron, 1993: 258–261). Summing up, according to Ronnie Becher and Bat Sheva Marcus, women’s tefillah groups will continue to remain in the future “a viable alternative for Orthodox women who desire a fuller worship experience without leaving Orthodoxy” (1998: 1505).

The culmination of Jewish Orthodox feminists’ efforts was the foundation of Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance (JOFA) in April 1997, the latest of Orthodox women’s organizations of national status in the United States, whose mission is to “expand the spiritual, ritual, intellectual and political opportunities for women within the framework of halakhah […] by advocating meaningful participation and equality for women in family life, synagogues, houses of learning and Jewish communal organizations to the full extent possible within halakhah” (“JOFA. Who We Are: Mission”). The integration of the values of equality into women’s religious lives, yet remaining within the Orthodox community in the process, has been of paramount importance to the JOFA. Thus, its agenda and approach to fulfill that aim have differed significantly from the ones put forward by Jewish feminists of the more liberal denominations of Judaism. As Blu Greenberg emphasizes, “Orthodox feminists have taken care to conform to the boundaries of Halakhah even as they press for reinterpretation of the law to achieve greater equality and dignity for women. […] Being halakhic, and being an Orthodox feminist means not going outside the Jewish law for a resolution to a problem” (2006: 564).

The JOFA, just like women’s tefillah groups, has faced fierce opposition from the rabbinical world. There are critics who argue that feminism is antithetical to Orthodox Judaism and that the new values of women’s equality threaten both the traditional role of the Jewish woman as wife and mother, and the halakhic authority. Nevertheless, the organization as well as regular women’s tefillah groups have done much to strengthen the significance of the Jewish family and the binding nature of Halakhah, providing Orthodox women with new possibilities and realities in the Orthodox community (cf. Greenberg, 2006: 564; Goldman, 2008: 110).

←53 | 54→

At this point, it is worth mentioning one particular group of Ultra-Orthodox women, namely the Lubavitcher women, who according to some scholars, such as for example Bonnie J. Morris (1991, 1995, 1998), and Naftali Loewenthal (2000) have enjoyed fantastic gains in educational and work opportunities. Despite the fact that in their daily and private life the Lubavitcher women are still obliged to observe scrupulously numerous strict Hasidic rules and regulations based on Halakhah, in public life they have held highly influential positions as educated, multilingual outreach activists, speakers, and writers in the United States since the 1960s. This exceptional position of the Lubavitcher women is mainly attributable to the late Lubavitcher Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, who introduced innovative changes to the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, by agreeing to the foundation of a girls’ school system, an organization for all Lubavitcher women, two community publications by and for women, as well as annual conventions for Lubavitcher women activists all over North America. The Lubavitcher Rebbe also approved of greater Torah study for women, for which he was severely criticized by Satmar and Belzer rebbes of the more conservative Hasidic sects in the United States (Nadler, 2008: 104–105; Morris, 1998: 598–599).

In the 1970s, when American feminists, including Jewish feminists of more liberal denominations began levelling accusations against Orthodox Judaism’s patriarchal perception and treatment of women and their role in the Jewish community, a group of educated Lubavitcher women retaliated immediately. They were prepared to confront feminist criticism and their call for change by speaking and writing passionately in defense of the women’s role and belief system in Hasidic Judaism.

Moreover, the Lubavitcher women have also played an important role as outreach missionaries, or shluchim. Traveling to remote locations, including college and university campuses, the Lubavitcher missionaries undertake campaigns to propagate the Hasidic lifestyle, their values, and Jewish learning among young adult secular Jews. Their endeavors to attract them to the Chabad movement seem to be successful as more and more liberal or non-observant Jews have become their followers in recent decades. A ba’al teshuvah (Hebrew for ‘master of return’ or ‘one who repents’) can be defined as a formerly secular and non-observant Jew who undertakes some type of religious observance, adopts a religious viewpoint, and returns into the religious and theological framework of Judaism. As Jacob Neusner and Alan Avery-Peck remark, “the single most striking trait of the contemporary Judaic religious world, in all its diversity, is the return to Judaism of formerly secular Jews, on the one side, or the movement from less rigorous to more complete observance of the holy way of life, on the other” (2004: 12). In the second half of the twentieth century, there emerged a strong ba’al teshuvah movement within Orthodox Judaism, similar to ‘born again’ Christianity, which has become an important social force contributing to the rapid growth of American Orthodoxy by attracting a large number of young secular/liberal Jews. Seeking a greater sense of spirituality in their lives, they are prepared to return to and fully embrace the Orthodox way of life as well as change their identity to become Orthodox Jews. ←54 | 55→Although it is too early to assess the long-term impact of ba’alei teshuvah on the Orthodox world, one thing is certain: “the very phenomenon of non-observant Jews turning to Orthodoxy has raised the movement’s self-esteem and increased its prestige within the broader American Jewish community,” as Jack Wertheimer points out (1989: 113).²⁴

Many organizations are active in the ba’al teshuvah movement, such as the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, Aish HaTorah and other yeshivot which are dedicated to the training of non-observant Jews in the United States and Israel. It is not uncommon for members of the ba’al teshuvah movement to become religious zealots, intolerant of Jews who identify with more liberal Judaism. Additionally, ba’alei teshuvah frequently encounter problems relating to non-Orthodox family members who sometimes perceive them with suspicion and hostility, being appalled by their fundamentalism. On the other hand, some Orthodox Jews wish to distinguish themselves from ba’alei teshuvah by referring to themselves as F.F.B. – frum (pious) from birth, claiming that the B.T.s are considered to be a disgrace to Orthodoxy (cf. Greenberg, 2006: 556; Karesh and Hurvitz, 2006: 41; Jacobs, 1995: 42–43).

Sociological studies by, for example, Herbert Danzger (1989) seem to indicate that most of the newly Orthodox are ba’alot teshuvah (Jewish women returning to a traditional observant Jewish lifestyle) and that women are more likely than men to turn to a religious way of life. Two other sociological studies: Debra Renee Kaufman’s Rachel’s Daughters: Newly Orthodox Jewish Women (1991) and Lynn Davidman’s Tradition in a Rootless World: Women Turn to Orthodox Judaism (1991), as well as Lis Harris’s ethnography Holy Days: The World of a Hasidic Family (1985) further develop the subject of ba’alot teshuvah. These studies explore how the newly Orthodox Jewish women negotiate within traditional religious institutions ←55 | 56→in order to find a meaningful place for themselves. Additionally, they discuss and analyze the reasons why secular Jewish women are attracted to the closely-knit Hasidic communities in today’s post-modern world. Davidman characterizes ba’alot teshuvah in such a way:

[they] are seeking a sense of self-rootedness in a larger continually existing community with a past and a future. They are also in search of an ordered sense of self on a personal level: they are often troubled by the confusion over gender in the wider society and by the lack of comfortable patterns for forming nuclear families. […] Ba’alot teshuvah find Orthodox Judaism appealing precisely because it offers a conception of femininity in which women’s roles as wives and mothers are honored and seen as central. (1998: 108)

Apart from portraying happy, educated, determined, and fulfilled Hasidic women in their private and public life, these sociological studies also contribute to abating misconceptions about Hasidic practices.

On the whole, life for women within the Hasidic communities can be deeply fulfilling and imbued with an all-embracing sense of meaning both on personal/private and public levels. The Lubavitcher Hasidism is one of very few exceptions among Hasidic sects in the United States, if not the only one, which has provided its women with, at least, partial fulfillment on both levels. As Bonnie J. Morris points out, “[wh]ile other Hasidic sects scorn the Lubavitchers as opportunistic or too willing to compromise on issues of modernity, the Lubavitch movement has enabled Hasidic women to study, advocate, and publish – in short, to gain an American voice” (1998: 599).²⁵

1.2.5 Women in Humanistic Judaism and Jewish Renewal

Contemporary radical alternatives within Judaism range from unrelentingly rationalistic secular movements to various groups of an esoteric, mystical character. Needless to say, there is an underlying difference between these two types of radical alternatives to Judaism. At one extreme, there are rationalists reluctant to ←56 | 57→accept that there is a personal God regulating human affairs. At the other extreme, there are various esoteric movements that consider mainstream religion too apathetic or remote, seeking a more passionate and direct contact with the Divine. Or in the words of Nicholas de Lange, “the former is open and would like to win over all Jews to its views by means of rational argument, whereas the latter turns its back on reason and favors intimacy and mystique” (2002: 80).

The concept ‘secular Judaism’ has two meanings. The first meaning denotes the extensive body of culture and creative work produced by secular Jews over the past 250 years, whereas the second one refers to the section of the Jewish people who do not feel bound by any observance of religious commandments. Despite the fact that ‘secular or cultural Jews’ have chosen to abandon the religious way of life, they have not rejected their Jewish identity or their attachment to the Jewish people. Jewish secularism has its roots in the Haskalah (the Jewish Enlightenment) and Emancipation, the secular nationalism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the democratic revolution of modern times, and the Holocaust experience, all of which have taught secular Jews to value pluralism, ethics, and human responsibility (cf. Lange, 2002: 80; Gordan, 2011: 341).

Humanistic Judaism emerged in Detroit, Michigan, in 1963, as a name for Jewish secularism, with its own ideology, an intellectual underpinning for a secular Jewish identity,²⁶ and an organized structure. Established by Rabbi Sherwin Wine, Humanistic Judaism deliberately avoids theological-religious terms and instead maintains that Judaism is an ethnic culture created by the Jewish people and shaped by the Jewish experience. Jews are defined as those who identify with the history, culture, and future of the Jewish people. Humanistic Judaism’s worldview centers around the autonomous human and not a God figure, as a result of which God-language and worship are regarded as inappropriate to a humanistic style of life. In secular Judaism, as Yaakov Malkin points out the Biblical God is perceived as “a literary figure” and hence [individuals] […] “bear exclusive responsibility for their actions, laws, and moral values.” Moreover, secular humanistic Jews believe in the universality of moral values which guarantee human rights, equality, and personal freedom. Secular Jews see themselves as committed to the struggle against any kind of discrimination, whether it is economic, social, or spiritual one, within their own and in other cultures (2005: 111–112).

