Karen E.H. Skinazi, Women of Valor: Orthodox Jewish Troll Fighters, Crime Writers, and Rock Stars in Contemporary Literature and Culture. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2018. 290 pp.

Abstract

This lively and readable book opens the window to a rich and vibrant world of Orthodox, or religiously observant, Jewish women who keep kosher and Shabbat while holding jobs, solving crimes, confronting prejudice, and making music. Drawing on memoirs, novels, film, and a graphic novel, Karen Skinazi argues that Jewish women find opportunities for personal empowerment through religious observance, and that their actions within the tradition (and against it) offer opportunities for corrective approaches to the tradition and to its perception by outsiders. The book is structured around selected verses of “Eshet ḥayil”—“Woman of Valor” (Prov. 31:10–31)—an acrostic poem that is sung on Friday nights as part of the Shabbat observance (the term also refers to any woman who is an active public figure). For Skinazi, the initiative, authority, energy, and intelligence ascribed to the woman of valor in the poem offers a counternarrative to mainstream fictional and media depictions of religious observance. The book thus offers itself as a feminist affirmation of religious practice in the post-secular age as described by German philosopher and sociologist Jürgen Habermas and Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor....