Challenge and Conformity: The Religious Lives of Orthodox Jewish Women by Lindsey Taylor-Guthartz

Abstract

Reviewed by: Challenge and Conformity: The Religious Lives of Orthodox Jewish Women by Lindsey Taylor-Guthartz Elana Sztokman Lindsey Taylor-Guthartz. Challenge and Conformity: The Religious Lives of Orthodox Jewish Women. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2021. 324 pp. The religious-cultural landscape for Orthodox Jewish women has changed dramatically over the past few years, certainly in the public sphere. Women have forged new communal opportunities in scholarship, leadership, and synagogue life. At the same time, it is not clear how women experience Orthodoxy in the private sphere, what the key dynamics driving change are, and what holds women back. Women's perspectives are often glaringly absent from mainstream Jewish sociological research, and in fact, many studies about Jewish life are male-centric—from assertions about synagogue attendance as the central Jewish activity, to focus on male-dominant symbols like tefillin and kippah, to questions that only men can answer, such as, "Is it important for your wife to cover her hair?" In fact, while women's perspectives are so often absent from studies on Jewish identity, Jewish men will often define their own denominational affiliation according to the role of women around them. A synagogue's gender partition, for example, will make or break its affiliation as "Orthodox." Amid this backdrop, Lindsey Taylor-Guthartz's book, Challenge and Conformity: The Religious Lives of Orthodox Jewish Women, opens up a crucial and much-needed window into the real lives and identities of Orthodox Jewish women. This is the first major publication of a sociological analysis of Orthodox Jewish British women and offers a comprehensive approach to understanding Orthodox women that can and should be applied to populations elsewhere. Taylor-Guthartz's methodology combines qualitative interviews and participant observation, a quantitative survey, and a wealth of historical information on British Orthodox women, some of which has never been published before. It examines both public-formal displays of Jewishness and private-informal displays. The focus on British Jewry is also in many ways unique, although I think that the [End Page 460] commonalities between Orthodox cultures in different countries probably outweigh the specific cultural nuances and histories. And while interviewees include women of different Orthodox subcultures, the magnifying glass is mainly on Modern Orthodox women. Given the current widespread media interest in Haredi women's experiences, which may seem more dramatic or extreme than more modern religious women, it is poignant to reveal that Modern Orthodox women often experience their own dramatic arcs vis-à-vis their religious-cultural contexts, even if it may be harder to discern from external appearances alone. Taylor-Guthartz brings many compelling insights. For example, she points out that women are more likely than men to switch between denominations, an observation that renders many standard Jewish sociological analyses irrelevant while keeping women invisible. She offers several interesting reasons for this reality, and I would add that it may also reflect women's acculturation into habits of adaptivity, flexibility, compromise, relationships, and the need to see many perspectives—as opposed to men's acculturation into what Avivah Zornberg calls "sterile individualism" and their often inflexible need to be right. Denominational mobility in Britain—which has never been formally studied—has a "clear social effect" and "can be seen in the links these moves create between subcommunities. Most Jews in London have relatives who belong to a wide range of denominations and to none" (53). This alone should be a wake-up call for Jewish sociological research. Taylor-Guthartz also brings in women's voices of ambivalence, pains of invisibility, and incessant demands to give up on their own spiritual needs and desires so as not to upset their families, communities, or rabbinical leaders. She powerfully exposes women's inner turmoil, practicing in a community that constantly rejects them and sidelines them. Many interviewees describe how much they resent and even detest synagogue, especially the partition, and yet continue to participate in it. They come late and sometimes stay home entirely but continue to accept synagogue attendance as a centerpiece of communal identity. As one interviewee described, "I remember coming to Simhat Torah at Norrice Lea and crying, really crying and crying and crying. I remember being in the gallery and...