The Columbia History of Jews and Judaism in America

More than a century passed between Polish Jewish immigrant Ernestine Rose’s demand of woman’s rights for all and the call for women’s full participation in Jewish life issued by the feminist, college-educated, Jewishly learned women of Ezrat Nashim. In the interim America’s Jewish women had benefited from the new opportunities opened up by the nineteenth-century woman’s rights movement and by the waves of American feminism that followed.

The woman’s rights movement, one of the great reform movements of the nineteenth century, was launched in the summer of 1848 at Seneca Falls, New York, where some three hundred women and men proclaimed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal.”¹ At the heart of the movement that emerged from this first convention lay the call for woman suffrage. Three years later Ernestine Rose, speaking at the second National Woman’s Rights Convention, called upon her adopted nation “to remove the legal shackles from woman . . . to enable woman to deposit her vote.” In Poland, at the age of sixteen, Rose, refusing to marry the man her father proposed, sued her father to keep the inheritance he intended to give away as her dowry. In the United States she became the only Jewish woman well known as a suffragette. Yet hers was never the only Jewish voice raised for woman suffrage.² In the 1910s East European immigrant Jewish women campaigned on the streets of New York’s Lower East Side to compel their fathers and brothers, husbands and sons to grant them the right to vote.³

As the woman’s rights movement gained momentum, it spurred middle-class American women to uncover interstices, new spaces for female organization and activism, which lay between the private spaces of their homes and the public worlds of business, politics, and society that belonged to their men. America’s Jewish women too came to play new roles in their Jewish communities. In 1893 at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, some, meeting as the Congress of Jewish Women, founded the National Council of Jewish Women, the first nationwide American Jewish women’s club.⁴ In the decades to follow, as other new associations emerged, armies of Jewish women massed to support their synagogues through sisterhood, to promote Zionism through Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization of America, and to protect immigrant girls from the perils of “white slavery” through the NCJW.⁵ They appeared in the 1910s and 1920s, just as the woman’s rights movement gave way to the “new language of Feminism.”⁶

As historian Nancy Cott has shown, this first wave of American feminism, which was then spelled with a capital F, signaled the end of the nineteenth-century woman’s rights movement. Those advocating the advancement of woman in society had first spoken in the singular, symbolizing “the unity of the female sex . . . propos[ing] that all women have one cause, one movement.” But feminism fractured that “singular woman” even as it proposed revolutionizing “all the relations of the sexes.” Feminists demanded full citizenship, and that meant the freedom to choose work regardless of sex or marriage, to earn equal wages for that work, to experience “psychic freedom and spiritual autonomy,” to enjoy sexual liberation, and to proclaim the independence of wives. None of these specific demands was new. Each “had been made at some time, piecemeal, by women before.” Yet, feminists differed from their predecessors: their intensity as they simultaneously espoused multiple feminist goals was new. Moreover, feminists embraced women’s heterogeneity, “the internal diversity and lack of consensus among women themselves.” Finally, they exhibited a “characteristic doubleness,” seeking “to achieve sexual equality while making room for sexual difference.” These became the “constellation Feminism,” and feminists transformed its “formlessness, that lack of certain boundaries, that potential to encompass opposites, into virtues.” To connect the points of that constellation, feminists struggled “to find language, organization, and goals adequate to the paradoxical situation of modern women.” As they did, not surprisingly, they met hostility and resistance as well as enthusiasm.⁷

Understanding that from its inception feminism was fraught with paradox and heterogeneity, open to different ways of speaking and organizing, and met by both enthusiasm and hostility, provides a framework for viewing the constellation that emerged when feminism confronted Judaism during the second wave of American feminism. The establishment, in 1961, of President John F. Kennedy’s Commission on the Status of Women “implicitly recognized the existence of gender-based discrimination in American society.”⁸ When, in 1963, the Jewish housewife and journalist Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique, she chronicled the discontent of her generation of female college graduates confined to suburban homes she called “comfortable concentration camps.”⁹ Congress paved the way for women to act on that discontent as it passed the Equal Pay Act of 1963 and Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which banned discrimination in employment on the basis of sex as well as race. After the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission showed little interest in enforcing Title VII when it came to female complaints of job discrimination, the National Organization for Women came into existence to pressure the government to secure equal rights for all. Its 1966 birth heralded the arrival of the second wave of American feminism.¹⁰ The women of Ezrat Nashim who, in 1972, called for change in Jewish life, rode its crest.¹¹

Whether they knew it then or not—and one of them, historian Paula Hyman, was already asking “Why had we been deprived of our heroines?”¹²—they were not the first to connect feminism to Judaism. Although before the mid-1960s American feminism had never coalesced into a single movement or mobilized the masses, historians have uncovered those who advanced feminist goals long before the second wave burst forth. In fact, women’s history reveals numerous feminist projects “sparked again and again” by lone individuals and small groups who, often as not, rejected the feminist label.¹³ Scholar Susan Hartmann calls these women “lively characters,” key players pushing from within their establishment settings to raise feminist consciousness.¹⁴ Although United States women’s historians largely ignore Judaism’s encounter with feminism before the early 1970s, lively feminist characters, making their way across American Jewish history, stood as harbingers of what would become Jewish feminism.

