Feminist Theology in Jewish Tradition

Feminist Theology and the Jewish Tradition
Oxford Handbooks Online

Melissa Raphael
The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theology
Edited by Sheila Briggs and Mary McClintock Fulkerson
Print Publication Date: Nov 2011 Subject: Religion, Religious Identity, Theology and Philosophy of
Religion, Global Religions
Online Publication Date: Jan DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199273881.003.0003
2012
Abstract and Keywords
Building on the foundations of First Wave Jewish and Christian women's activism, Jewish feminist theology has made a
decisive contribution to the post-Holocaust renewal of Jewish thought. Its vision of Israel as an assembly of gendered
persons whose ethical relationships with the world and with one another are witness to the love and justice of God has
introduced inclusive language into the liturgy, and has expanded the linguistic and imaginal range of Jewish evocations of
God. In doing so, Jewish feminist theology has established the theological terms on which to affirm the full humanity of
Jewish women as subjects and agents of their own Jewish experience. This chapter begins by outlining the
denominational and postdenominational contexts of Jewish feminist theology and assessing its standing in the primarily
Anglophone Jewish community in which it has established itself since the second half of the 1970s. It then moves on to
examine the ideas and approaches of a number of Jewish feminist theology's key practitioners, and some of the
challenges it is likely to face over the coming years.
Keywords: Jewish feminist theology, Israel, Jewish women
Building on the foundations of First Wave Jewish and Christian women's activism, Jewish feminist theology has made a
decisive contribution to the post-Holocaust renewal of Jewish thought. Jewish feminist theology's vision of Israel as an
assembly of gendered persons whose ethical relationships with the world and with one another witness to the love and
justice of God has introduced inclusive language into the liturgy and expanded the linguistic and imaginal range of Jewish
evocations of God. In doing so, Jewish feminist theology has established the theological terms on which to affirm the full
humanity of Jewish women as subjects and agents of their own Jewish experience.
This essay begins by outlining the denominational and postdenominational contexts of Jewish feminist theology and
assessing its standing in the primarily Anglophone Jewish community in which it has established itself since the second half
of the 1970s. The essay will then move on to examine the ideas and approaches of a number of Jewish feminist
theology's key practitioners and some of the challenges it is likely to face over the coming years.
The Denominational Context of Jewish Feminist Theology
Throughout its history, Jewry has benefited from the outstanding piety, scholarship, and philanthropy of women who have
adapted Jewish law and custom to their gender-specific status and circumstances. However, by the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, First Wave Jewish feminists in Europe and North America recognized that women have a right and a
moral and spiritual duty to express their Jewish values and aptitudes outside the domestic sphere. Second Wave Jewish
feminists of the last four (p. 52) decades of the twentieth century went on to adopt a range of critical and disciplinary
perspectives in a negotiation with the tradition that would yield equality of access as women, not honorary men, to
positions of religious leadership, religious education, and full participation in communal worship.
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The present impact of feminism throughout the Western Jewish community, even in those circles that disapprove of it,
should not be underestimated. Contemporary Judaism offers women unprecedented educational and devotional
opportunities, though among the Orthodox this is only to a degree and of a kind permitted by an essentially male
dispensation. For despite the considerable advances made by feminism, we should not forget that men have generated
and dominated what is effectively the entire canon of Jewish religious and intellectual tradition. The male Jew has been
the normative Jew: he has been God's allocutor and the tradition's interlocutor and decisor in matters of Jewish law
(Raphael 2005). In the classic sources, women are silent, absent from the Jewish construction of the universe and of
God, categorically separate to men and classified with minors, slaves, handicapped people, and non-Jews (Wright 1994:
1523). This remains the case in Orthodox communities and to a lesser extent in the more conservative non-Orthodox
congregations as well, where more subtle forms of gender discrimination can persist despite a rhetorical commitment to
equality.
Religious feminist challenges to Jewish patriarchy have been of three overlapping types (Heschel 1986; Zaidman 1996).
Each of these has made a distinctive methodological and substantive contribution to Jewish feminist theology. Within
modern Orthodoxy, women use the frame and terms of halakhah (customarily, if somewhat inadequately, translated as
Jewish law) to negotiate between contemporary women's interests and those of the tradition. Orthodox feminists use a
conservative legal hermeneutic that limits its will for change to interpretations allowable by the male rabbinic
establishment within the existing spirit and letter of Torah. Orthodox feminist approaches to Judaism are predicated on a
view of the normativity of classical Judaism that differs sharply from that of more liberal Jewish feminists. While those on
the left of the Jewish feminist movement would be inclined to support Daniel Boyarin's view that rabbinic Judaism was a
takeover and disenfranchisement of all sources of traditional religious authority among Jews, including, but not only the
authority of women's traditions (2000: 179), those taking a more Orthodox approach would sympathize with the view
that, after the failure of Jewish military strength and the destruction of the Second Temple, the rabbis created a form of
Judaism that would be precisely hospitable to feminist values. According to this sympathetic account of postbiblical
Judaism, the community was structured to survive without military or political power and had espoused an image of God
whose power was deferred and whose present imitation was located in prayer and the service of the heart (Lubarsky
2004: 310). In short, Orthodox feminism focuses on halakhah as a necessary and sufficient locus of revelation that has
made it far less concerned with theology as an engine of reform than feminists from the less traditionalist denominations.
Since the nineteenth century, liberal Jewish feminism has drawn on the ethical impetus of modern reformism to gradually
achieve an at least nominal equality of religio-social opportunity with Jewish men. Less bound by halakhic judgments and
(p. 53) obligations than Orthodox feminists, and, indeed, sometimes indifferent to halakhic precedent, feminist scholars
of the broadly liberal traditionsmost notably Judith Plaskow, Rachel Adler, and Ellen Umanskyhave conjoined the
tradition's inherent prophetic self-criticism and self-revision with the humanistic values of modern Judaism to address (and
sometimes move beyond) the classic theological framework of Judaism: God, Torah, and the people Israel. This essay will
therefore devote most of its attention to Jewish feminist theology written and used by women from Reform and
Reconstructionist backgrounds, since it is within these non-Orthodox groupings that interest in theology is at its most
lively.
However, before turning to the liberal or reformist feminist contribution, it is important to examine the third type of
Jewish feminismpostmodern Jewish feminismsince its influence on liberal Jewish feminisms has been considerable
and the boundaries between the two types are highly permeable, on the reformist side at least. The more eclectic, self-
defining mood of ultraliberal or postmodern Jewish feminism is, naturally, the least bound by law and tradition. Lori
Lefkovitz, for example, finds the great pillars of Jewish thoughtGod, Torah, and Israelunhelpful to women. Preferring
the gynocentric categories of French philosophy, she subverts the rabbinic distrust of female Otherness and celebrates
its numinous power and mystery (1995). Other postmodern Jewish feminists have more clearly thealogical (Goddess-
orientated) affiliations. Some women on the alternative Jewish left have chosen to pursue a woman-centered approach to
reflection on the divine that includes the thealogical texts and rituals of the contemporary Goddess feminist movement
(see Pirani 1991; Gottlieb 1995; Raphael 1998). In doing so, Jewish feminists both on the edges of and within the
Goddess movement feel that thealogydiscourse on the Goddessneed not abandon or compromise their Jewishness.
As Ryiah Lilith notes, As a Goddess-worshipping lesbian feminist, I found that no mainstream Jewish denomination fulfilled
my spiritual needs but just because I am not a Reform Jew or a Conservative Jew, it doesnt mean that I am not a Jew. I
rejected the denominations, not the religion. I may not be able to explain exactly how I manage to be both Jewish and a
Pagan, but I know with certainty that I am both (2001: 110). Thealogy is especially congenial to women on the left of the
Jewish feminist movement when it honors the ancient near eastern Goddesses associated with ancient Israelite women's
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syncretistic practice such as the Canaanite goddess Asherah, whom the Israelites would sometimes style as a divine
