Abstract
This article examines two authors’ perspectives on marriage and sexuality in Hasidic Judaism through the leading female characters in their semi-autobiographical novels: The Romance Reader by Pearl Abraham and Hush by Judy Brown. Each novel features an adolescent woman on her path to marriage and their experience of matrimony and sexuality within their respective Hasidic communities. The aim of the article is to analyse and compare their views in order to gain a better understanding of the female experience of sexuality and marriage within contemporary Hasidic Judaism. Furthermore, this article discusses the treatment of sexual abuse within a particular Hasidic group. It employs a methodology of close reading combined with a discussion of Talmudic, theological, sociological and ethnographic commentaries on the subject.
Highlights
Digital Preservation: The Open Library of Humanities and all its journals are digitally preserved in the CLOCKSS scholarly archive service
We have a larger number of female authors, who were taught English literature at school writing about Hasidic Judaism
This is of special significance since the male and female experience of Hasidism is vastly different due to the highly patriarchal nature of ultra-Orthodox Judaism, which insists on distinct gender roles as delineated in Jewish theology
Summary
Digital Preservation: The Open Library of Humanities and all its journals are digitally preserved in the CLOCKSS scholarly archive service. This article examines two authors’ perspectives on marriage and sexuality in Hasidic Judaism through the leading female characters in their semiautobiographical novels: The Romance Reader by Pearl Abraham and Hush by Judy Brown.
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