The fact that secularism has a long tradition in Jewish life in the United States seems to be confirmed by the results of The Pew Research Center 2013 Survey of U.S. Jews, which suggest that Jewish identity is changing in America, where 22 percent of Jews now describe themselves as having no religion (commonly ←57 | 58→called Jews of no religion, or secular/cultural Jews). Moreover, when asked a question about Jewish identity: ‘What is more important in being Jewish: ancestry/culture or religion?’ 62 percent of all U.S. Jews (regardless of denomination) admit that being Jewish is mainly a matter of ancestry and culture, while just 15 percent say it is mainly a matter of religion (“A Portrait of Jewish Americans,” 2013: 7–10).

Although there is scarce data concerning gender distribution within Humanistic Judaism, the analysis of the documents and resolutions available on the official website of the Society for Humanistic Judaism (SHJ) indicates that this movement is fully committed to egalitarianism with respect to gender and gender identification, Jewish status, and sexual orientation. Humanistic Judaism ordains both men and women as rabbis, and its first rabbi was a woman, Tamara Kolton ordained in 1999, who today however, identifies with the Jewish Renewal and Reform movements (Falick, 2014: 9). The Society for Humanistic Judaism passionately supports full rights for women, including the right to terminate pregnancy in accordance with women’s own ethical standards (“Society for Humanistic Judaism Says Reproductive Choice Is a Fundamental Right,” 1996). Not only does the SHJ approve of intermarriage, but in 2004 it also issued a resolution supporting “the legal recognition of marriage and divorce between adults of the same sex,” affirming “the value of marriage between any two committed adults with the sense of obligations, responsibilities, and consequences thereof” (“Society for Humanistic Judaism Supports Marriage Rights of Same-Sex Couples,” 2004). On the whole, Humanistic Jews believe that gender equality is the cardinal principle which should be the basis of human behavior among all nations around the world, but at the same time they are fully aware that much more progress still needs to be made both in North America and around the world to ensure full equality between men and women (“Society for Humanistic Judaism Supports August 26 as Women’s Equality Day and Condemns Gender Discrimination,” 2013).

Humanistic Judaism holds much in common with Reconstructionist Judaism, with its emphasis on retaining Jewish identity while accepting a scientific worldview and a humanistic ethical outlook. However, Humanistic Judaism is more radical than Reconstructionism in the sense that it departs further from traditional Judaism by developing and performing non-theistic, secular rituals and ceremonies. Indeed, nowadays a large number of secular Jews take part in Jewish cultural activities, such as the celebrations of Jewish holidays as historical and nature festivals, filled with new content and form, or life-cycle events in a secular fashion. (cf. Gordan, 2011: 341; Lange, 2002: 81–82; Malkin, 2005: 107).

At the opposite end of the spectrum there is a plethora of smaller groups that have abandoned the larger, uninspiring, spiritually empty organizations in pursuit of an authentic religious experience turning to various denominations within the Jewish tradition. All of these groups can be subsumed under one movement within contemporary non-Orthodox American Judaism, namely Jewish Renewal Movement which emphasizes intense personal spirituality, mysticism, serious and creative text study, and social justice. This is how the movement is defined by its members themselves:

←58 | 59→

Jewish Renewal is a trans-denominational approach to revitalizing Judaism. We combine the socially progressive values of egalitarianism, the joy of Hasidism, the informed do-it-yourself spirit of the havurah movement, and the accumulated wisdom of centuries of tradition. […] We create innovative, accessible, and welcoming prayer experiences. We shape halacha (Jewish law) into a living way of walking in the world. And we seek to deepen the ongoing, joyful, and fundamental connection, with a God Who connects us all, which is at the heart of Jewish practice. […] (“ALEPH. What is Jewish Renewal? Mission and Vision”)

As Jeffrey K. Salkin notes in his article “New Age Judaisms: Contemporary Expressions of Judaism,” Jewish Renewal emerged in the 1980s and 1990s, “as a result of Judaism’s encounter with the American counter-culture and as a reaction to an American Judaism that had become, in the view of many, stultified and in need of renewal” (2005: 1256). Jewish Renewal can be regarded as a successor to the havurah movement, which promoted small, mostly non-synagogue-based worship and study communities and minyanim (‘alternative communal prayer groups’). The first havurah was founded in Somerville, Massachusetts in 1968, and others were soon established, frequently in university towns. They devised forms of worship and spiritual fellowship with great freedom, and generally with an emphasis on equality of the sexes. So successful was the havurah movement that it was partially adopted by the religious establishment, with Reform, Conservative and Reconstructionist synagogues setting up their own havurot (‘religious fellowship groups’) not only for worship but for study or for social purposes (Lange, 2002: 82–83; Salkin, 2011: 342).

Like Hasidism before it, Jewish Renewal reclaimed the spiritual heritage of the Kabbalah, and indeed Hasidic wisdom itself became a major source of spiritual renewal for this movement.²⁷ Apart from that, Jewish Renewal draws heavily from rabbinic teachings, interests in mysticism, and the healing potential of prayer, combining them with the insights of contemporary feminism, psychology, and ecology. Jewish Renewal also emphasizes an intimate, creative, and participatory involvement of its followers, in which each participant becomes an active worshipper. Therefore, it is not surprising, as Jeffrey K. Salkin remarks that, “Jewish Renewal’s unique worship style embraces the use of ‘New Age’ techniques, such as chant, meditation, and even yoga, as well as new artistic expressions, in its efforts to create a modern intensity in worship” (2011: 342).²⁸

←59 | 60→

The second-wave feminism has had a lasting and significant effect on the whole Jewish spectrum in the United States, from Orthodox to more liberal Jewish denominations, including Jewish Renewal. Indeed, as Dr. Arthur Waskow, director of the Shalom Center affiliated with ALEPH (the umbrella organization for a network of Jewish Renewal communities) puts it, “I can’t imagine Jewish Renewal in the last thirty years without the full involvement of women in Jewish life. […] Jewish Renewal and feminist Judaism are very deeply intertwined” (Friedman, 2006: 798). The receptivity of Jewish Renewal communities to feminist innovation is in harmony with their general willingness to experiment with ritual, liturgy, and style of worship. Since the 1980s, a variety of new rituals have emerged to celebrate turning points in women’s lives. While this effort has by no means been restricted to Jewish Renewal groups, their members have been very active in this area, creating rituals to mark such important events as Rosh Hodesh (the beginning of the new Jewish month), women’s Passover Seders (focusing on the role of women in the Exodus story), the onset of menstruation or menopause, retirement, and so forth. Moreover, many of the gender-conscious liturgical innovations developed by Jewish women in Renewal communities, for example the use of descriptive or neutral language to address the Divine instead of the masculine forms of the word God, have been compiled in siddurim (prayer books) and published by ALEPH as a resource to assist communities in their spiritual explorations. Finally, the most striking features of Jewish Renewal services in comparison with other Jewish denominations are their egalitarianism, high level of participation, spiritual intensity, and incorporation of a variety of creative ‘New Age’ techniques to enhance the experience. As Reena Sigman Friedman explains, “[the] emphasis on ‘praying with the heart and not only the head,’ as well as the tremendous support for the arts in Renewal circles, has provided women, especially those with artistic bents, with opportunities for self-expression,” adding that “Renewal has given women an equal place in Judaism that can speak to their hearts, bodies and minds” (2006: 802).

To conclude, Jewish Renewal is clearly having an impact on the broader Jewish community, which is manifested not only in the incorporation of various radical practices by the mainstream denominations, but also in a resurgence of Jewish spirituality in the last decades of the twentieth century.²⁹ This new spirituality has ←60 | 61→led to increased Jewish observance, including thousands of ba’alei teshuvah returning to Orthodoxy. Jewish Renewal is also conducive to an active participation of women on all levels of Jewish religious and communal life. Women generally feel empowered in Renewal settings and are convinced that their ideas, feelings, and contributions are respected and appreciated by all members of the movement (Friedman, 2006: 804).

On the other hand, it must be remembered that Jewish Renewal also struggles with critical issues, the most salient ones being the problem of constructing Jewish identity (“How does one construct a Jewish identity that is rooted in tradition and yet trumpets creativity (often radical) and individualism?”) and the authenticity of the movement (“How can a movement be authentically Jewish and yet be influenced by a plethora of non-Jewish intellectual and theological streams?”). The future will demonstrate whether Jewish Renewal will prove to be fertile enough to attract significant numbers of American Jews who are in search of greater spiritual fulfillment in their lives, thus becoming the fifth movement within American Jewry (Salkin, 2011: 342).

