Torah Study, Feminism and Spiritual Quest in the Work of Five American Jewish Women Artists

2007 ◽  
pp. 97 ◽  
Author(s):  
Orenstein
Keyword(s):  
Women Artists ◽  
Jewish Women ◽  
Spiritual Quest ◽  
Torah Study ◽  
American Jewish

American Jewish Women and the Zionist Enterprise (review)

2006 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 204-210
Author(s):  
Donna Robinson Divine
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Women ◽  
American Jewish

Studying Jewish Women

2021 ◽  
pp. 10-36
Author(s):  
Lindsey Taylor-Guthartz
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
Active Role ◽  
Orthodox Jews ◽  
Orthodox Judaism ◽  
Jewish Women ◽  
Religious Activities ◽  
Torah Study ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Religious Lives ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter explores the problems of studying Orthodox Jewish women, in particular the 'double invisibility' they experience, first from the perspective of male Orthodox Jews, and, second, in the lack of knowledge about them in the non-Jewish world. Orthodox women engage in a wide range of communal and domestic religious activities, in spite of their exclusion from an active role in worship in synagogue and from some areas of Torah study. Activities defined by Orthodoxy as the supreme religious privileges of women, such as keeping a kosher kitchen, preparing food for sabbath and festivals, and nurturing and educating children, remain largely invisible to Orthodox men. Standard descriptions of women's practices in the domestic and individual spheres omit many widespread customs and practices, often characterized as 'superstitions' although they form an integral and meaningful part of many women's religious lives. A major problem in studying women's religious lives and the ways in which they differ from and intersect with those of men is imagining how women fit into one's overall picture of Jewish religious activity. Neither the 'separate but equal' apologetic nor the simplistic identification of 'oppressed and oppressors' made by some feminists provides an adequate way of thinking about the relationship between male and female lived experience of Judaism. Given that Orthodox Judaism is undeniably patriarchal, it may reasonably be asked whether women have any access to power or agency within the religious life of the community, particularly in matters of ritual and correct practice.

Motherhood as Motivation: American Jewish Women in Action, 1890–1940

2017 ◽  
pp. 207-224
Author(s):  
Melissa R. Klapper
Keyword(s):  
Gender Difference ◽  
Jewish Identity ◽  
Peace Movement ◽  
Ethnic Identities ◽  
Women’S Rights ◽  
Jewish Women ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
American Jewish ◽  
Crucial Ingredient ◽  
Collective Belief

This chapter discusses maternalism as a collective belief in gender difference based on motherhood as the foundation for reform. It argues that maternalism was a crucial ingredient in the activism of Jewish women of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It also mentions Der Fraynd, the socialist Workmen's Circle monthly publication that linked the origins of the women's rights movement to prehistoric matriarchal societies in the fight for suffrage. The chapter analyses the peace movement that exhorted Jewish mothers to pass on the value of peace to their children and instruct them about the evils of war. It looks at how maternalism provided a framework and language for maintaining Jewish identity within a wider societal sphere as Jewish women moved into more public arenas and joined with women of different ethnic identities.

Hasia R. Diner and Beryl Leiff Benderly. Her Works Praise Her: A History of Jewish Women in America from Colonial Times to the Present. New York: Basic Books, 2002. xvii, 462 pp.

AJS Review ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 197-198
Author(s):  
Dianne Ashton
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Social History ◽  
Jewish Women ◽  
General Audience ◽  
American Jewry ◽  
Valuable Book ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Jewish ◽  
Familiar Material ◽  
Experiences Of Women

This valuable book is more than a long overdue corrective to the extant one-volume histories of American Jewry whose narratives pivot upon a familiar list of male names. Diner and Benderly offer us all the events and themes of American Jewish social history that we expect to find, but we see them through the actions, motivations, and experiences of women. And because women's experiences often have been entirely different from those of men, we learn more about the topic than can be available in the previous one-volume accounts. Although this book was written for a general audience, it reminds this reader of the more scholarly U.S. History as Women's History (1995) for the new understandings it brings to familiar material.

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