consort of their God (see Long 1992: 1289; Brenner 1997), as well as those female divine hypostases that derive from
biblical, rabbinic, and mystical traditions, such as Shekhinah, the immanence of God, and Hochmah, the figure of Wisdom.
Consequently, it is not always possible to ascertain precisely the difference between a Jewish feminist theology and a
Jewish feminist thealogy. Many Jewish women who, like the academic and Reconstructionist rabbi Rebecca Alpert, would
not consider themselves post-Jewish or neo-pagan would nonetheless share her commitment to incorporating a
thealogical element within Jewish feminist theology. With Alpert, they would declare, I want room in my Judaism for a
variety of theological perspectives. I want room to explore the meaning of ancient Goddess worship; to let its existence
seep into my contemporary struggle with a masculine God (1999: 497). When Jewish feminist (p. 54) theology
postulates a maternal model of God, its discursive boundaries become especially porous to a thealogical celebration of
the Goddess as an idea of the divine that is as accessible to Jewish women as any other women (see Christ 2005: 579).
This does not, however, make thealogians such as Starhawk or Asphodel Long (the late mother of the British Goddess
movement), who have never repudiated their Jewishness, Jewish feminist theologians. Cynthia Ozick's famously derisive
remarks about Jewish feminist thealogy as a crude resurrection of every ancient idolatry the Jewish idea came into the
world to drive out (1983: 121) may be overstated, but it is difficult to deny that most models of the Goddess function in
very different ways to the Jewish God, even the Jewish God-She. Although their debate remained amicable, Judith
Plaskow's feminist spirituality parted company with that of the Goddess feminist Carol Christ's on the question of
monotheism, whose basic terms Plaskow was not willing to concede. The Goddess of feminist thealogy imposes no quasi-
contractual obligations upon humanity, does not primarily reveal herself through the historical or any posthistorical
juridical process, and, in the Wiccan model of the modalities of the Goddess as Maiden, Mother, and Crone, has a cyclic
nature largely alien to that of the Jewish God. Nonetheless, it is arguable that in a postmodern feminist religious
environment where women are encouraged to avail themselves of the freedoms and possibilities of compound, multiple,
or fluid cross-traditional identities across a spectrum of sexual-political alternatives, a rigid or hostile distinction between
Jewish feminist theology and Jewish feminist thealogy need not be drawn.
Definitions of Jewish Feminist Theology
The extent to which Jewish feminist theologyas a discourse or disciplinehas been an engine of sociopolitical change
in the Jewish community is debatable, not least because a consensus about the nature, content, method, and purpose of
theology has itself proved elusive in the Jewish community as a whole. While Jewish theology can reasonably be claimed
to be implicit in any Jewish text from the Bible onward that represents the being, will, or self-revelation of God, the
received view is that Judaism is legal, ritual, and social in character, rather than doctrinal or creedal. If that is the case,
then Jewish feminist theology will have been less apparent as a primary agent of change within the Jewish community
than the feminist struggle for halakhic reform and access to study and leadership as a means to spiritual-political justice
for women. This latter view would be found in the more Orthodox, halakhically orientated feminist circles, but also, and in
different ways, in liberal Jewish feminist circles as well, where Judaism may be more a social, cultural, spiritual, and
historical identity than a confession of faith. Very few Jewish women would describe themselves as professional feminist
theologians (though as time goes on, and the books and doctoral theses now in preparation are completed, the numbers
will grow). It also seems clear that those accustomed to a conventional Christian definition of theology as an ordered,
thematic discussion of the Church's presiding doctrines would detect little Jewish feminist theology in circulation.
(p. 55) Yet if, with Alexandra Wright, one defines feminist theology not as an academic profession, but as women
speaking about God and about themselves in relation to their religious tradition (1994: 152), it is more than possible to
claim that there is, in fact, a great deal of Jewish feminist theology in circulation, but it is diffused and implicit in articles,
lectures, and liturgical and ritual innovations. The more inclusively Jewish feminist theology is defined, the more prevalent
and influential it appears to be. Women rabbis and others use and produce theology through their hermeneutical,
pastoral, and liturgical and linguistic practices. In Britain, Jewish feminist theology has been both shaped and derived from
the pastoral and liturgical innovations of women rabbis such as Sybil Rothschild, Sybil Sheridan, Marcia Plumb, Alex
Wright, and Elizabeth Tikvah Sarah, who has been an important advocate for the lesbian feminist perspective (Rothschild
and Sheridan 2000). Similarly, feminist scholars of the Hebrew Bible such as Athalya Brenner offer readings of the text
that assume, even if they do not always state, feminist theological positions. Or again, Marcia Falk has developed a
constructive feminist theology through the creation of new blessings, poems, midrashim, translations, and rituals (1996,
2004). Here Jewish feminist theology becomes a discourse on the nature of God and the relation between God and the
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world that proceeds by drawing together Jewish tradition and feminist spiritual politics, poesis, art, philosophy, literature,
historiography, liturgy, language, and ethical values: the whole expressive range of Jewish feminism regardless of its
declaring a religious intention, each element being construed through the lens of the other.
As Rachel Adler recently recalled, the first anthologies of Jewish feminist thought puzzled Christian feminists, crammed
as they were with a hodgepodge of articles, most of which had nothing to do with matters of faith and doctrine. Instead,
history, sociology, and psychology rubbed shoulders with halakhic (legal) analyses, personal narratives, new rituals, and a
very few articles recognizable as theology (2002: 1). Although there are only a very few women who would describe
themselves as Jewish feminist theologians, Jewish feminist theology might be defined most inclusively not as a body of
self-identified theological texts or a separate academic discipline, but simply as the elucidation of what a Jewish feminist
can believe. Such an inclusive definition may precisely fail to be a definition in so far as it could render Jewish feminist
theology both everything and nothing in particular, but it does nonetheless signal what has been one of Jewish feminist
theology's main achievements, which has been to challenge received ideas of what theology should be and do.
Jewish Feminist Theology's Standing in the Jewish Academy and Congregation
With more than a hint of regret, David Ellenson has observed that no great systematic theology will be forthcoming in
our day. Furthermore, even if it were, many of us would doubt its claims for absolute certitude and veracity (1999: 501).
Instead, Ellenson (p. 56) finds that Judith Plaskow and Rachel Adler's feminist theology, like that of Arthur Green,
captures the theological temperament of our time. The orientations that define their writings are illustrative of the
emotive, yet tentative and personal tenor that informs so much theological work today. As the product of an intellectually
and communally fractured modernity, theirs is an experiential theology that thereby lacks certitude and
comprehensiveness (1999: 500).
Jewish feminist theology's experientialism, relationalism, and immanentism have also been characteristic elements of the
most influential twentieth-century Jewish theology: that of Martin Buber, Emmanuel Lvinas, Abraham J. Heschel, Arthur
Green, and others, the crucial difference being Jewish feminist theology's sustained attention to women's experience and
the rectification of gendered religious discrimination. Insofar as Jewish feminist theology is indicative of the mood and
direction of contemporary Jewish theology as a whole, it follows that Jewish feminist theologians have not been invariably
patronized or marginalized by other Jewish theologians. Significant numbers of male rabbis and academics whose broadly
left-wing spiritual-political interests are in Jewish men's studiesDaniel Boyarin, Howard Eilberg-Schwartz, and Arthur
Waskow notable among themacknowledge their debt to Jewish feminist theology (see Umansky 1999: 146).
Yet even if Jewish feminist theology encapsulates some of the mood and trajectory of current Jewish theology, Jewish
theology that is non-gender-reflexive has not accepted feminist construals of God or the divine attributes without
question. To take but one example: most Jewish scholars would be of the view that even if the Shekhinah (the divine
presence) is a traditionally feminine attribute of God, she is still properly subordinate to the male attributes of God. The
neo-Kantian Jewish theologian Steven Schwarzschild rejects the neomystical and feminist construal of the Shekhinah as a
female hypostasis of divine immanence. The theological anthropomorphization or metaphorical sexualization of divine
immanence, no less than literal conceptions of divine masculinity, limits God's transcendence, weakens monotheism, and