They surface in the challenges raised by the women who would have been rabbis if they could have been rabbis. In 1921, seventeen-year-old Martha Neumark, a student at Reform Judaism’s Hebrew Union College, asked the college for a High Holiday pulpit assignment. She wanted, on the coming holy Days of Awe, to lead a small community in prayer just as her male classmates would. That request, demonstrating that Neumark indeed saw herself on the way to becoming a rabbi, launched a two-year-long debate in the world of Reform Judaism. Would its leaders, who had already sanctioned so many other transformations of traditional praxis, cross the gender divide and ordain women? In the end the College’s Board of Governors voted against women’s ordination, and Martha Neumark never became a rabbi. But Neumark well understood that the discussion about “the admission of women as rabbis is merely another phase of the woman question” that emerges “each time that a woman threatens to break up man’s monopoly.” Decades later, in 1964, just as the second wave of American feminism burst forth, she would trumpet once again that at last “the time is ripe” for women to become rabbis.¹⁵

Another lively character appeared at what is widely regarded as the first American bat mitzvah. In 1922 Jewish Theological Seminary professor Mordecai M. Kaplan called his eldest daughter Judith, then aged twelve and half, to read a portion of the Torah—from a printed book, not from the sacred handwritten scroll—on Sabbath morning. Years later Judith Kaplan Eisenstein recalled both the “excitement” and the “disturbance” evoked by this gender shift, although those most disturbed seemed to be her grandmothers who had tried to convince their son and son-in-1aw not to do this “terrible thing.” In fact, this first bat mitzvah failed to cause “the kind of sensation” that Mordecai M. Kaplan’s other radical changes would.¹⁶ But, even if it did not provoke furor,¹⁷ bat mitzvah surely indicated a meeting between feminism and Judaism. In fact, later that summer, as Reform rabbis debated whether or not Martha Neumark could be ordained, one favoring women’s ordination reported that “the rabbi of an Orthodox congregation had a bar mitzva of girls,” and this proved that “the other wing of Judaism is also making progress.”¹⁸

Moreover, Judith Kaplan Eisenstein remembered a deliberate connection between feminism and Judaism back then. After the woman’s suffrage amendment passed when she was eleven, she recalled “a conscious feminism in our household.”¹⁹ A year or so later, she joined a Hebrew-speaking girls club. Chosen to represent the club in a contest, she gave a long speech on “women’s place in the synagogue,” arguing that “women should be allowed to read from the Torah which they weren’t yet . . . and all sorts of things.” Later her uncle, who had heard her speak, pulled her aside to warn: “You know it’s all very well for you to say what you think in some places, but you must remember that you represent your father and you will get him into trouble if you start these terrible things.”²⁰

To these two harbingers of the “terrible things” unleashed by the meetings of Judaism with feminism before the second wave erupted, others could be added. They date back to the founding of the National Council of Jewish Women, and they also include the women who tried after Martha Neumark to become rabbis; the women’s organizations determined to write women into Jewish history at the tercentenary of American Jewish life in 1954; the mothers and fathers who sent their daughters to Hebrew School rather than to Sunday School, the daughters who wanted to go, and the rabbis who taught them there; those who celebrated their bat mitzvah in the 1950s and earlier; and the rebbetzin whose aliyah during High Holiday services in the mid-1950s drove hundreds of shocked congregants out of the service.²¹ These events demonstrate feminism reverberating in American Judaism across the twentieth century smoothing the way for the wave that would later crash on its shores.

In the early 1970s, as the second wave of American feminism surged, an emerging Jewish feminism surfaced. It began, as Anne Lapidus Lerner, then an instructor in modern Hebrew literature at the Jewish Theological Seminary, described in 1976, “as a series of isolated questionings in the shadow of the women’s movement.”²² These isolated questions were articulated amidst the euphoria sweeping American Jewry in the wake of Israel’s victory in the 1967 Six-Day War. They sprang out of the Jewish “counterculture,” out of the intimate study and worship communities of the havurah movement as young Jewish activists created alternatives to the established and establishment synagogues in which they had been raised and whose spiritual aridity they decried.

The first Jewish feminists of the late 1960s and early 1970s included college and graduate students who found themselves “torn in two.” Their feminism promised them intellectual and spiritual equality with their male peers, but their Judaism relegated them to second-class status within the walls of their synagogues, within the corpus of Jewish law (halakhah)²³ They also included those who sprang up from among the ranks of Jewish communal leaders, who, deeply influenced by the “remarkable re-burgeoning of the Women’s Movement,” wanted to bring its message to bear upon American Jewish life.²⁴ Together they began to form the constellation that would outline Jewish feminism.

