Riv-Ellen Prell (ed.), Women Remaking American Judaism

Abstract

Few chapters in contemporary Jewish life are as overwhelmingly positive as the flowering of Jewish women’s accomplishments in virtually every area of Judaic scholarship and artistic enterprise. As a result, any book that sets out to explore the impact of feminism on what is arguably a contemporary American Jewish renaissance does well to include expertise in a broad range of disciplines. Happily, this highly recommended anthology, edited by Riv-Ellen Prell, with a foreword by David Weinberg, gives readers a good taste of the range of Jewish feminist scholarship. Prell’s “Introduction” sets the interdisciplinary tone, offering a cultural anthropologist’s analysis of the cover image by Betsy Teutsch: a colorful Purim tambourine showing Queen Esther as Rosie the Riveter, flexing her beautiful biceps under stacks of bangles, fixing the viewer with a no-nonsense gaze, and declaring, “I did it my way!” The juxtaposition of the biblical figure and the American World War II heroine is telling, as Prell points out, since “most of the changes demanded by and for women in Judaism,” no matter how particularistic to Jewish life, “reflect the norms of the societies in which they lived” (p. 7). The book is divided into three sections. Part One, “Reenvisioning Judaism,” looks at the images that inspired many Jewish feminists. Rochelle Millen carries on the interdisciplinary spirit of the volume by tracing “the development of Jewish feminist theology through the writings of Judith Plaskow, Marcia Falk, Tamar Ross, and Rachel Adler”—three theologians and a poet. With impeccable scholarship, Millen illuminates the intersections of morality, sexuality, and familial and communal concerns in their works, arguing that Jewish feminism has “forced us to explore some of our deepest assumptions” (p. 44). Chava Weissler looks at the “Meanings of Shekhinah in the ‘Jewish