turns God from a spiritual and ethical being into a sort of hermaphrodite. According to Schwarzschild, the Shekhinah is
not the name of a divine hypostasis but a metaphor for the fundamentally ethical relationship between God and Israel, and
thereby, between God and humanity (1990: 237). It should also be noted that some Jewish feminist theologians have
similarly objected to any promotion of Shekhinah into a deity as this would undermine the unity of God (Frymer-Kensky
1994: 50).
There are, in fact, indications that the impact of Jewish feminist theology upon mainstream Jewish thought has been
limited or at least poorly acknowledged. In the recent Oxford Handbook of Jewish Studies (2002), whose editors style it
as a snapshot of the current state of research in Jewish Studies and which allocates space for its articles on the basis of
the extent and interest of current scholarly debate in that area, Paul Mendes-Flohr's article on Jewish theology makes
no methodological or substantive reference to Jewish feminist theology (Mendes-Flohr 2002). More surprisingly, it is also
barely referred to in Tal Ilan's overview of Jewish women's studies in the same volume (2002). In more popular Jewish
feminist literature, feminist theology rarely features as a (p. 57) disciplinary contribution. In Danya Ruttenberg's 2001
Yentl's Revenge: The Next Wave of Jewish Feminism, an edited collection of essays on the sexual, political, and cultural
identities of the present generation of Jewish feminists (effectively the daughters of Second Wave Jewish feminists),
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explicitly theological approaches do not feature at all.
It may be that Jewish feminist theology has not had the academic impact it might have because, as the Jewish liberation
theologian Marc Ellis has pointed out, the current conservative climate of theological appointments impedes the
development of new critical Jewish thought. Whereas theologians of Plaskow, Adler, and Ellis's age entered academia
supported by radical academics who valued, shared, and informed their younger colleagues political engagement, today
the education industry that increasingly dominates higher education is not hospitable to theologies of protest (Ellis 2004:
1745). For Jewish theologians the political backlash is compounded by dissent-stifling hiring practices for Jewish
academics in Jewish seminaries and in secular academic institutions. Both seminaries and universities tend to solicit the
opinion of local Jewish leaders during an appointment's selection process and further delimit the political scope of the
post by setting it in safe areas such as Old Testament or Hebrew studies (2004: 1789). As Ellis remarks: Do you
think it would be possibledid it ever cross the mind of the [Harvard] Divinity Facultyto hire a Jewish faculty member
with the same piercing critical skills as [Elisabeth] Schussler Fiorenza? (2004: 177).
It is impossible to understand the relative paucity and marginality of Jewish feminist theology, as well as its ambivalent
reception in the academic and congregational community, without recognizing that the tradition does not wholeheartedly
encourage and is often bemused by the theological project itself. Of course, Jewish religious thought and observance is
patently and inherently theological insofar as it is expressive of beliefs that ultimately derive from revelation. It is, in fact,
possible to cull a theology or at least a cluster of theological concepts such as those concerning divine providence or
eschatological hope from the aggadhic or literary elements of the classical rabbinic literature, even though the rabbis
(with the exception, perhaps, of Maimonides in the twelfth century) had little concern for the imposition of a dogmatic
scheme. Jewish philosophical theology has a long and distinguished history. Medieval Jewish thought in particular used
Greek philosophy to elucidate the divine object of its faith. Yet premodern Jewish theology all too often served an
apologetic purpose, whether in response to medieval Christian theological polemic against Judaism and coercive
attempts to convert the Jews, or as a means of scoring points in sectarian quarrels within the Jewish community itself
(Mendes-Flohr 2002: 7634). According to Orthodox commentators at least, in the modern period the Reform movement
used theology pragmatically to present Judaism's ethical credentials to a Western Christian society that was becoming
more tolerant of its Jewish population and to prevent emancipated Jews from abandoning the traditions of their
forefathers. By then, theology seemed to have become an essentially Reform intellectual and ethical project, separable
from halakhic study and observance: a modern apology for belief that has been detached from practice. For the
Orthodox, theological discussion might reinforce the halakhic obligation but does not itself impose the commandment.
(p. 58) While contemporary Jewish theology enjoys the support of some illustrious contemporary practitioners (Jacob
Neusner and Steven Katz among them), its disciplinary positioning within the American and British academy is relatively
marginal. It is common to find that, as a discipline, Jewish theology is subsumed under the category of Jewish philosophy
or it is not taught at all. In the nonconfessional intellectual culture of departments of Jewish Studies and Religious
Studies, Jewish feminist theology can seem doubly committed: a religious and a political confession (Plaskow 1994: 62
3). Leaving confessional studies to the seminary, Jewish Studies has produced an extensive feminist literature that rarely
includes theology qua discourse upon the nature and will of God and its self-revelation in history. Yet for the reasons
outlined above, Jewish theology, especially feminist theology which is a critical theology, is also methodologically foreign
to the Orthodox Jewish seminary, leaving Jewish feminist theology too often suspended in an intellectual vacuum
somewhere between the activity of the rabbinical seminary and the secular university. In Britain, theology can be studied
as a degree within the universities but theology departments tend to be Christian and theology is assumed to be Christian
unless stated otherwise. The energies of British Jewish Studies departments are usually focused on history, halakhah,
philosophy, and culture, with interest in theology as a discipline remaining almost as marginal as it is in the wider Jewish
community.
It is also notable that well-known, self-identified Jewish feminist theologians have not, to date, been trained in Jewish
theology. For want of a place to study Jewish theology in the late 1960s, Judith Plaskow trained in a Protestant school of
divinity in the United States (Plaskow 2005: 9) (as did I in England in the first years of the 1980s for similar reasons);
Marcia Falk and Rachel Adler studied English literature and Ellen Umansky trained as a historian (Adler 1998: xxiv).
Political, intellectual, and spiritual boundaries and margins have long been recognized as sites of freedom, subversion,
and regeneration. The uneasy location of Jewish feminist theology might therefore be welcomed as much as it is
regretted since the multi- and cross-disciplinarity of Jewish feminist theology has been a source of methodological and
substantive creativity. Nonetheless, its lack of a single academic identity can also militate against the development of
Jewish feminist theology as a focused discipline and literary corpus that can engage in fruitful dialogue with feminist
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theologians from other religious traditions.
Some Key Jewish Feminist Theological Contributions
Arguably, there are only three full-length books to date that have styled themselves works of Jewish feminist theology:
Judith Plaskow's Standing Again at Sinai (1990), Rachel Adler's Engendering Judaism (1998), and my own The Female
Face of God in Auschwitz (2003). Of these, Judith Plaskow's Standing Again at Sinai remains the presiding and
foundational Jewish feminist theological text. It is the closest Jewish feminist (p. 59) theology has yet come to paralleling
a Christian systematic theology, or at least a modern Protestant systematic where, in the manner of Schleiermacher,
doctrine is reinterpreted in terms of a particular principle or idea. I have already alluded to the reasons for this relatively
small corpus: namely, an Orthodox cultural preference for legal discourse, with Torah being the sufficient locus of divine
self-revelation, compounded by a distribution of labor within the Jewish academy that leaves Jewish theology marginal to
both the rabbinical and the secular Jewish Studies departments in the universities. It has also been noted that the Judaism
of many Jewish feminists is, like that of many other Jews, not so much religious or faith-based as culturally and politically
focused.
The question of Jewish feminist theology's contribution to Jewish feminism was first raised for a wide readership in an
article Cynthia Ozick published in 1979 in which she insisted that Jewish women's secondary role and status is not a failure
of revelation in Torah but a halakhic injury that is consequently a matter for halakhic, or what she calls sociological, not
theological, reform (1983: 142). Judith Plaskow then countered with the argument that Jewish women's status as Other to
the male norm is not halakhic in origin but precedes halakhah, originating in a masculinist conception of God and
revelation of which halakhic inequalities are but a symptom. Jewish feminism needs, therefore, to be grounded in an
engagement with the profound injustice of Torah itself, in a systemic revision of the theology that underpins the