1.3 Impact of Jewish Feminism on the American Jewish Community

Jewish feminist movement, considerably influenced by the second-wave of twentieth-century American feminism, was established to provide radically modern forms to struggle for equal rights and gender equality in the American Jewish community. Similarly to Zionism, Jewish feminism had its roots in secular Western culture and was highly influenced by Enlightenment and its concept of the fundamental equality of all human beings, as noted by both Paula Hyman (“Jewish Feminism,” 1998: 695) and Riv-Ellen Prell (2007: 5). Like Zionists, Jewish feminists asserted from the very beginning of their public activity in the early 1970s that the demands of Jewish feminism were in accordance with Jewish experience in the modern era, and with Jewish self-understanding. Unlike Zionists, however, Jewish feminists were also concerned with the inferior status of Jewish women in religious and communal life, and emphasized a struggle for gender equality, an issue ←61 | 62→that was overlooked in Zionism which gave priority to the longing for the restoration of Zion expressed in the male-created classical Jewish texts.³⁰

Although Jewish feminism developed under the influence of the American women’s movement, it gradually diverged from it essentially because the latter did not perceive Jewish women’s specific concerns to be of interest to the general movement. Jewish feminist movement, however, gathered a momentum of its own particularly throughout the 1980s and 1990s when it emerged as a religious, political, and intellectual force, uniting secular and religious Jewish women. Its adherents were aware of general feminist issues that transcended ethnic and religious lines, but their feminism was suffused by Jewish communal concerns. In these decades, Jewish women gained a distinct identity within secular feminist groups, while at the same time the work of Jewish feminists transformed the American Jewish communal and religious life in innumerable ways. Nowadays, as Sylvia Barack Fishman remarks, these “profound transformations have already become so mainstream as to appear unremarkable” (2001: 131). Indeed, many of the notable changes made possible by Jewish feminism are now experienced as norms in Jewish life and are clearly visible in areas such as synagogue worship, with egalitarianism common practice in the vast majority of American congregations, with the integration of female-centered rituals into Jewish life, as well as within the organized American Jewish community (cf. Antler, “American Feminism,” 1998: 414–415; Hyman, 2003: 308–309; Bronznick, Goldenhar, and Samuels, 2010: 515–516).

The sections below explore the impact of the Jewish feminist movement on American Jewry. First, I provide a brief outline of the Jewish feminist movement which emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s, focusing on the relations and distinctions between specifically Jewish feminism and the general American women’s movement. Then I move on to discuss the feminist critique of Judaism and gender relations in Judaism drawing on feminist theology as put forward by prominent American Jewish theologians and feminists. The final section is devoted to the presentation and discussion of the achievements made by Jewish feminism in contemporary American Jewish denominational life, paying special attention to the changes affecting the lives of Jewish women. Moreover, a profound impact of Jewish feminism on the broader American Jewish community, including the changes in the American Jewish family and women’s communal organizations, as well as a backlash from Orthodoxy, are also analyzed.

←62 | 63→

1.3.1 Jewish Feminist Movement versus American Feminism

During the 1960s and 1970s, the American Jewish community was influenced by the larger American culture, particularly by the Civil Rights movement, the American counter-culture, and the women’s movement. The second wave of American feminism,³¹ often dated from the publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique in 1963, asserted that ‘personal is political’ leading to the development of numerous consciousness-raising groups whose active members became women. Women joined those groups with the aim of examining and challenging the existent structure of the family and the workplace, and demanded equal pay for equal work, and equal opportunity for professional advancement. Moreover, those groups familiarized women with feminist literature, such as Simone de Beauvoir’s classic The Second Sex (1949), and more radical works by younger American authors, for example Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics (1970) and Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (1970). According to historian Hester Eisenstein, in its early stages, American feminism concentrated on “the socially constructed differences between the sexes” regarded as the “chief source of female oppression. In the main, feminist theory concentrated on establishing the distinction between sex and gender, and developed an analysis of sex roles as a mode of social control” (1984: xi). Thus, emancipation required that the connection between gender and social function should be severed, opening up in this way societal roles to all citizens, regardless of gender.

Starting in the 1970s and continuing through the next several decades, the Jewish feminist movement,³² for which American feminism provided the ideological and social framework, became a public phenomenon and a considerable force for social change in the American Jewish community. It attracted both religious and secular Jewish women, the daughters and granddaughters of women union activists and volunteer leaders as well as women from the Jewish counter-culture ←63 | 64→and independent havurah community. Distinct from American feminism, the Jewish feminist movement, as Paula Hyman notices, “[d];id not consist of the totality of women of Jewish origin who [were] active in American feminism. Nor [did] it have a single address. Rather, it [was] a loose construct of Jewish women who have brought feminist insights and critiques into the Jewish community and into the field of Jewish Studies in the American university” (2003: 297).³³

As noted by Riv-Ellen Prell in the Introduction to her work, Women Remaking American Judaism, Jewish feminism was fueled by individuals and self-organizing groups who launched conferences and campaigns, as well as established new organizations and institutions in order to introduce the issue of gender equality to the Jewish community (2007: 3). In 1972, a group of ten New York Jewish feminists, known as Ezrat Nashim (Hebrew for ‘women’s section of the synagogue,’ but also ‘women’s help’), took the issue of equality to the Rabbinical Assembly of the Conservative Movement, presenting “Jewish Women Call for Change.” Calling for the public affirmation of women’s equality in all aspects of Jewish life, the document stated:

It is time that: women be granted membership in synagogues, women be counted in a minyan, women be allowed full participation in religious observances, women be recognized as witnesses before Jewish law, women be allowed to initiate divorce, women be permitted and encouraged to attend Rabbinical and Cantorial schools, and to perform Rabbinical and Cantorial functions in synagogues, women be encouraged to join decision-making bodies, and to assume professional leadership roles, in synagogues and in the general Jewish community, women be considered as bound to fulfill all mitzvot equally with men. (“Ezrat Nashim: Jewish Women Call for Change,” March 1972)

“The Call for Change” put forward the early agenda of Jewish feminism which emphasized ‘equal access’ of women to public roles and honor within the Jewish community from which they had been excluded, and the elimination of the subordinate status of Jewish women in Jewish law. So influential was the manifesto of this liberal Jewish feminist group that it contributed to many changes in the Conservative Movement in the following years, further equalizing men and women in synagogue rituals and positions of leadership in congregational life (see also Section 1.2.2 in this chapter).

Jewish feminists also brought their message of gender equality to a wider public through the written word. Lilith: The Independent Jewish Women Magazine, established by Susan Weidman Schneider in 1976, was the first periodical to give voice to the ideas of Jewish feminism. From its inception, the magazine has combined ←64 | 65→news of particular interest to Jewish women, focusing on religious and social issues, with the latest Jewish feminist research as well as thought-provoking reviews of new publications. The issues discussed in Lilith have stimulated a great deal of thinking and, indeed, fostered change within the Jewish community. The following decades saw a proliferation of Jewish feminist magazines, journals, and newspapers, such as Shifra: A Jewish Feminist Magazine founded in 1984, Bridges: A Journal for Jewish Feminists and Our Friends established in 1990, and Nashim: A Journal of Jewish Women Studies and Gender Issues started in 1998, to name but a few. These journals and magazines represent a leading and respected voice of Jewish feminism and scholarship on Judaism and gender, highlighting the struggle to redefine the place of women in Jewish tradition and history in ways that incorporate both female spirituality and creativity (Hyman, “Jewish Feminism,” 1998: 695; Lerner, 1998: 854–856). Apart from that, major anthologies on Jewish feminism have been published since the 1970s, including Elizabeth Koltun’s The Jewish Woman: New Perspectives (1976), Susannah Heschel’s On Being a Jewish Feminist (1983), or Elyse Goldstein’s New Jewish Feminism: Probing the Past, Forging the Future (2009), all of which reflected the development of Jewish feminist scholarship in the particular decades.

Not only through their publications did Jewish feminists gain support for their cause, but also through the creation of and participation in various organizations and institutions which were dedicated to the personal, religious, cultural, and political aspects of women’s lives. For example, the Jewish Feminist Organization (JFO), founded in 1974 as a result of the two successful Jewish women’s conferences held in New York in previous years, articulated the double goal that became characteristic of Jewish feminists:

We, Jewish feminists, have joined together here, in strength and joy to struggle for the liberation of the Jewish woman. Jewish women of all ages, political, cultural and religious outlooks and sexual preferences, are all sisters. We are committed to the development of our full human potential and to the survival and enhancement of Jewish life. We seek […] the full, direct, and equal participation of women at all levels of Jewish life – communal, religious, educational, and political. We shall be a force for such creative change in the Jewish community [as well as] […] the voice of the Jewish feminist movement in the national and international movement. (“Jewish Feminist Organization: Statement of Purpose,” April 1974)

As this quotation indicates, from its early days, Jewish feminists devoted themselves to addressing pressing issues in the women’s movement, thereby expecting to make great strides not only in the lives of Jewish women but in the whole Jewish community. Although the Jewish Feminist Organization failed to become a national umbrella feminist organization, it quickly evolved into the Jewish Women’s Resource Center (JWRC) in l976, whose aim was to document the emergence and history of feminism in the context of Judaism (Binder and Gross, 1998: 700–701). The Drisha Institute for Jewish Education, in turn, founded in 1979 by Rabbi Silber, provided Jewish women with the unprecedented opportunity to ←65 | 66→engage in the advanced study of traditional Jewish texts. The religious study offered to Jewish women by this non-denominational institution, can be comparable to the yeshiva training offered to their male counterparts (cf. Hyman, “Jewish Feminism,” 1998: 697; Bronznick, Goldenhar, and Samuels, 2010: 515–516). This is how Rabbi Silber justifies his initiative to provide serious learning for Jewish women from different backgrounds, “this is not only a feminist issue. […] It is a community issue. The more thoughtful and knowledgeable men and women we have active in the Jewish community, making good ethical decisions and setting good goals, the better the community we have” (qtd. in Lautin, 1998: 340).

