Chava Weissler. Voices of the Matriarch: Listening to Prayers of Early Modern Jewish Women. Boston: Beacon Press, 1988. xxvi, 267 pp.

Abstract

For more than a decade, Chava Weissler has called on readers to listen to the voices of matriarchs. Her numerous articles on tkhines—Yiddish prayers for private devotion typically recited by women of early modernity—have appeared in a wide variety of academic and, to a much lesser extent, popular publications. At once folklorist, ethnographer, literary critic, and student of classical Jewish texts and mysticism, Weissler has time and again applied her training in elite fields of learning to non-elite sources. While initially interested in merely “recover[ing] women's religious experience and contrast[ing] it to men's,” her objectives have broadened over the years to include “understanding the tkhines within the matrix of Ashkenazic Judaism” (pp. xii–xiii). Most recently, Weissler has turned to interpreting how tkhines influenced twentieth-century Jewish religious life in communities as diverse as Conservative Jewry and feminist ritual groups.