structure, content, and interpretation of Jewish law (1983: 22333; see, also, 1994: 6284). It is not that Plaskow has ever
wanted Jewish feminist theology to dispense with Torah. Despite its androcentrism and its reinforcement of patriarchy,
Torah does attempt to testify to the workings of a guiding and calling God; to moments of illumination and mystery when
the curtain was pulled back from the endless chain of historical circumstance and some underlying meaning and presence
were traced and read from the events of Jewish history (1994: 78). It is rather that Plaskow finds Torah to be incomplete
and foreshortened in its range. Plaskow urges that the Torah's canon can be extended far beyond the traditional
boundaries of Torah, into the lives and writings of women and other nonrabbinic groups who are also witnesses to divine
presence and creators of Jewish theological meaning (1994: 79).
Plaskow's Standing Again at Sinai made a significant contribution to the revisioning of Torah, a contribution grounded not
only in her scholarship, but in her practical experience of Bnot Esh, the Jewish feminist spirituality collective she helped
to establish in the early 1980s, and the havurotthe informal liberal communities that are more open to alternative and
experimental ideas and practice than established congregations (1990: viiix). In Standing Again at Sinai Plaskow knows
her work is limited by the range of Jewish feminist religious studies itself, noting that because women speak more about
their lives than about theological issues per se there was not, at the time of her writing, a range of voices with which she
could dialogue (1990: xxi). Nevertheless, convinced that a constructive feminist theology, if not the narrow criticism of
patriarchal Jewish theology, would make a practical difference to women's lives (1994: 68), she began with women's
experience and moved to explore Jewish images of God from a feminist perspective in an attempt to reorient and
transform the Jewish conception of God (1990: 1213). In other words, her exercise in God-talk, which comes as the
fourth of six chapters, is (p. 60) subsequent to and dependent on the recovery of women's memory, embodiment, and
the reconstruction of community. Aware that there is no nonsexist essence of Judaism that can be retrieved by the
operations of feminist thought, Plaskow intends her book to help create a Jewish community in which women are
present and equal as women and in which difference is nurtured and respected (1990: 119). She wants to see the
transformation of Judaism into a religion that men and women shape together (1990: xvxvi).
In customary Reform tradition, Plaskow justifies women's continued adherence to Judaism on ethical, historical, and
relational grounds, rather than on the authority of revelation. As a woman and a feminist she has mixed feelings about
halakhah. Halakhah forms the greater part of the oral Torah and is regarded by Orthodoxy as a divine revelation through
which the revealed written Torahthe Hebrew Bibleshould be read. Plaskow grants that halakhah is a responsive
communal process that can protect rights and establish responsibilities. However, its rigidities and precedents can also
inhibit social spontaneity, innovation, and the acceptance, let alone celebration, of difference (1990: 6073). Instead of
testing the elasticity of halakhah, Plaskow's work has been more immediately concerned with the transformation of the
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theological imaginary and the use of feminist historiographical and hermeneutical methods to expand the Judaic canon.
Her most recent research marks the shift of her interests toward Jewish sexual ethics, and her latest book, published in
2005, The Coming of Lilith: Essays on Feminism, Judaism, and Sexual Ethics 19722003, collects her previous essays.
The explicitly theological dimension of her work forms the earlier part of her corpus.
Plaskow's struggle with halakhah, or more precisely, her refusal to struggle with it, signals perhaps the most significant
difference between Jewish feminist theology and Christian feminist theology. Whether or not a feminist Judaism should be
centered around law and whether law can rectify the injustices of gender discrimination sanctioned by its own structures,
norms, and sources are both issues peculiar to Jewish feminist theology (though parallels could be drawn with Islamic
feminists negotiation with Sharia law). Rachel Adler has a greater commitment to the accommodation of halakhah within a
feminist Reform Judaism than Judith Plaskow and Ellen Umansky. Perhaps because Adler identified as an Orthodox Jew
for a significant period of her life before returning to the Reform community of her upbringing, she holds fast to her
halakhic commitment by offering a liberal construal of halakhah as the act of making one's way or as pathmaking (from
the Hebrew root HLKh, to walk or go). Halakhah then becomes not so much law as a way of translating Judaism's stories
and values into action (Adler 1998: 21). To a greater extent than other Jewish feminist theologians, Adler's approach is
grounded in the traditional Jewish belief that revelation is produced hermeneutically through a dialogical reading of the
classical halakhic texts and the stories they tell. Rereading the classic texts is, for Adler, a central task of Jewish feminist
theology.
On both halakhic and hermeneutical counts, Adler's theology is perhaps the most characteristically Jewish of all Jewish
feminist theology written to date. Rather than offering a systematic feminist elaboration of the positive beliefs that
underpin and direct the community's hopes and practices, Adler's most important theological work, Engendering Judaism
(1998), is preoccupied with the means by which law, liturgy, and (p. 61) Jewish sexual and marital ethics can be
transformed by religious feminist values and practices. As Randi Rashkover observes, Adler's own theological position is
conspicuously absent from the book. Indeed, for Rashkover, her theological silence makes it more difficult for Jewish
feminists to bring religious and philosophical sophistication to the reading of classical Jewish texts (2004: 3301). Yet it
may be that Engendering Judaism is a little more theologically declarative than Rashkover finds it to be; Adler clearly
regards the feminist rereading of Torah as a way of mending Judaism itself. Adler's theological approach also illustrates a
very Jewish concern that God is also subject to the moral requirements of justice, and her inferential theological style
suggests that Jews should refrain from depicting God in positive theological discussions that may degenerate into
discursive idols.
Reflecting recent developments in feminist studies of religion, Adler's reading of the rabbis is complex, nuanced, and
nonideological. As Rashkover puts it, Adler avoids reading the rabbis as heroes or oppressors and reads them instead,
through a hermeneutic of laughter, as human beings whose stories portray them as suffering ordinary insecurities,
desires, and misadventures (327). Adler's reading of Berakhot 51b, for example, illustrates how her hermeneutic of
laughter can be a witty and deflating interjection into the patriarchal conversation. In Berakhot 51b, a rabbi and his
learned guest debate whether a woman should receive a glass of wine that has been blessed during the ritual of grace
after a meal. Their discussion so irritates Yalta, a woman of high status who is both the rabbi's wife and the daughter of a
wealthy and erudite family, that she goes to the wine cellar and smashes four hundred jars of wine. Her action leaves the
men looking foolish indeed as there is now no wine to bless. Yalta then disdains the unblessed cup of wine her husband's
guest has offered her as a placatory gesture with a sharply cutting remark. By focusing on Yalta's words and actions, not
on the substantive halakhic debate between the two men, Adler's feminist reading does not merely challenge the
religious and social prestige of Yalta's male guest but theologically destabilizes the very standing, locus, and possibility of
the holy and its blessings within the patriarchal order (see Adler 1998: 556).
Ellen Umansky has also made an invaluable contribution to the teaching and publication of Jewish feminist theology. She
notes that her approach is close to that of Adler, though she cannot, to the same degree as Adler, relinquish the
autonomy that Reform Judaism has traditionally conferred upon Jews by its modern selective approach to the observance
of Jewish law (1999: 144). In common with feminist theologians from other traditions, Umansky's approach to Jewish
feminist theology reflects a widespread lack of confidence that women's values and experience can be successfully
reconciled with those valorized by the patriarchal tradition.
Her negotiation with the halakhic mode has made a significant methodological contribution to Jewish feminist theology.
Umansky's theology, influenced primarily by Reform theology but also by Reconstructionist theology (with its emphasis on
the greater importance of community life than belief), is a product of Jewish modernity's critique of halakhah's archaic
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heteronomy. However, Umansky's theology is also a product of postmodernity where voluntary religious observance
entitles a woman to control (p. 62) and define the meanings of a Jewish life for herself by disprivileging androcentric
canonical traditions and focusing primarily on her own experience as a means of authoritative engagement with the
tradition. Umansky grants that it is questionable whether any woman can claim any personal experience to be Jewish