As has been stated at the beginning of Section 1.3.1, there is no singular definition of Jewish feminism; instead there are many different ways in which feminists articulated their encounters with Judaism. This multitude of ways has led to a variety of definitions of what it means to be ‘a Jewish feminist.’ These various definitions reveal the fact that Jewish feminists, as feminists and as Jews, belonging to different Jewish denominational movements, do not share a common vision, and strive for different goals. Ellen M. Umansky offers three definitions of Jewish feminism which reflect this diversity in belief and goals, namely “Jewish feminism as a call for increased participation and legal change,” “Jewish feminism as a call for equal access,” and “Jewish feminism as transformation” (1999: 180–187).

Proponents of the first definition of Jewish feminism argue that to be a Jewish feminist is to believe in and/or actively call for the greater participation of women within Jewish religious and communal life. They have attempted to create, facilitate, or make available public religious opportunities for girls and women from which traditionally they were exempt if not excluded, for example greater access to religious education and participation in public worship. Moreover, these Jewish feminists have been actively involved in pressing rabbinic authorities for legal change in order to re-examine those laws that have created unnecessary hardships for women, for example the laws of divorce and most specifically those concerning the agunah (Umansky, 1999: 180–181).

“Equal access feminists,” representing the second group of Jewish feminists, press not only for increasing the rights and responsibilities of women within Judaism, just like the above-mentioned feminists, but they also wish to secure for women equal access to all aspects of Jewish life including those privileges or rights which previously have been exclusively reserved for men. They have sought the inclusion of women in the minyan, the right of women to receive aliyot (to be called up to the pulpit to recite blessings before and after the Torah reading), and to read from the Torah itself. Many such feminists, especially those within the Conservative movement, have advocated the wearing of such traditionally male attire as kippot (head coverings), tallitot, and even tefillin by women during communal worship. Moreover, many such feminists have worked to create or to participate in ceremonies paralleling those traditionally celebrated by men, for example baby naming ceremonies for girls welcoming a daughter into God’s covenant with Israel (paralleling the ceremony of brit milah for a boy) and adult bat mitzvah (corresponding to bar mitzvah for boys). Finally, calls for equal access have also ←66 | 67→included calls for women’s ordination as rabbis and their investiture as cantors (Umansky, 1999: 183).

The articulation of an “equal access” platform by Jewish feminists from both groups mirrored the goals of American feminism which in its first stage in the late 1960s lay an emphasis on the identification of women’s oppression and exclusion from power, and on the development of various strategies helping to secure self-empowerment and political change for women. The primary goal of American feminism was for women to participate in the material wealth and to enjoy the social status previously available to white men in the American society. Similarly, Jewish feminism sought equality as well as equity for women in Jewish communal life and in the synagogue.

In the late 1970s American feminism, which entered its second stage, began to highlight some of women’s differences from men as positive attributes. This emphasis on the woman-centered perspective was not intended, as Hester Eisenstein remarks, “to minimize the polarizing between masculine and feminine,” but rather “to isolate and to define those aspects of female experience that were potential sources of strength and power for women” (1984: xii). Just as American feminists began to celebrate women’s culture, so Jewish feminists began in the early 1980s to focus their energies on the creation of a ‘feminist Judaism’ in which its three important elements, that is God, Torah, and Israel would be re-conceptualized. According to Umansky, the third, more recent definition of Jewish feminism asserts that “to be a Jewish feminist is to integrate women’s experiences into Jewish life, thus working toward the transformation of Judaism itself” (1999: 185–186). A similar sentiment is expressed by theologian Judith Plaskow who views feminism as demanding a new:

[…] understanding of Israel that includes the whole of Israel and thus allows women to speak and name our experience for ourselves. It demands we replace a normative male voice with a chorus of divergent voices, describing Jewish reality in different accents and tones. Feminism impels us to rethink issues of community and diversity […]. Feminism demands new ways of talking about God that reflect and grow out of the redefinition of Jewish humanity. (1991: 9–10)

As a consequence, such feminists began to articulate the need for women’s creation of liturgy that would reflect the ways in which women named, and experienced, God. As Plaskow notes of feminist reinterpretation of rituals, or creating new liturgy, “women are seeking to transform Jewish ritual so that it acknowledges [their] existence and experience. In the ritual moment, women’s history is made present” (1986: 33).

Comparing the three definitions of Jewish feminism offered by Umansky, it must be stated that the first two definitions referring to ‘equal access’ do not comprise all the aspects of Jewish women’s life that require transformation. On the one hand, equal access enables women to participate more fully in the Jewish community but, on the other hand, it does not necessarily reflect the values and experiences of men as well as women nor does it view the values and experiences ←67 | 68→of both groups as equally important. Although Jewish women may achieve equal access to rituals and liturgies created by and for men, it does not mean that the androcentric nature of those rituals and liturgies will be addressed and remedied. As Judith Plaskow (1990), Rachel Adler (1998), Ellen M. Umansky (1999), and other Jewish feminists – representatives of “Jewish feminism as transformation” – have argued, the ‘otherness’ of women, evident in Jewish liturgies and sacred texts, cannot be resolved simply through equal access or gradual and partial change of Halakhah. They have advocated the transformation of the very nature of Halakhah, and the creation of non-hierarchical images of God that reflect the theological conviction that, “[…] it is our obligation, as covenantal partners, to work with God in repairing the world and to bear responsibility for our actions” (Umansky, 1999: 186–187) (see also Section 1.3.2 in this chapter).

The relationship between Jewish women and American feminism has been complex from the very beginning. Notwithstanding the energetic contributions of individual Jewish women and Jewish women’s groups, not all Jewish women’s organizations were actively interested in and approved of the goals of equality or enhanced political rights for women. Nor did American feminists recognize the legitimacy of Jewish identity and the major contributions that Jewish women made to their mutual cause. Moreover, feminists from the general feminist movement rarely got involved in defense of Jews when they were attacked in the United States or abroad; in fact, women’s rights supporters and their allies themselves frequently expressed anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant, or anti-Zionist views. Despite American feminists’ failures to publicly support or acknowledge Jewish issues, Joyce Antler emphatically asserts that “Jewish women have been among the most passionate supporters of feminist goals throughout the long and continuing struggle for women’s rights” (“American Feminism,” 1998: 408).

It is worth noting that many of the leaders and thinkers of the second-wave American feminism were of Jewish descent – they were well-educated, largely secular Jewish women, liberal in their political and cultural orientation. Apart from Betty Friedan (Bettye Goldstein), a cursory list of feminists who were Jews encompasses figures as influential and varied as Bella Abzug, Phyllis Chesler, Letty Cottin Pogrebin, Vivian Gornick, Gloria Steinem, Robin Morgan, Shulamith Firestone, Andrea Dworkin, Adrienne Rich, Esther Broner, Nancy Chodorow, Susan Gubar, Grace Paley, Marge Piercy, and Judith Plaskow who played prominent roles in spearheading women’s rights in the 1960s and early 1970s, and in the following decades were active in various spheres of American (Jewish) public and/or religious life making use of their feminist insights and experience (Jacobson, 2006: 253, 437).

Despite the fact that these feminists were of Jewish origin, most did not deal specifically with Judaism or with the Jewish community nor did they link their feminism to their religious or ethnic identification, especially in the 1960s and early 1970s. The avoidance of Judaism as well as Christianity, regarded as patriarchal religions, a source of oppression and hence irrelevant to women’s lives, was a characteristic feature of the American ideological and political atmosphere of ←68 | 69→that period.³⁴ Within American feminism it was proclaimed that gender surpassed all other aspects of identity, as a result of which all women were united, despite their differences of class, race, and ethnicity. Although many working-class and women-of-color feminists quickly took issue with a feminist program that paid no attention to their numerous allegiances and their solidarity with men of their own groups, “Jewish women within the American feminist movement,” as Paula Hyman notices, “tended initially not to assert a Jewish dimension to their feminism or to bring the issue of gender equality to the Jewish community” (2003: 299).

However, some Jewish women for whom Jewishness was fundamental to their identity felt that they could not define themselves solely through their feminist ideology and affiliations, following Mary Daly’s advice. As Judith Plaskow declares in the Introduction to her Standing Again at Sinai (1990) – the first methodical feminist Jewish theology – “the move toward embracing a whole Jewish/feminist identity did not grow out of my conviction that Judaism is ‘redeemable,’ but out of my sense that sundering Judaism and feminism would mean sundering my being” (1991: xiii). Plaskow’s statement clearly indicates that Jewish feminists were not willing to turn their back on the Jewish past and (deeply patriarchal) tradition, giving priority to their own feminist experience, but rather create ‘a new extended identity’ that would embrace different, frequently conflicting, yet equally important, aspects of their female identity. To make a feminist Judaism a reality, Jewish feminists believed that Judaism would be required to transform its patriarchal nature thoroughly. Implementing their newly acquired feminist analysis to their condition as American Jews, Jewish feminists realized that female inferiority was a cultural construct, because of which Jewish women suffered the inequalities in Jewish law, in the synagogue, and in Jewish communal institutions. Their collective goal, however, was not only the attainment of equal rights for Jewish women in religious or societal structures, but also the transformation of Judaism in such a way that it would become a religion including all Jews – women and men. Thus, as feminist Ellen M. Umansky concludes, specifically Jewish feminism emerged “as a means of asserting both Jewish visibility within the feminist movement and ←69 | 70→feminist consciousness within the U.S. Jewish community” (1988: 352; italics in the original).

However, the assertion of “Jewish visibility” within the general feminist movement proved to be no easy task to Jewish feminists. Although American Jewish women quickly embraced feminism, they equally quickly discovered, as Umansky remarks, that “they were embraced as women but scorned as Jews” (1988: 351). Jewish feminists sought recognition of their particularity within the American women’s movement not only because they had specific issues to come to grips with but also because they were reluctant to conceal an important component of their identity, that is the centrality of Jewishness, in the name of feminism. However, the lack of recognition of their Jewish ethnic, cultural, and religious identity by the black as well as white Christian feminists within the general feminist circles made many Jewish women realize that the price of total acceptance within the feminist community was to repudiate or simply disregard their Jewishness, with which they vehemently disagreed (Fishman, 1989: 13; Hyman, 2003: 301).

