Jewish feminism

Torah Queeries: Weekly Commentaries on the Hebrew Bible

admin — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 16:01:00 +0000

Edited by Gregg Drinkwater, Joshua Lesser, David Shneer

Torah Queeries is a compilation of sixty drashot, short exegetical essays, each of which addresses one of the parshiyot, segments of the Torah that comprise the yearly cycle of the reading of the Five Books of Moses. The reason there are sixty drashot rather than the usual fifty-four is because six additional ones are included, each dealing with one of the major Jewish holidays. Each drash engages the pertinent sacred text from a particular queer perspective—whether by exploring passages traditionally assumed to prohibit homosexuality (such as Elliot Dorff’s “How Flexible Can Jewish Law Be?”), by “updating” the story so it speaks to some aspect of the modern-day quest for a more just community (such as Steve Gutow’s “Setting the Stage for Pluralistic Judaism“), or by uncovering the presence of queer gender or queer desire in the Torah itself (such as Sarra Lev‘s “Esau’s Gender Crossing”).

On one hand, the book is an attempt to queer the act of Torah interpretation itself in a variety of ways: reading against the grain, turning traditional interpretations on their heads, reading with an eye to the margins of the stories, and claiming the right (as queer people and other outcasts) to interpret Torah in the first place. On the other hand, as the editors are careful to point out, there is absolutely nothing new about approaching Torah interpretation in this way. Although this is sometimes forgotten, Torah interpretation has always been fundamentally creative, confrontational, and revolutionary.

One need only read a single page of Talmud to understand that contradiction, upheaval, and the search for a more just and inclusive Jewish society are at the sacred core of textual interpretation and generation in (at least rabbinic) Jewish tradition. Thus, Torah Queeries is both boundary-crossing and radical and squarely traditional. As its focus on, and profound respect for, the Torah suggests, the book seeks to root itself firmly in history while simultaneously contributing to the continued dynamism of a modern, evolving Judaism.

Torah Queeries is close to my heart, and I was fortunate to have had the opportunity to participate in the project in its first incarnation as a weekly queer Torah commentary blog. I’m also fortunate to be able to say that many of the authors in the anthology are my colleagues and friends. I’ve experienced firsthand the amazing community that has accrued around a shared love of Torah, as well as a shared belief in the value and dignity of queer people in all our forms.

Torah Queeries and related queer Jewish projects are creating venues for queer Jewish scholarship, creativity, and community. This is precious, powerful work.

Written by: Ri J. Turner, April 8th 2010

Women and Judaism: New Insights and Scholarship

admin — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 01:00:00 +0000

Edited by Frederick E. Greenspahn

New York University Press

Why is it that so many scholars—people well-versed in captivating ideas and history—are dry writers? Being a feminist with Jewish roots, I was really excited to review Women and Judaism. Divided into four sub-categories: classical tradition, history, contemporary life, and literature—the volume did present some very interesting thoughts on women's role within the Jewish religion. Unfortunately, like many textbooks I remember from college, Women and Judaism was written in a scholarly, rather than engaging, format. While there were a few authors who were exceptions, this dry style dampened my enthusiasm for what could have been a fascinating read.

That said, if you can wade through the style, the meat of the book is definitely worth checking out. For starters, there is some interesting discussion about the relationship between Judaism and feminism—the authors don't believe them to be mutually exclusive. Rather than justify the sexism written into historical Judaic documents, several of the authors make the point that it is the sexism of the time that led to the inequity in religious texts—and they think that modern Judaism can, and should, move past it. This is probably the book's key theme: the authors challenge the idea that Judaism is a fundamentally sexist religion, arguing that changing times call for changing practices.

Some of the bare historical facts (the first female rabbi was not ordained until 1972!) were shocking in terms of how late women were accepted into leadership roles, and how long it took for them to be included in traditionally male roles and ceremonies. The essays of Pamela S. Nadell (“Women and American Judaism”) and Sylvia Barack Fishman (“Women's Transformation of Contemporary Jewish Life”) are both eye-opening and highlight the importance of Jewish feminists in the second wave of the women's movement in the United States.

