Gender and Agency in the Feminist Historiography of Jewish Identity

Abstract

Can women be Jews? When the Jewish Theological Seminary, the seat of Conservative Judaism, decided to ordain women as rabbis, it faced a dilemma: all students (until then, all men) were expected to observe Jewish religious law, observing the Sabbath and holidays strictly, praying three times a day, wearing a head covering, and so forth. Should the new women students follow the Jewish laws incumbent upon men, but from which women are exempt? For example, men are required to put on phylacteries for weekday morning prayers, whereas women are not only exempt, but, according to some authorities, forbidden to wear phylacteries. Men are expected to wear a head covering (yarmulke), whereas women are not (though married women, in Orthodox custom, wear a scarf, hat, or even a wig). Men wear ritual fringes under their clothes every day, donning a prayer shawl with fringes for morning prayer, whereas women, again, are exempt or forbidden. The legal niceties aside, the question goes to the heart of Jewish identity: if the new women rabbinic students are required to follow the laws incumbent upon men, it implies that only men are real Jews and that pious Jewish women, who have been exempt from those laws, are somehow less than fully Jewish. Why does becoming a rabbi require both women and men to follow the role of Jewish religious men, even when it forces women to violate the laws regulating women’s piety? For a woman to be a Jew, the rabbinical ruling insinuates, means becoming a male Jew, and the question of ordaining women rabbis is really a question of whether Jewish women can become Jewish men. Why not encourage or at least permit male rabbis the same exemptions from religious observance that have defined Jewish women’s piety—allowing men to become women? At the same time, if the role of rabbi is to be opened to women, should not all aspects of Jewish religious life, especially those heretofore limited to men, be opened to women? The gender inequalities of Judaism that have been overcome as a consequence of modernity have brought women opportunities—such as rabbinical ordination—that were closed to them for two thousand years. At the same time, opening men’s privileges to women has reified Judaism according to the normative rules applied to men, rather than