By 1980 Jewish feminists had to combat not only ‘subtle’ expressions of hostility to their Jewishness and anti-Jewish prejudices and stereotypes but also overt manifestations of anti-Semitism that had emerged both within the American women’s movement and in the international feminist community. During two United Nations International Women’s Conferences in Mexico City (1975) and in Copenhagen (1980), Jewish feminists were faced with blatant examples of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism coming not only from delegates representing other countries but also from their American co-nationals (cf. Pogrebin, 1992: 149–160; Fishman, 1995: 9–11; Antler, 1997: 274–284). In 1982, American Jewish feminist, Letty Cottin Pogrebin, a participant of the two conferences, published a forceful article “Anti-Semitism in the Women’s Movement” in Ms. magazine, in which she denounced “anti-Semitism and sexism” as the “twin oppressions” of women, revealing the ubiquity of anti-Semitism on the radical left as well as the political right, within the black community, and among Christian feminists who blamed Judaism for the birth and the theological legitimation of patriarchy as the cultural system oppressing women, for the death of Jesus, and for sexism within Christianity.³⁵ Most importantly, she identified the “three i’s” as ways in which Jewish women experienced anti-Semitism: “invisibility (the omission of Jewish reality from feminist consciousness),” “insult (slurs, Jew-baiting, and outright persecution),” and “internalized oppression (Jewish self-hatred).” Finally, she declared that anti-Semitism equaled racism, responding to black feminists’ conviction that “anyone with white-skin privilege [could not] be oppressed” in such a way: “some ←70 | 71→people see white racism as the only evil on earth, but ignore anti-Semitism, which is the oldest form of racism” (1982: 45+).

Similarly, two years later, in an article published in a general book of feminist theology and spirituality, Judith Plaskow provided American feminists with an analysis of anti-Semitism as “the unacknowledged racism” of the women’s movement. By recounting anti-Semitic jokes and references to anti-Semitic stereotypes such as “[the Jewish American] Princess/Jewish intellectual/rich Jew/pushy Jew/cunning Jew, etc.” heard by Jewish women at various women’s meetings, Plaskow demonstrates that anti-Semitism is prevalent in the women’s movement, and yet Jewish feminists’ concerns are trivialized and they are accused of “Jewish paranoia” when they vigorously protest the anti-Semitic jokes and publicly complain of anti-Semitism (2005: 94–99). Similar observations are made by other American Jewish scholars, such as Sylvia Barack Fishman (1995: 11–12) and Edward S. Shapiro (1995: 249), who also point out that increased intermarriage might be one of the effects of the dissemination of the negative images of Jewish women, in particular the Jewish American Princess (JAP) stereotype, not only within the women’s movement but also in the American Jewish community itself.

Jewish feminists were rarely critical of American women’s movement except when the issues of anti-Semitism, anti-Zionism or Jewish identity were brought up, but they frequently avoided some prominent themes typical of general American feminism. Moreover, they differed from American feminists in their attitudes towards the family. In the early stages of the feminist movement, American feminists were widely perceived as prioritizing professional success and public activity over women’s traditional domestic roles. Moreover, the worth and importance of childbirth and childcare were also devalued, mostly because these roles, as Anne Roiphe remarks, “were associated with all our other deprivations, [consequently] many women turned away with disinterest from the entire enterprise of bringing up the next generation” (1986: 74). Many feminists depicted the nuclear family only as a patriarchal source of women’s oppression (‘a woman’s prison’), failing to acknowledge the satisfactions it offered to both women and men. Additionally, they trivialized or ignored the stress experienced by women who sought to combine careers and family life (cf. Fishman, 1989: 6–7; Hyman, 2003: 304–305). Such a negative attitude to the family as displayed by the American feminists in the early stages was criticized by Betty Friedan in her 1981 book The Second Stage. She asserted that because of their perceived hostility to the family, feminist ideologues were unsuccessful in appealing to the majority of American women, whose sense of personal identity was deeply rooted in family life and closely connected to their domestic roles. “The women’s movement,” she notes, was “being blamed, above all, for the destruction of the family. Churchmen and sociologists proclaim that the American family, as it has always been defined, is becoming an ‘endangered species,’ with the rising divorce rate and an enormous increase in single-parent families […]” (Friedan, 1981: 22). However, as the movement was evolving over the years, the feminists gradually understood that “a full ←71 | 72→family life, a loving connection to the next generation, was as necessary as our liberty and must be incorporated into our lives” (Roiphe, 1986: 74).

Jewish feminists conveyed a slightly different vision of the family than American feminists. Although there were voices such as that of Martha Ackelsberg’s who insisted that the Jewish community should accept and encourage a number of alternative household styles (besides heterosexual nuclear families) in order to ensure the survival and continuity of Judaism (1987: 76–78), the value of the Jewish family, on the whole, was not denigrated. Jewish feminists defended the family, perceiving its role as the central unit in Jewish communal life. For example, Susan Handelman, rejected the claim made by Ackelsberg in Sh’ma magazine that Jewish strength could be separable from traditional normative Jewish family life. By referring to excerpts from the Book of Genesis, Handelman demonstrates that the Jewish family has always been the most important and enduring institution in the history of Judaism. Not only does the family educate the young and support Jewish institutions, but it is also the symbolic representation of Jewish values. What we can infer from her compelling article is that it is impossible to speak of Judaism without the primacy of the traditional Jewish family, which is “the foundation of Jewish life and guarantor of Jewish survival,” and that any “attacks on the Jewish family” are, in fact, directed at both the Jewish religion and culture (1987: 73–76).

Not surprisingly, in view of their commitment and loyalty to the Jewish family, Jewish feminists showed true understanding of the concerns expressed by Jewish communal leaders encouraging Jewish women to have more children to compensate for the Holocaust or for the increasing intermarriage rate in America. Jewish feminists were also aware that the main threats to the Jewish family, as presented by Jewish sociologists and demographers, were not only assimilation and intermarriage, but also the low birth rate, the high divorce rate, dissolving families, delayed marriage and single life choices. In a nutshell, a feminist perspective on the Jewish family has been best articulated by the writer Anne Roiphe in her article in Tikkun magazine, “a truly feminist position does not mock the family and a Jewish feminist position must by definition cherish the home and value the work that is done there” (1986: 71).

On the whole, Jewish feminism, which has been highly successful in its efforts to end the exclusion of women from spiritual and communal leadership and help women to reclaim their rightful place in Jewish history (see also Section 1.3.3 in this chapter), has also enabled many secular Jewish feminists to (re)discover a place for themselves within the community of Jews, and embrace their Jewishness. Paradoxically, this fact was largely attributable to the erasure and critique of Jewishness as well as the encounter with anti-Semitism in the general feminist movement, to which many of the secular Jewish feminists responded by exploring the meaning of Jewish identity. This led them to the rediscovery of their own Jewish (religious) heritage and identity which they began to assert with pride. Betty Friedan, for example, began to reflect on the Jewish component of her identity only after she had encountered anti-Semitism within the women’s movement. She began to get more interested in theology, joined a Jewish study group in ←72 | 73→America, traveled to Israel in an attempt to “get in touch with [her] Jewish roots,” and got engaged in the organized American Jewish community by becoming the co-chair of the American Jewish Congress’s National Commission on Women’s Equality (“Jewish Roots: An Interview with Betty Friedan,” 1988: 26–27; Antler, 1997: 259–267). Letty Cottin Pogrebin had a similar experience – her reconciliation of her Jewish heritage with feminist philosophy occurred after coming face to face with anti-Zionism exhibited at the International Women’s Conferences in Mexico City and Copenhagen. She recounts in Deborah, Golda, and Me: Being Female and Jewish in America how Jewish feminism provided her with an opportunity to overcome her alienation from Judaism which started at the age of fifteen, when she was prohibited from reciting kaddish (‘the memorial prayer for the dead’) as the tenth member of the minyan after her mother’s death (1992: 49–52, 75–81, 236–255). Last but not least, the Jewish poet Adrienne Rich also returned to Judaism thanks to her feminism. Born into a mixed Jewish-Christian family in a white Christian community in the South of the United States, Rich was raised to deny her Jewishness. However, despite the fact that according to rabbinic law, she was not Jewish (the daughter of a Christian mother and Jewish father), and had been baptized and confirmed in the Episcopal Church, Adrienne Rich thought of herself as “more Jewish than half-Jewish, and something other than Christian” (Antler, 1997: 300). Growing up, Adrienne Rich felt that she had a blurred identity; in a long poem entitled “Readings of History” written in 1960, she described herself as “Split at the Root, neither Gentile nor Jew, /Yankee nor Rebel, born /in the face of two ancient cults” (1967: 39). In her 1982 essay “Split at the Root: An Essay on Jewish Identity,” Rich performed a kind of self-analysis by examining the sources of her own divided identity in her adolescence and adult life when she perceived the world from “too many disconnected angles: white, Jewish, anti-Semite, racist, anti-racist, once-married, lesbian, middle-class, exmatriate southerner,” acknowledging her identity as “split at the root” (1994: 122), composed of multiple and sometimes conflicting selves. When she came to the recognition of her lesbianism in the late 1970s, she also affirmed her identity as a Jew and turned to Jewish feminist writings as resources. Thus, Rich’s embrace of Jewish identity was not separate from her negotiations around sexuality and gender. In this way, Rich fulfilled the hope with which she ended the essay, that in the future “every aspect of [her] identity would […] be engaged” and interconnected (1994: 123). In the following years, she wrote poems and prose on Jewish subjects, participated in Jewish activism, and was a founding editor of the Jewish feminist journal Bridges (Rich, 1994: 100–123; also cf. Antler, 1997: 299–301; Martin and Zox-Weaver, 2015: 417–419).