As a writer, the section on literature was of particular interest to me. “Text, Nation and Gender in Israeli Women's Fiction,” by Nehama Aschkenasy, is a very interesting piece; she analyzes the still-evolving feminist literary response to the historically male-dominated Israeli culture. But as Sara R. Horowitz notes in “Women in Jewish American Literature,” sexism has curtailed the celebration and acknowledgment of Jewish women writers in the United States until the last quarter century, which she describes as a “sea change.”

If you can plod through some of the narratives, the ideas contained in this volume make it worth reading each of the essays.

Written by: M.L. Madison, February 3rd 2010

The Passionate Torah: Sex and Judaism

admin — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 23:00:00 +0000

Edited by Danya Ruttenberg

New York University Press

This new collection of essays, solicited from among the world’s most brilliant scholars of rabbinic literature, interpreters of the Torah, and professors of gender studies, is the first book I would recommend for those preparing to teach advanced courses in Jewish Studies. The essays range in tone from playfulness to fairly turgid exegesis, but the pieces are—without exception—bold, honest, and unabashed. They starkly confront the challenge of reconciling sexuality and spirituality from the perspective of those who study, worship, and identify with the Torah and the Talmudic tradition of critical analysis, while also maintaining active feminist belief and commitments to social justice that often seem to conflict with Jewish law, at least as it has been traditionally construed.

Each of the essays deserves more than the cursory notice possible here and would serve as ideal prompts for further (and badly needed) engagement on the nexus between religious law and the realities of living. A representative piece is Haviva Ner-David’s poignant essay “Reclaiming Nidah and Mikveh Through Ideological and Practical Reinterpretation.” The author confronts the subject of menstruation and its “impurity” as it arises first in Leviticus 15:19-33. The priestly and later rabbinical interpretation of this significant part of each month as a time of impurity for women, when they were denied access to worship in the temple, “reinforced the patriarchal power structure that gives these men their power.”

But rather than rejecting the law and rabbinic tradition, the author reinvents it. When she is in nidah (having her period), she finds herself naturally more “closed and self-absorbed,” so that the ritual immersion becomes a powerful transition to a state of greater openness. Further, she and her husband have negotiated the “distancing laws,” whereby intercourse during a woman’s period and the seven “white days” afterwards is prohibited, so that they make sense practically and spiritually in terms of their own relationship. Most profoundly, I thought, she has invited her husband to join her in the mikveh immersion, so that the ritual is a reinvigorating element in their relationship.

One of the shortest pieces in the book is similarly moving and frank, Rebecca T. Alpert’s “Reconsidering Solitary Sex from a Jewish Perspective.” She references Talmudic argument about whether the “punishment, to cut off a man’s hand, is a law or merely a curse.” For better or worse, the possibility that women masturbate seems not to have occurred to the Rabbis, and the author concludes simply and joyfully, “Self care is an important Jewish value.”

Equally provocative is Naomi Seidman’s semi-autobiographical essay “The Erotics of Sexual Segregation,” illustrating the point that the breakdown in traditional cultural segregation between men and women has “entailed a certain erotic loss.” The editor’s own essay “Toward a New Tzniut” is related in advocating a connection between subjectivity and eroticism, the self-love that grows out of claiming one’s own sexuality through a connection with the divine.

The book takes on the “queering of Jewish theology,” what the Torah and its interpreters say about having “good sex,” prostitution, divorce, and intermarriage. Wendy Love Anderson dares to explore “the Goy of Sex”—groan!—a brief history of Jewish-Gentile “boundary-crossing” sex. Sarra Kev interprets the Mishnah Sotah as rabbinical pornography: the Sotah is a woman accused of adultery and forced to endure humiliation and a sort of public rape before the gaze of the powerful men punishing her—and the literary gaze of the male students re-imagining this ghastly scene as part of their religious training.

This is a brilliant book, as well as an entertaining and moving one, with implications that extend well beyond the immediate project of Jewish-feminist exegesis.

Written by: Rick Taylor, August 21st 2009