simply because she is a Jew; the tradition might impose its own cultural and religious prerequisites. Umansky's Reform
perspective is not, then, oblivious to the basic requirements of Jewish law, especially those pertaining to idolatry.
Nonetheless, Umansky rejects Jacob Neusner's normative view of Jewish theology as an exposition of received,
authoritative sources on the grounds that these norms are masculinist and androcentric. Jewish feminist theology should,
by its nature, celebrate its autonomy and subjectivity: its own voice, perspective, and stories (1989: 1934). Feminist
theology, for her, differs from traditional theology in its willingness to acknowledge the autobiographical nature of its
project and in its abjuration of claims to universal truth or a single form of authentic Judaism. Rather, the feminist
theologian's task is to articulate her own understanding of the self, God, and the world and, within a Jewish context, to
view these realities through the lens of Jewish feminist experience (1999: 142).
Umansky's feminist theological method is firmly contextual; citing Rabbi Laura Geller's conviction that to be a Jew entails
telling one's own story within the Jewish story, Umansky insists that Jewish feminist theology negotiates the categories of
God, Torah, and Israel through a theology self-consciously rooted in the context of the theologian's own life (1999:
143). Like other Jewish feminist theologians, Umansky's theological method is often rooted in liturgical revision and it is
also midrashic, that is, she uses the classical rabbinic hermeneutical method where new stories or midrashim are told by
retelling old stories in such a way as to reintroduce women into the text as agents of the narrative and whose
experiences of God are not entirely mediated through those of men (1999: 145). By focusing on theology's narrative
dimension, Umansky has made an important contribution to feminist historical theology. Her studies of Lily Montagu (the
founder of British liberal Judaism) and other well-known and unknown Jewish women demonstrate how Jewish women's
piety and activism have enacted a personal, affective theology predicated on relational intimacies, both between human
persons and between persons and God (Umansky 1983; Umansky and Ashton 1992).
Predated by an article by Susan Nowak in which she offered a humanistic reading of women's Holocaust memoirs
(1999), my book The Female Face of God: A Jewish Feminist Theology of the Holocaust (2003) offers a different
approach to historical theology. This is the first full-length Jewish feminist theological engagement with the Holocaust,
parts of which have been reprinted not only in mainstream Jewish theological collections, but also in a number of
Christian theological publications, suggesting spiritual continuities and permeabilities between Jewish and Christian
feminist theology, particularly in the area of theodical reflection. In this book I use women survivors memoirs of
Auschwitz to argue that it was a patriarchal model of God, not God-in-God-self, that failed Israel during the Holocaust.
This was a model of God that was reliant upon an idea of masculine power that simply could not withstand the actual
masculine patriarchal power of Nazism that confronted it.
(p. 63) A central purpose of the book is to challenge the masculinist free-will defense of God's inaction or absence
during the Holocaust as the justifiable price of (male) autonomy and moral freedom that most post-Holocaust theologies
are in various ways predicated upon. The deployment of the free-will defense in post-Holocaust theology suffers from a
number of intrinsic philosophical flaws (Katz 2005), but also does not correlate with women's experience as evidenced in
so many of their memoirs and by so much of the feminist historiography of the Holocaust (see further, Raphael 2003,
2004). Judith Tydor Baumel's research on Jewish women's structures of mutual support in pre-war Nazi Germany and
during the Holocaust suggests that, historically at least, Holocaust theology need not turn on the axis of freedom (1995,
1999). Baumel has shown that women developed cooperative strategies for survival out of previous domestic,
philanthropic, and feminist experience that had fostered sisterhood and solidarity. She concludes that crisis situations can
strengthen women's communal identities and power while negating the masculine ideal of the autonomous individual
(1999: 3334, 343, 344).
Historical evidence has theological implications. My book argues that in the ghettos and death and concentration camps
women seem to have invested their human dignity less in freedom as such than in the degree to which they were needed
by vulnerable others and bound to them by quasi-covenantal ties of love and obligation. So too, the women's memoir
literature gives little evidence either for a female equation of dignity and freedom per se or for women calling upon
God's interventionary power to save them, but far more for their calling upon one another to be present to each other's
need. What seems to have mattered to women was to maintain a capacity to respond to the need of the Other, just as
they had done in family and communal life before the onslaught.
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Although Judaism is a practical religion that regulates and ritualizes the ordinary needs that sustain life, women's
experience in meeting the emotional and physical needs of the suffering Other has been largely ignored by post-
Holocaust theology: it is not considered an authoritative religious witness to the self-revelation of God in history. And yet
my feminist reading of the narratives of resistant presence to the suffering Other found in women's memoirs of the
Holocaust period counters these theologies of absence. In these texts, women often remember how they held, covered,
warmed, and fed other women, and how other women did those motherly things for them. From a post-Holocaust
feminist perspective, such acts can be construed as figures or tableaux of God's maternal presence to suffering within
Auschwitz. Women's efforts to restore humanity to the degraded Other can be interpreted as acts of tikkun, or
restorationthe Jewish task of sanctification that makes the world fit for God's presence. If that was the case, then the
redemptive, covenantal process was not suspended by Auschwitz but went on in spite of it.
While, in Judaism, memory (zakhor) is a commandment, a sanctification of history that has a necessarily collective
dimension, The Female Face of God in Auschwitz does not seek to speak on behalf of women victims of the Nazi
genocide or to appropriate and rewrite what they wrote. Rather, it suggests that these stories of resistant presence to
the Other, in a place defined by its will to erase presence through the processes of mass degradation and murder, can,
for the post-Holocaust feminist reader, constitute a (p. 64) discernment situation where the meanings of these
women's stories can continue to unfold in other women's lives also shaped by covenantal love. Theologically too, the
traditional Jewish image of the Shekhinah as a female figure of divine presence accompanying Israel into exile correlates
well with these narratives of female shelter and again counters the dominant theologies of absence. Instead, the stories
of women's relationships in AuschwitzBirkenau and other camps can become media of divine presence, read and told as
narrative bodies for God (to use a phrase Rachel Adler uses in a different context (1998: 96)). Here, women's holding,
pulling, and pushing the Other from death back into the slender possibility of lifeso often the very substance of their
memoirwere means of carrying God into Auschwitz under a torn shelter: an improvised Tent of Meeting in which
women could meet God in the face-to-face relation.
Jewish Feminist Theology and the Subversion of Theological Essentialism
Some think that religious feminism, with its roots in religious traditions that divinely and eternally ordain heterosexist
gender roles, will be more susceptible to the charge of essentialism than other feminisms. While I am yet to be
persuaded that essentialist attribution of different roles, values, and characteristics to men and women should, in fact,
be avoided in all and every instance, it seems clear that Jewish feminist theology has done much to subvert and
complicate the apparent essentialism of feminist theologies that ignore the masculine attributes of God or simply replace
them with feminine attributes. Jewish feminist theology has, for example, avoided undue reliance on potentially
essentialist feminine names for God which, while properly valorizing traditionally female ethical postures and practices,
are in danger of reinforcing the nurturing attributes ascribed to women by religious patriarchies that refuse them any
others. Gynocentric names for God, such as harachmamima, a female form of The Merciful One, with strongly uterine
overtones, and Shaddai, a biblical name for God usually translated as Almighty but deriving etymologically from breasts
(see Gen. 49: 25; Ruth 1: 20), are often used by Jewish feminist theologians and liturgists alongside less biologically
inflected names such as The Holy One.
Of course, Jewish feminist theology can be solidly personalistic. Rachel Adler's own work is a significant instance of
feminist personalism. She insists on God as a real, personal, sustaining Other: the creator and covenantal partner with
whom the people of Israel have had a long and complex historical relationship (1998: 916). My own work is also
predicated on a personalistic model of a God revealed in history. However, Jewish feminist theologians are also inclined