1.3.2 Feminist Critique of Judaism

The interaction between feminism and Judaism has undergone a radical transformation since the 1970s. Feminist theologians have maintained that Western religious traditions have systematically excluded women’s voices, that religious institutions have been predominantly male-oriented, and that many canonical ←73 | 74→religious texts, written almost exclusively by men, contain numerous misogynistic statements (Rudavsky, 2007: 324). For the last four decades, Jewish feminists have challenged theological interpretations of Jewish law in every aspect of Jewish living, but most of all, they have attacked traditional Judaism for its sharp gender distinctions as well as the inferior status of women in Jewish society. This goal is very well expressed by the co-editors of the anthology Womanspirit Rising: A Feminist Reader in Religion:

Since Judaism is a religion of ritual, law, and study rather than theology, creed, and doctrine, Jewish feminists have devoted their efforts not so much to defining and overcoming the patriarchal structures of Jewish thought as to criticizing specific attitudes toward women and to working for the full incorporation of women into Jewish religious life. Feminist contributions to the reconstruction of tradition most often focus on the creation of new rituals. (Christ and Plaskow, 1992: 134)

The writings of two Jewish feminist theologians, Judith Plaskow and Rachel Adler, exploring the contradictions that many women felt between Judaism and feminism, have become highly influential for the American Jewish community. The case for Orthodox feminism, in turn, was made most eloquently by Blu Greenberg in her On Being a Jewish Feminist: A View from Tradition (1981). Adler in Engendering Judaism: An Inclusive Theology and Ethics (1998) positioned feminism as part of “Judaism’s commitment to justice [which] obligates it to understand and redress gender inequity” (2001: xvi).

Traditional Jewish societies are organized according to the principles of Rabbinic Judaism, which prescribe separate roles and responsibilities for men and women. Thus, women are required to perform all negative mitzvot, but are exempt from observing the “fixed-time” commandments, the so-called positive mitzvot which have to be carried out at a specific time of day in a public place, including communal worship. First and foremost, women do not have to put on the tallit and tefillin while reciting daily morning prayers. This mitzvah is reserved solely for Jewish men, who in this way are bound head and heart to God (Zahavy, 2003: 182). Orthodox feminist Blu Greenberg remarks that “from the exemption of women from tefillin the rabbis derive several other exemptions: counting the omer, hearing the shofar, and reciting the Shema” (1981: 82). In the public domain, intelligent, committed Orthodox women often feel marginalized when it comes to religious leadership roles and public ritual within their own communities. In Jewish law, women are not counted in the minyan (the official quorum for public prayer of ten adult Jews), including the minyan required for communal recitation of the mourner’s prayer (kaddish). Moreover, women cannot be ordained, cannot read from the Torah at the bimah, are unable to be a witness in a religious trial, cannot initiate a divorce, which contributes in many cases to their plight of an agunah, and in the synagogue, they sit apart from men, often separated by a physical barrier (mechitzah) (cf. Baskin, 2003: 394; Ross, 2004: 15–16; Trepp, 2009: 329).

Although Jewish women are encouraged to pray, their prayers are essentially private, may be conducted in any language, and need not follow a set liturgy. This ←74 | 75→has meant, as Judith Baskin notes, that “historically, […] regularized religious education in sacred language, texts, or legal traditions was not provided for most girls in traditional Jewish societies” (2003: 394). In Orthodox Judaism, women are exempt from the central religious activity of studying Torah, which is based on the opinion of Rabbi Eliezer (a prominent Talmudic sage living in the first and second centuries CE) with regard to religious education for women that was adopted as normative by the Halakhah. Rabbi Eliezer stated, “Anyone who teaches his daughter Torah is teaching her ‘immorality’ or ‘nonsense.’ ” He went even further and wrote, “The words of the Torah should be burnt rather than be taught to women” (Jacobowitz, 2004: 79–80).

As a consequence of Rabbi Eliezer’s binding decision, Orthodox women feel deprived of a full participation in the synagogue and an access to sacred religious texts solely on the grounds of gender. Sylvia Barack Fishman explains this fact in such a way:

For much of Jewish history women were denied access to the intellectual life of the community, which centered around the study of sacred texts, primarily the Talmud, and they were denied a public role in Jewish worship. These exclusions were based on certain assumptions in Jewish rabbinic law about the nature of women. The rabbis assumed that, as a practical matter, the vast majority of women would be absorbed in domestic responsibilities for most of their adult lives. They also assumed that men as a group were easily inflamed into sexual thoughts, and that a woman’s uncovered hair, her arms or legs, or even her voice could – perhaps unwittingly – distract a man from such sacred tasks as prayer or study. One of the rationales for the exclusion of women from study and public worship was that women’s physical attractions were perceived as a sexual snare for men. (1995:101)

Gender-based tasks which a Jewish woman is supposed to fulfill focus on marriage and family rather than female influence and participation in public rituals of prayer and the synagogue. A Jewish wife and mother is not expected to do anything which might interfere with the responsibilities of motherhood and the maintenance of a pious family life (Zahavy, 2003: 183–184). Thus, what is incumbent upon Jewish women is to observe the three specific women’s commandments, termed as hallah, niddah, and hadlaqah. In its broadest sense, hallah refers to a woman’s knowledge of kashrut,³⁶ the Jewish dietary laws concerned with permissible foods and food ←75 | 76→combinations, essential for running home according to Rabbinic ritual law. The laws of niddah (literally ‘the menstruating woman’), regarded as a central aspect of marital life in traditional Jewish practice, refer to punctilious obedience to the family purity laws ordaining physical separation between a menstruating, post-menstrual, or post-partum woman and her husband prior to her ritual cleansing in the mikvah at a specified time. Finally, hadlaqah (‘kindling’) indicates the ritual kindling of the lights marking the advent of the Sabbath, and, more generally, a woman’s participation in domestic rituals connected with the festivals and holy days of the Jewish calendar (cf. Baskin, 2003: 394; Spiegel, 2009: 22; Trepp, 2009: 329–330).

In contemporary Jewish communities both in the United States and Israel, it is Orthodox or, to be more precise, Ultra-Orthodox Jews who continue to follow traditional modes of Rabbinic Judaism. Because of the patriarchal nature of this branch, the position of Jewish women seems to be most problematic within the world of the Ultra-Orthodox Jews, where the practices discussed above are still central religious actions that define women’s lives. In Hasidism, it has been suggested that there are no Hasidic women, only mothers, wives and daughters of Hasids. Moreover, the analysis of the experiences of Hasidic women within historical Hasidism indicates that the two experiences women have most often described are exclusion and abandonment (Jacobowitz, 2004: 78).³⁷

On the other hand, there are also supporters and advocates of this way of life. For example, Tamar Frankiel, a typical representative of contemporary ba’alot teshuvah, who after having accepted the practices of Orthodox Judaism as an adult Jewish woman, has written in her 1990 book The Voice of Sarah: Feminine Spirituality and Traditional Judaism of the spiritual benefits of the woman’s role in Rabbinic Judaism. Beginning with the premise that there are profound and inherent male-female differences in perception, abilities, and contributions that traditional Judaism has always recognized and celebrated, she demonstrates, by using various examples of biblical and post-biblical heroines, that Orthodoxy empowers and values women. In Frankiel’s view, traditional Judaism – perceived ←76 | 77→as a living tradition with rich resources for women’s self-understanding and self-realization – fosters these gender-based distinctions by prescribing domestic roles for women. Through the participation in the birth and nurturance of children, the preparation and serving of food, the creation and preservation of shalom bayit (domestic harmony), as well as in the Sabbath, and other Jewish festivals, she believes that women fulfill their distinctive roles in a cycle of Jewish life “richly interwoven with feminine themes” (1990: 58). Frankiel, similarly to other ba’alot teshuvah, glorifies the special benefits of the family purity rituals, believing monthly immersion in a mikvah to be an experience of renewal, and enforced marital separation a safeguard for the spirituality of sexual expression, but above all, an infallible means to preserve marital love (1990: 80–83). Although Frankiel is convinced that halakhic tradition is to be accepted with faith and trust, she is not impervious to the influences from the contemporary world (1990: 47–48).

Summing up, in contrast to Jewish men, who occupy the public domains of worship, study, community leadership, and judicial authority, Jewish women’s life in Rabbinic Judaism is expected to be situated in the private sphere of home, and family economic endeavors. While this patriarchal religious system has protected and honored women who have complied with its customs, the Rabbis have depicted females as essentially ‘other’ than males and connected females to the realm of nature as opposed to culture. In other words, inequality between men and women in Judaism is also based on the fact that women are often perceived within Halakhah in terms of their bodies, their physicality and sexuality, whereas men are perceived in terms of their mind and intellect (Elior, 2010: 381–455). There is no denying that the traditional Jewish sources invariably reflect male stereotyped conceptions and lowly views of women, rather than women’s understanding of themselves as individuals with their own rights, interests, and priorities. Taking into account that the classic image of woman in Jewish tradition is determined by rabbinic interpretation of biblical texts, it is therefore not surprising that the woman’s role and value are defined and limited mainly by male interests, needs, and perspectives.

It is true, however, that apart from the derogatory remarks, negative images and judgements of Jewish women pronounced by men, many examples of moving expressions of genuine love, respect and admiration for women can be also found in the Talmud. For instance, Babylonian Talmud: Tractate Yebamoth 62b cites appreciative comments concerning women in the role as wives: “Any man who has no wife lives without joy, without blessing, without goodness [of life] [and finally] without life. […] A man who loves his wife as himself, and honors her more than himself […] – of him does Scripture say: ‘And you will know that your home is in peace.’ ” The Talmudic sages have even devised a paradigm of an ideal Jewish woman, eshet chayil, whose virtues are praised in a poem “A Woman of Valor” (Proverbs 31:10–31). The section of the poem in praise of the perfect woman who “labors long hours in caring for her family and household […], is sung by the father and children every Friday night in the Jewish home in appreciation of their ←77 | 78→wife and mother” (Unterman, 1997: 61).³⁸ Moreover, Babylonian Talmud: Tractate Berakoth 17a remarks that women earn merit “[b];y sending their sons to learn in the synagogue and their husbands to study in the schools of the rabbis.” It is clear from the above examples that, within the framework of traditional Judaism, the place of a perfect Jewish woman is to be situated in the private domain where her role is strictly limited to taking care of her family and enabling the males of her family, that is her husband and sons, to participate in culturally valued activities in the public sphere. Thus, Jewish women have been, as Tamar Ross aptly points out, “culturally and religiously nurtured into acceptance of their prime function as ‘enablers,’ [whose] merit accrues mainly in a vicarious way through the religious achievements of their husbands and sons” (2004: 21). Such behavior is regarded as a sufficient religious act in itself and constitutes a model of female nobility in observant Jewish communities even nowadays. The model of an ideal Jewish woman can be best encapsulated in one verse from Psalms (45:14): “The entire glory of the daughter of the king lies on the inside,” which has been used by the rabbis throughout the ages to emphasize the appropriate private nature of the woman’s role in Orthodox Judaism (Plaskow, 1991: 84).

Despite the glorification of the role of the woman at home by the rabbis, in reality, Jewish women are accorded no greater halakhic status in the domestic realm. On the contrary, men are the official heads of the families, leaving women with few independent rights or privileges. After marriage, the woman’s obligations towards her parents are superseded or – to use a more precise term – overridden by her subjugation to her husband and her obligation to obey his authority. Legally, it is the father who bears the exclusive responsibility for the raising and educating of the children. Another reflection of the woman’s lack of autonomy and, in fact, her subordinate status within the family is her financial position, which posits that all of a woman’s earnings belong to her husband in exchange for his supporting her (Ross, 2004: 17–18).

Since the 1970s, Jewish feminists, influenced by their feminist peers from the general feminist movement, have begun to level significant attacks at Judaism and demand radical changes within it. By 1974, several articles analyzing and criticizing the patriarchal nature of Judaism had appeared in various American Jewish newspapers and magazines. According to Paula Hyman, two articles pioneered in ←78 | 79→feminist analysis of the status of Jewish women, namely Trude Weiss-Rosmarin’s “The Unfreedom of Jewish Women” published in the Jewish Spectator and Rachel Adler’s “The Jew Who Wasn’t There: Halacha and the Jewish Woman,” which appeared in Davka, a countercultural magazine (“Jewish Feminism,” 1998: 694). Both articles released at the beginning of the 1970s concentrated on examining traditional Jewish life and values. The former focused on criticism of Jewish marriage laws indicating their unfairness towards divorced and abandoned women, who “resent the legal inferiority and disabilities to which Jewish law subjects them. They want legal equality, especially with respect to the laws of marriage and divorce” (Weiss-Rosmarin, 1970: 2–6). The latter, on the other hand, severely criticized the status of women in Judaism by contrasting male and female models of traditional Jewish piety. Adler’s article also urged that Jewish women should confront their peripheral status in Halakhah by demanding or creating legal decisions that would “permit Jewish women to develop roles and role models in which righteousness [sprang] from self-actualization, in contrast to the masochistic, self-annihilating model of the postbiblical tzadeket [the feminine term for tzadik – ‘the righteous one’]” (1995: 12–18). One more article is worth adding to this pioneering feminist list, namely Paula Hyman’s “The Other Half: Women in the Jewish Tradition” published in Conservative Judaism. In this article, Hyman criticizes patriarchal cultures, including Judaism, for the “patriarchal sex-role differentiation and the concomitant disparagement of women” (1972: 15). By juxtaposing women’s position with men’s in traditional Judaism, Hyman highlights the second-class status of women within Judaism, and advocates the examination of the Jewish tradition, which “has excluded women from entire spheres of Jewish experience and has considered them intellectually and spiritually inferior to men” (1972: 21).

These early influential articles set the stage for a feminist interest in and an emphasis on women’s experience of Judaism. They also demonstrated the emergence of feminist challenges to the patriarchal structure of the Jewish world. The feminist definition of Jewish patriarchy is based on Simone de Beauvoir’s classic 1940s analysis of Western patriarchy, in which man is the Subject, woman is the Other (1997: 16). When applied to Judaism, de Beauvoir’s definition highlights the role of Jewish men as the subjects as well as the authors and interpreters of Jewish texts and laws, and demonstrates the marginalization of women’s experiences, and the almost complete absence of women’s voices. At the core of Jewish feminists’ criticism against Judaism lay the absence of equality between the sexes which, they believed, was rooted in patriarchal institutionalism. This type of patriarchy is perhaps best expressed by Judith Plaskow in her seminal work Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism from a Feminist Perspective:

Underneath specific legislation [is] an assumption of women’s Otherness more fundamental than the particular laws in which it finds expression. Halakhah in its details discriminates against women because the world of law is male-defined and places men at the center. Women are objects of the law but neither its creators nor agents. […] Laws concerning family status assume passivity of women. Women are “acquired” in ←79 | 80→marriage and are passive in the dissolution of marriage, so that the law deprives them of control in important areas of their lives. (1991: 63)

As can be seen from this description, Jewish men are the actors in religious and communal life. Women are ‘other,’ not counting as full people. This otherness of women as a presupposition of Jewish law is then its most central formulation (Plaskow, 1995: 224).

The majority of feminist scholars of Judaism blame the Halakhah for the inferior position of women in Jewish community. They claim that the estrangement of women within Judaism may be traced back to the very birth of the Jewish people as a nation, that is, the giving of the Torah and the entry into the covenant at Sinai. These feminist scholars are inclined to agree with Judith Plaskow’s view, finding the Halakhah objectionable on the grounds that it has been male-centered from its inception. Plaskow writes:

Given the importance of this event, there can be no verse in the Torah more disturbing to the feminist than Moses’ warning to his people in Exodus 19:15, “Be ready for the third day; do not go near a woman.” For here, at the very moment that the Jewish people stand at Sinai ready to receive the covenant – not now the covenant with individual patriarchs but with the people as a whole – at the very moment when Israel stands trembling waiting for God’s presence to descend upon the mountain, Moses addressed the community only as men. […] At the central moment of Jewish history, women are invisible. (1991: 25)

It is clear that even at Mount Sinai, Moses addresses the community as though it were composed exclusively of men. This experience of exclusion is extremely troubling to the feminists due to the fact that “biblical memory is an active force in the spiritual lives of Jews,” as Sylvia Barack Fishman points out (1989: 43). Furthermore, Plaskow maintains that the issue of female exclusion is perpetuated and even exacerbated by the later traditions and developments in Halakhah, as put forward in the Talmud, and the responsa literature, where women are rarely seen “as shapers of tradition and actors in their own lives” (1991: 26). Rachel Adler in her article “I’ve Had Nothing Yet So I Can’t Take More,” discusses another dimension to the problem of the Sinai passage without which it is impossible to understand the assignment of Jewish feminism nowadays. She maintains that since the Torah is not just history, but also living memory, every time the story of Sinai is recited during the Sabbath and holiday liturgy, the past is and will be recreated for present and future generations of Jewish women who experience the feelings of alienation and exclusion all over again, “eavesdropping on the conversation between God and man” (1983: 22–23). As Adler puts it, “[…] because the text has excluded [the woman], she is excluded again in this re-enactment and will be excluded over and over, year by year, every time she rises to hear this covenant read” (1983: 23). Similarly to Fishman’s opinion above, Adler contends that women’s silence and invisibility is so overwhelming in the Sinai passage that it can provoke a crisis for Jewish feminists. She says, “We are being invited by Jewish men to re-covenant, ←80 | 81→to forge a covenant which will address the inequalities of women’s position in Judaism, but we ask ourselves, ‘Have we ever had a covenant in the first place? Are women Jews?’ ” (Adler, 1983: 22) This question has become an important part of Jewish women’s search for identity that would be comprised of all aspects of their lives, that is being female, Jewish, and a feminist.