to express their sense of God as an immanent dynamic energy that can be evoked by a litany or stream of metaphors that
resist the predication of a patriarchal super-personality to God such as that of the monarchical God whose exclusively
masculine character is idolatrous and which renders the female (p. 65) ontologically Other to the divine. Tikva Frymer-
Kensky, for example, has explored the multiple facets within the unity of God by noting biblical instances of morphing,
such as Deuteronomy 32 where God is imaged in a succession of images from a rock and father to a mother eagle, birth-
giver, and warrior. When one image for God can dissolve into another, motion and change are introduced into a
theological repertoire that can no longer be limited to one set of static and hierarchical metaphors for God (1994).
Marcia Falk similarly expresses her sense of the permeable boundaries of the human, natural, and the divine through the
composition of new prayers and new translations of traditional texts. By emphasizing the immanence of God in nature, the
community, and the individual and finding elemental images such as well-spring of life or spark of the inner self that are
conceptually, if not in Hebrew grammar, gender neutral, Falk destabilizes received masculine anthropocentric
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theologies in which the transcendence of God separates the divine from the female and the natural (1989: 536).
Judith Plaskow's recent notion of a transgendered God also signals a tendency in Jewish feminist theology to correct its
own tendency toward theo(a)logical essentialism. In a lecture given at the University of Manchester in 2000, she
explored the theological instabilities and contradictions generated by the Jewish anthropomorphic concept of God as
father and husband of Israel that suggest a model of God who is neither male nor female, nor androgynous, but
transgendered. Plaskow notes that the Jewish God is gendered but not sexed: the Bible consistently veils or averts its
gaze from that part of God that would reveal God's sex (as on Mount Sinai when Moses and three priests and seventy
elders see God but the text refers only to what lies beneath God's feet (Ex. 24: 911). Likewise, although the Hebrew
Bible refers to God as a woman in labor and as a woman nursing her baby, God is also Israel's husband. However, the
literature is reticent about their sexual relationship, not least because, as Howard Eilberg-Schwartz (1994) and Daniel
Boyarin (1997) have pointed out, God's being effectively married to Jewish men has homoerotic implications that have
long troubled its patriarchal interpreters. The indeterminacy of God's sex feminizes Jewish men as lovers and wives of
God and can erase women's sexuality as a reflection of God's image, making it redundant or superfluous to the male
communion with God. Yet the very indeterminacy and ambiguity of the bond between God and Israel can also leave it
open to reconceptualizations that reflect the performativity and playfulness of sexuality (evident, for example, in the
mutualities, subversion of gender stereotypes, and slippages in the subject and object voices of the biblical Song of
Songs). As Plaskow notes, If gender is something we perform, the possibilities for divine performance are infinite
(2000: 9). Plaskow does not present her model of a destabilized, transgendered God as a cure-all for hierarchy, violence,
and coercion in the tradition, but argues that it does allow Jews to question compulsory heterosexuality and, through
fluid and shifting subject positions of multiple selves, to experience a more fluid relational possibility between persons
and between persons and God (11).
Not only Jewish men's studies, but also process theology has informed Jewish feminist theology. In Sandra Lubarsky's
post-Holocaust critique of the traditional attribute of divine omnipotence, God's power is affirmed as maximal but not
coercive because that would contradict God's perfect goodness. Instead, God must work in tandem with other (p. 66)
causal influences and with the element of self-determination that defines each occasion. God is experienced as an
immanent power, responding to creaturely freedom with an influx of possibilities and thus actively working to shape the
world (2004: 308). God's power is quiet, hidden, and persuasive; it is a love that encourages rather than commands.
Lubarsky's feminist qualification of the attribute of divine omnipotence is not to be mistaken for tacit acceptance of the
powerlessness and passivity that has so often led to the degradation and abuse of women. Rather, divine power is
construed as an active, vital, organic power that is a good model for the human exercise of power (31011).
Challenges for Jewish Feminist Theology in the Twenty-first Century
It is inevitable that Jewish feminist theology will continue to evolve over the coming years, especially as the academic
pioneers of Second Wave Jewish feminism begin to contemplate retirement and younger scholars inherit a globalized
world with changing opportunities, issues, and patterns of inequality. The next generation of feminist theologians will face
different challenges than the previous generation of feminists whose radical outlook was formed during the 1960s
through to the 1980s when the Death of God movement, liberation theology, and (after Bultmann) systemic
demythologization set the theo-political agenda. For Jewish women, radical theologies were further complicated in two
different ways: first, by awareness of feminist anti-Judaism (Jewish and Christian feminist dialogue under the leadership of
Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza, Rosemary Ruether, and Judith Plaskow has greatly improved understanding and produced
a considerable literature in its own right), and second, by a theological reluctance born of the trauma of God's apparent
silence and absence from his covenantal people during the Holocaust. This was a divine silence prefigured in and
compounded by the biblical and rabbinic notions of God as a hiding God: an elusive God who mysteriously hides his face;
who is himself resistant to human speculation on his nature.
Perspectival shifts are already evident, even among Second Wave feminists themselves. In 2002, prompted in part by her
mother's decline into dementia and more generally by the plea of human suffering that cannot be healed or justified,
Rachel Adler expressed doubts about the benign maternal God-She upon which so much Second Wave feminist
spirituality has been predicated. Adler regards the relational ethic as a legacy of an Enlightenment progressivism that
cannot be sustained indefinitely in the face of so much historical evidence to the contrary. She concludes:
Perhaps the universe is darker and messier than we have been willing to concede. Indeed, perhaps this
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tender, intimate divine presence which is our generation's master liturgical image, implicit in all its prayers and
sacred music is not the only face God turns towards us. Sometimes She cannot be imaged as Mother or Lover.
Sometimes she is the attacking bear bereft of her cubs, the lioness in our path, the (p. 67) terrifying, the
arbitrary, the inexplicable. I am asking how we will speak to and of Her. I am asking why. (Adler 2002: 3; see,
also, 1998: 99)
Although Adler's recent comments may not have done full justice to either the fluidity of Jewish feminist models of God or
to the sexual ambiguities of the traditional love between God and Israel, Adler's sense that the Enlightenment legacy has
shaped and now circumscribes the Jewish feminist theological agenda seems well founded. Similarly, Miriam Peskowitz
and Laura Levitt have questioned what the consequences might be when the majority of work in Jewish feminist studies
has been tied either implicitly or explicitly to the Enlightenment's project of emancipation (Peskowitz and Levitt 1997:
14). The legacy of ethical rationalism left by Haskalah (the Jewish Enlightenment movement that developed about a
century after that of Christian Europe) permitted Second Wave Jewish feminist theology to criticize the irrationality and
injustice of premodern gynophobia and to interrogate the authority and mentality of the classical sources. Modern
Judaism created the possibility for Jewish feminist theology, yet modernity may also, in the future, limit its scope.
Peskowitz and Levitt's question might be directed toward Jewish feminist theology whose historicist, ethical Reform terms
and assumptions have permeated its thought but have not yet been critically interrogated.
Jewish feminist theology is the product of its time; most immediately it has been a post-Holocaust theology in which
Judaism can no longer be justified either by classical faith in the God of revelation on Sinai or by the modern Reform
assertion that Judaism underpins the ethical structures of Western civilization. Consequently, at the beginning of the
twenty-first century, Jewish feminist theology is still best able to justify Judaism to other Jewish women on the grounds of
its history of prophetic concern for social justice, of its existence as a source of spiritual and practical connection
between foremothers, mothers, and daughters, and as a ritual and imaginal focus for women's communal experience and
identity. To varying degrees, all types of Jewish feminism have put their shoulder to the liberal Jewish feminist cause and
have focused on women's religious liberation, their equality of religious opportunity, and their capacity to reorient the
tradition toward the practical needs and conditions of their own lives. And they are not the only ones to have done so.