According to Modern Orthodox feminist Blu Greenberg, part of the problem in terms of Halakhah, seems to be women’s exemption from observing the ‘fixed-time’ commandments, which is likened to exclusion by her and many other Jewish feminists. Such exemptions not only weaken women’s commitment to communal prayer but also suppress any desire to be formally considered equal members of the holy community. This is how Greenberg explains the use of the laws of exemption:

[…] it seems that the principle and practice of exemption generally yielded negative self-images of women regarding a discipline of steady prayer. What tilts the balance perhaps is the language of the principle itself: “Women, slaves, and children are exempt” (Kiddushin 1:7). Of course, women are not equated with slaves or to children, but the phrase subtly suggests that, in the eyes of the Halakhah, women shared with slaves and children a status lower than the adult free men. Not lost on women, surely, was the realization that individual slaves and male children could grow up or out of these ascribed categories, but the entire class of women forever retained a status of ‘exempt,’ ‘released,’ ‘uncountable.’ (1981: 85)

The stance of this group of Jewish feminists, including Judith Plaskow, Rachel Adler, and to some extent Blu Greenberg, who lay the blame for the inferior position of women on the Halakhah, is perhaps best expressed by Plaskow herself. In her ground-breaking essay “The Right Question Is Theological,” and later in her book Standing Again at Sinai, she calls for a new understanding of the primary categories of Jewish theology, that is, Torah, God and Israel that should begin “with acknowledgement of the profound injustice of Torah itself,” adding that “the assumption of the lesser humanity of women has poisoned the content and structure of the law, undergirding women’s legal disabilities and [women’s] subordination in the broader tradition” (1995: 231). Adler expands on their stance in her Engendering Judaism, by maintaining that the central Jewish categories of Torah, God, and Israel are not sufficient for a feminist Judaism and that feminists must experiment with a variety of approaches to Jewish sources by moving outside traditional categories in their reconstruction of Judaism (2001: xxii–xxvi). She proposes “a theology for engendering Judaism in both senses: a way of thinking about and practicing Judaism that men and women recreate and renew together as equals” (2001: xiv).

Even Blu Greenberg, a Modern Orthodox feminist, seems to regard the halakhic process as a flexible means to ensure a change in the women’s position in Judaism. Her attempt is representative of those made by Halakhah-binding women who explore practical solutions to improving their status in Judaism by working within the halakhic system. Apart from struggling with the ideological tensions between Orthodoxy and feminism, in her book On Being a Jewish Feminist: A View from ←81 | 82→Tradition, Greenberg advocates greater women’s involvement in public ritual and communal prayer (1981: 95–97). Simultaneously, however, she foresees that her suggestions concerning the integration of women into the minyan will be perceived by Orthodox rabbis as too much innovation or even a violation of mesorah (Jewish tradition) (Greenberg, 1981: 93). Indeed, she has been criticized by mainstream Orthodox circles for her ‘radical’ views, for being “too instrumentalist” in her attitude towards Halakhah, and for showing “an insufficient appreciation for the finer points of halakhic deliberation” as an insider (Ross, 2004: xi).

In Expanding the Palace of Torah: Orthodoxy and Feminism (2004), Orthodox feminist Tamar Ross, a representative of mainstream Orthodoxy, argues that feminism forces the Jewish community to re-examine the relationship between divine revelation and human interpretation in order to determine whether a tradition grounded in the notion of a unique revelation at Sinai can accommodate the changing moral sensibilities of its adherents (2004: xv–xvi). Although Ross contends that feminism indeed constitutes a genuine challenge to traditional Judaism, it does not mean that traditional Orthodox Jews are obliged to accept its perceptions even to a minimal extent. However, she believes that the familiarity with the feminist critique will enable Jewish traditionalists to assess the challenge that Orthodoxy is confronting and to develop an adequate response. She also seems to be fully convinced that feminism need not be perceived as a threat to traditional Judaism, and that Jewish tradition itself provides ways and means of dealing with such challenges. Ross concludes that the challenges that feminism presents have “the potential to enhance Judaism and make it more meaningful for all its believers, male and female alike [as well as] to enhance rather than destroy the foundations of Torah, while deepening its relevancy for our time” (2004: xvi–xvii). In contrast to Blu Greenberg, however, Tamar Ross, who identifies with the more traditionalist religious environment, seems to be far from providing ultimate answers to women’s issues in Orthodox Judaism. Neither does she advocate the changes in the fundamental halakhic status of women as this might lead to profound implications upon or even an upheaval in the entire system that has served the Jewish people for two thousand years (2004: xv). She acknowledges that she is fully committed to the tradition in which “the Torah has both described and prescribed a patriarchal society. Disturbing as this may be, [she believes] that it need not be the end of the story and that Jewish tradition itself provides hope that an authentic understanding of Torah can accommodate what is, to all intents and purposes, an egalitarian ethos” (2004: xxi).

The other group of feminist scholars is comprised of those who believe that it is the external circumstances that are responsible for perpetuating the inferior position of Jewish women in Jewish community, and/or that Halakhah may be actually used to remedy gender injustice in Judaism. For example, according to Rachel Biale, the Halakhah has not excluded Jewish women nearly as much as the folk cultures that have surrounded it. She argues that it was folk culture, not post-biblical Jewish law, for example, that perpetuated the notion of menstrual contamination and made menstruating women feel unwelcome in synagogues in ←82 | 83→certain European Jewish communities. Contrary to popular opinion, Biale suggests that, “the law [Halakhah] may have preceded common practice in what to the contemporary eye are liberal, compassionate attitudes toward women” (1995: 7). In a similar vein, Cynthia Ozick in an article entitled “Notes toward Finding the Right Question,” analyzing the sociological status of women in Judaism, argues that their subordination is not rooted deeply in Torah but is the result of its misinterpretation by rabbis throughout the centuries. Thus, “for Judaism, the status of women is a social, not a sacred, question” (1995: 126). Ozick also points out that the subordinate treatment of women within Judaism can be halakhically repaired, declaring that Torah itself provides its own basis for radical change of many aspects of Jewish life (1995: 123–124, 142). She has been taken to task by Judith Plaskow for not understanding the implications of the theological categories she has used in her article as well as assuming that the ‘otherness’ of women will disappear if only the community is flexible enough to rectify halakhic injustices. According to Plaskow, the problems extend far beyond Halakhah: the ‘otherness’ of women is directly linked to theological conceptions of God as male and to the male authorship of Jewish tradition (Plaskow, 1995: 226–227). However, in the last section of her article, Ozick raises a disturbing question what if:

[…] I have taken the position that the issue of the status of Jewish women flows from societal, not sacral, sources. But suppose this position is dead wrong? And suppose the opponents of this position, who believe that the status of women is in fact a sacral question, are right? (1995: 143)

In other words, Ozick is wondering whether it is possible that the lesser status and ‘otherness’ of Jewish women are created and sustained, albeit partially, by Torah itself, and do not derive only from the surrounding social attitudes. On the one hand, this might indicate Ozick’s ambivalence about her stance towards the source of the subordination of women in Judaism, on the other hand, her attempt to explore, or at least consider, the theological underpinnings, the very foundations of the Jewish tradition, as a potential source regarding women’s inferior status in Judaism.

Aviva Cantor provides yet another explanation for Jewish women’s oppression under Jewish patriarchy in her 1995 book Jewish Women/Jewish Men: The Legacy of Patriarchy in Jewish Life. She theorizes that one of the reasons why Jewish patriarchy oppressed Jewish women with such vigor was the emasculation of the Jewish male. As members of a cultural/religious minority residing within the host countries that often displayed hostile behavior towards them, Jewish men frequently lacked the ability to defend their communities and families, and were coerced into adopting positions of inferiority and subservience. Aviva Cantor explains:

The Jews’ condition in Exile is analogous in many ways to the oppression of women, who are also powerless under patriarchy and are affected by power struggles they are not part of and by their outcome. Lacking self-determination over their own destinies, ←83 | 84→Jews were, as are women, object rather than subject, forced to be reactive rather than active and to respond to others’ demands. (1995: 14)

Having felt powerless, Jewish men imposed the same kinds of conditions that they attempted to avoid, upon Jewish women, rendering them ‘object’ in the American Jewish community. However, the Jewish women had to grapple with something much more painful and hopeless than what Jewish men were experiencing, namely the realization that what was imposed upon Jewish men came from the external hostile host society, whereas what was imposed upon women came from within, from their own Jewish community. Thus, Jewish women felt doubly marginalized, as Jews by the host society in which they lived, and as women within their own American Jewish community.

The double marginalization of Jewish women both in the American and American Jewish communities has also contributed, as some scholars maintain, to the fact that Jewish women began to be seen as the archetypical victims of ‘Jewish feminine mystique’ which kept them within the confines of their private suburban homes and nuclear families, isolated from the world of work and wages, feeling ‘satisfied’ and protected, but at the same time totally powerless (cf. Shapiro, 1995: 247; Diner, Kohn, and Kranson, 2010: 2–3). According to these scholars, the subservient position of women lies not as much in the Halakhah as in “[…] male fear and rage at the idea of autonomous women defining their own relationship to the Jewish tradition. The issue is power: Who will have power over Jewish women’s lives?” (Plaskow, 1990: 26).

Irrespective of the source of Jewish women’s oppression, whether it is rooted in the Halakhah (Judith Plaskow, Rachel Adler, Blu Greenberg), historical custom and practice (Cynthia Ozick), the folk culture (Rachel Biale) or resulting from the power struggles in an exilic patriarchal society (Aviva Cantor), Jewish feminists adamantly opposed women’s subordination within the American Jewish community and called for radical changes in law as well as in ‘attitude’ to achieve equality of women. They demanded not only halakhic and institutional change, but also the radical transformation of “[their] religious language in the form of recognition of the feminine aspects of God” (Plaskow, 1995: 229), which they hoped might bring about changes in underlying Jewish attitudes of the whole Jewish community. Moreover, they objected to the dominant model of the middle-class femininity³⁹ that threatened to circumscribe Jewish women’s lives and their autonomy. Looking for opportunities to transcend the boundaries of domesticity, Jewish feminists promoted full participation of Jewish women in every sector of Jewish life, from religious to public ones – as religious leaders, educators, scholars, board members and ←84 | 85→professional executives in communal organizations, social justice activists, artists and businesswomen. Of course, receptivity to these demands varied depending on the Jewish denomination, with the Reform Movement more open to equal access, the Conservative Movement more restrictive, whereas the Orthodoxy hardly responsive to the suggestions put forward by Jewish feminists.

1.3.3 Achievements of Jewish Feminism