Even Orthodox feminist scholars have deployed the same historical methods of modern liberal theology. The work of Blu
Greenberg and Judith Hauptman, for example, has been to rationally justify women's continuing participation in Jewish
life by defending the Talmudic rabbis as more sensitive to women's needs than other non-Jewish religious authorities of
the time. If there is any deference to the supernatural authority of these texts it is very muted. Greenberg, Hauptman,
and others develop an essentially modern liberal defense of Judaism, arguing that the discriminatory husk of the tradition
can be discarded to reveal its unchanging core: its principles of justice and equality (Heschel 1986: 27).
Jewish feminist theology to date has tended to justify the practice of Judaism to women on the grounds of its ethical
provision, not its revelation or eschatological promise. For example, the covenantal motif predominates in Jewish feminist
religious writing and practice not only because it is inherently relational but because its consensual reciprocities (p. 68)
are so amenable to the liberal values of individualism, autonomy, and immanence. And yet the rational, egalitarian
impetus of Jewish Enlightenment thought may be leaving Jewish feminist theology reluctant to engage some of the great
themes of classical Judaism. As I have argued elsewhere (Raphael 2006), in the coming decades Jewish feminist
theology may want to revisit some of Judaism's classic truth claims, many of which, as a modern project, it rejected or
neglected a priori. Jewish feminist theology should, I think, address its historicity, its modern resistance to certain
elements of Jewish belief, and its less critical adherence to others. For as Susannah Heschel, herself a Jewish feminist,
pointed out over twenty years ago, feminists have come to stand in ethical authority over the religious authority of the
tradition and its content (1986: 31). Consequently, some elements of the tradition have been privileged (such as the
covenantal motif), and others have all but disappeared. Messianism, for example, is not characteristic of Jewish feminist
theology, principally because the figure of a sole male redeemer in the role of a priest, warrior, or king is inimical to
feminist hopes and values. Yet that messianic strain in the tradition, which sees the messianic era as an intrahistorical
spiritual and political renewal whose justice and peacemaking radically transforms both the life of the Jewish community
and that of God's whole creation, is very far from incompatible with the feminist vision. Likewise, post- or late modern
Jewish thought's refusal of normativity and its appeal to locality and difference has introduced a new inclusivity that has
replenished Judaism's imaginal and linguistic repertoire, but it has also hampered the cross-cultural political and spiritual
solidarities among diverse groups of Jewish women and hampered the development of a common discourse on the
public exteriority of God's self-revelation in a world that is cosmically as well as historically situated.
Finally, Jewish feminist theologians (especially those living outside Israel) cannot any longer delay consideration and
Page 11 of 15
rectification of their Eurocentric, Anglophone perspective. Jewish feminist theology needs to catch up with Jewish
feminist cultural anthropology. For some time now, Jewish feminist scholars have acknowledged that their particular
studies do not represent all Jewish women everywhere. There is now far greater attention to the cultural specificity of
Jewish women's experience, which differs widely according to denominational background, economic standing, ethnicity,
age, and geographic region (see, e.g., Sered 1992; Schely Newman 2002). However, a great deal more work remains
to be done, especially with reference to ethnic and geographic factors of difference, before Jewish feminist theology can
consider its discourse truly inclusive. As reflected in this very essay, Jewish feminist theology has been dominated by
middle-class, privileged Reform and Reconstructionist Ashkenazic women of European background who have yet to
attend to and learn from non-Ashkenazic Mizrahi (Middle Eastern and North African) and Central Asian Jewish women's
voices within and outside the State of Israel. Although there are, for example, approximately 200,000 Arab Jews living in
the United States, many women, whether of a theological background or otherwise, know little more about Mizrahi
Jewish women than their culinary traditions as presented by Jewish food writers such as Claudia Roden, who was herself
born in Zamalek, a district of Cairo (1996). Middle Eastern and North African Jewish feminists who live in Ashkenazi-
dominated Jewish communities can be subject to both the sexism of Mizrahi culture itself and (p. 69) intra-Jewish bias,
including that found among Jewish feminists who unthinkingly identify being Jewish with being Ashkenazi and who regard
non-Ashkenazi concerns as of marginal special interest in the same way that male Jews identify the Jew as male and
women's concerns as the exceptions to a male rule (Khazzoom 2001: 175; Dahan Kalev 2001). Loolwa Khazzoom, who
is of Iraqi-Jewish background, remembers growing up and flying into fits of glee and gratitude upon simply hearing a
leader mention the existence of non-Ashkenazi Jews (2001: 176). Ashkenazi, Anglophone Jewish feminist theologians
would gain much from listening to those Jewish women who may use different prayer books, sing different Shabbat and
holy day songs to different tunes, use different Jewish dialects such as Ladino or Judeo-Arabic, enjoy different festival
traditions, honor different Jewish women's historical contributions, have different body images, experience different
degrees of gender discrimination, and inherit a colonial and postcolonial heritage whose hyphenated identities could
importantly inform their own and others theological perspective and repertoire.
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Samuelson (Ed.), Women and Gender in Jewish Philosophy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 31439.
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Penguin.
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Women Today. London: SCM Press.
RUTTENBERG, DANYA (ed.) (2001). Yentl's Revenge: The Next Wave of Jewish Feminism. New York: Seal Press.
SCHELY NEWMAN, ESTHER (2002). Our Lives Are But Stories: Narratives of Tunisian-Israeli Women. Detroit: Wayne State
University Press.
SCHWARZSCHILD, STEVEN (1990). Shekhinah and Eschatology, in Menachem Kellner (Ed.), The Pursuit of the Ideal: Jewish
Writings of Steven Schwarzschild. New York: New York University Press, 23550.
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Oxford University Press.
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Edward Mellen.
(1989). Creating a Jewish Feminist Theology: Possibilities and Problems, reprinted in JUDITH PLASKOW and CAROL C.
CHRIST (Eds), Weaving the Visions: New Patterns in Feminist Spirituality. New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 18798.
(1999). Jewish Feminist Theology, in ELLIOT N. DORFF and LOUIS E. NEWMAN (Eds), Contemporary Jewish Theology: A
Reader. New York/London: Oxford University Press, 1417.
and ASHTON, DIANNE (Eds) (1992). Four Centuries of Jewish Women's Spirituality: A Sourcebook. Boston: Beacon.
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Judaism, 16: 4765.
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Further Reading
ADLER, RACHEL (1998). Engendering Judaism: An Inclusive Theology and Ethics. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society.
ALPERT, REBECCA (1997). Like Bread on the Seder Plate: Jewish Lesbians and the Transformation of Tradition. New York:
Columbia University Press.
FALK, MARCIA (1996). The Book of Blessings: New Jewish Prayers for Daily Life, the Sabbath, and the New Moon Festival.
San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco.
GOLDSTEIN, ELYSE (Ed.) (2009). New Jewish Feminism: Probing the Past, Forging the Future. Woodstock: Jewish Lights.
PLASKOW, JUDITH (1990). Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism from a Feminist Perspective. San Francisco: Harper and Row.
and DERMAN, DONNA (Eds) (2005). The Coming of Lilith: Essays on Feminism, Judaism and Sexual Ethics, 19722003.
Boston: Beacon Press.
RAPHAEL, MELISSA (2003). The Female Face of God in Auschwitz: A Jewish Feminist Theology of the Holocaust.
London/New York: Routledge.
(2006). Standing at a Demythologised Sinai? Reading Jewish Feminist Theology through the Critical Lens of Radical
Orthodoxy, in ROSEMARY RADFORD RUETHER and MARION GRAU (Eds), Interpreting the Postmodern: Responses to Radical
Orthodoxy. New York: T&T Clark, 197214.
ROSS, TAMAR (2004). Expanding the Palace of Torah: Orthodoxy and Feminism. Lebanon, NH. University Press of New
England.
UMANSKY, ELLEN (1992). Reclaiming the Covenant: A Jewish Feminist's Search for Meaning, in Ellen Umansky and Dianne
Ashton (Eds), Four Centuries of Jewish Women's Spirituality: A Sourcebook. Boston: Beacon Press, 2304.
Melissa Raphael
Melissa Raphael is Professor of Jewish Theology at the University of Gloucestershire, UK. Her research interests have focused on
post-Christian feminism, Jewish feminist theology, and Jewish religious aesthetics. She is the author of a number of studies, including
Theology and Embodiment: The Post-Patriarchal Reconstruction of Female Sacrality (1996), Rudolf Otto and the Concept of Holiness
(1997), The Female Face of God in Auschwitz: A Jewish Feminist Theology of the Holocaust (2003), and Judaism and the Visual
Image: A Jewish Theology of Art (2009).
Page 15 of 15

Feminist Theology in Jewish Tradition

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Feminist Theology and the Jewish Tradition

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Feminist Theology and the Jewish Tradition

Abstract and Keywords

Keywords: Jewish feminist theology, Israel, Jewish women

The Denominational Context of Jewish Feminist Theology

Definitions of Jewish Feminist Theology

Jewish Feminist Theology's Standing in the Jewish Academy and Congregation

explicitly theological approaches do not feature at all.

theologians from other religious traditions.

Some Key Jewish Feminist Theological Contributions

Jewish Feminist Theology and the Subversion of Theological Essentialism

Challenges for Jewish Feminist Theology in the Twenty-first Century

University of California Press.

the American Academy of Religion, 73: 57780.

Forum, 24: 116.

Critique of Politics, Culture and Society, 4: 536.

FRYMER-KENSKY, TIKVA (1994). On Feminine God-Talk, The Reconstructionist, 59: 4855.

Oxford University Press, 77096.

Jewish Feminism. New York: Seal Press, 16880.

Jewish Feminism. New York: Seal Press, 10211.

Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 75669.

A Reader. New York: Schocken, 12051.

Reader. New York: Schocken, 22333.

Identities, Nova Religio, 1: 198214.

Women Today. London: SCM Press.

Oxford University Press.

Rabbis Tell Their Stories. London: SCM Press, 15261.

Judaism, 16: 4765.

Columbia University Press.

San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco.

London/New York: Routledge.

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