Signs of light emanating from this constellation appeared even before Ezrat Nashim issued its “call for an end to the second-class status of women in Jewish life.” By the late 1960s the women’s movement was spinning off in a dizzying array of new directions. Feminists turned their attention to a host of legal, political, and social inequities. They demanded an end to job ads labeled “Help Wanted—Male.” They marched to legalize abortion. They coined the slogan “Sisterhood Is Powerful,” and they meant it. Women’s liberation, which celebrated female difference, burst forth, and with it came the first consciousness-raising groups: small, intimate circles of female friends decrying sexism sprang up on college campuses, in suburban backyards, and in middle-class urban apartments.²⁵ A “great media blitz,” well underway by 1970, broadcast “stories all year long on the new women’s movement.”²⁶

Some of them revealed American religion wrestling with the feminist critique. Headlines blazoned “Women’s ‘Lib’ on the March in the Churches,” as the National Organization for Women created an ecumenical task force on women and religion, and churches, like the United Methodist and United Presbyterian, established their own task forces. Protestant denominations, which had not before ordained women, began to do so. Together they presented a picture of feminism storming the bastion of American religion.²⁷ Some of the stories revealed the first meetings between second-wave feminism and American Judaism. Time and Newsweek reported that Hebrew Union College rabbinical student Sally J. Priesand planned to become “Rabbi Sally.”²⁸ The New York Times discovered Hilda Abrevaya, the first woman cantor in the United States.²⁹ The Jewish student press featured stories connecting the feminist critique to America’s Jews and their Judaism.³⁰ Against this background, the women of Ezrat Nashim coalesced.

Its founders, members of the alternative religious fellowship, the New York Havurah, were deeply committed to Jewish tradition. But they were also drawn to the women’s movement. Martha Ackelsberg had participated in a consciousness-raising group; then graduate student Paula Hyman had helped organize the women’s caucus of Columbia University’s history department. When, in the fall of 1971, they and six other women began meeting, they constituted but one of the many study groups linked to the New York Havurah. Deeply disturbed by Judaism’s bias in favor of men’s learning and prayer, they set out to explore the social and historical forces that had shaped women’s roles in Judaism. It took but a single event to “transform this informal consciousness-raising group into a band of activists.” When leaders of the Jewish counterculture insisted that a national conference that they were planning be open only to men, the women of Ezrat Nashim exploded in anger. Moving beyond their private consciousness-raising, they went public. In January 1972 they prepared a position paper titled “Jewish Women Call for Change.” It demanded that women become full members of their synagogues, that they count in the prayer quorum (minyan) of ten—traditionally ten men—needed for worship, that they become synagogue and Jewish communal leaders, that they have the right to serve as witnesses and to initiate divorce, roles Jewish law prohibited to them, and that they attend rabbinical and cantorial schools. Although Ezrat Nashim’s first target, presenting their demands at the annual meeting of Conservative Judaism’s rabbis in March 1972, was the Conservative movement, their “Call for Change” and the accompanying publicity they received in the national press brought Jewish feminism out into the open.³¹

Ezrat Nashim’s demands resonated among American Jewish women and men whose consciousnesses had already been raised by the second wave of American feminism. Its members were deluged with requests to share their message widely. They spoke to synagogues, Jewish communal organizations, student groups, and the national and Jewish presses. They also helped plan the first National Jewish Women’s Conference, held in New York City in February 1973.

That first conference drew together over five hundred women from all across the United States. Their varying interests and concerns exposed the sweep of the constellation Jewish feminism. Like the second wave of American feminism of which it was a part, Jewish feminism was decentralized. It emerged wherever women connected feminism to Judaism and their Jewish lives and communities. Its adherents never embraced a single address.³² They espoused diverse feminist aims. Like the first glimmers of American feminism, Jewish feminism too came to be characterized by multiple feminist goals, an internal diversity often fractured along denominational lines that demonstrated feminist and Jewish difference, and the desire to achieve sexual equality while allowing for gender difference. Jewish feminism would seek to transform gender relations affecting the intimate lives of Jewish women, men, and their families; their synagogues and American Judaism’s denominations; and the network of agencies, welfare funds, advocacy groups, and community centers that sustain American Jewry.

The first National Jewish Women’s Conference paved the way. It shed light on the issues that would become the constellation Jewish feminism, which would include Jewish women’s socialization and their roles within the family, their status within Jewish law, within the state of Israel, and within Jewish communal life, their places within Jewish communal politics and the synagogue, and their access to religious texts and learning. Topics that would spark enormous Jewish feminist creativity in the years to come—developing new religious rituals to acknowledge significant moments in women’s lives, which Jewish tradition ignored, uncovering in the past “feminist” role models, revisioning Judaism’s androcentric God and prayer, mining Jewish history and culture to create Jewish women’s studies, opening up space for lesbians—already appear in the constellation.

Those who would become noted pioneering Jewish feminists, like Judith Plaskow and the Orthodox feminist advocate Blu Greenberg, addressed the first National Jewish Women’s Conference. There Plaskow, whose 1990 Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism from a Feminist Perspective is one of the cardinal texts of Jewish feminism, “explored both the sexism of the Jewish tradition” and the contradictions she sensed “between Judaism and feminism as alternative communities.”³³ But the real “stars of the show,” according to one observer, were New York congresswomen Bella Abzug and Elizabeth Holtzman. Their presence underscored the diversity of Jewish feminists. They included those committed to Jewish religious observance and to the body of Jewish law who were deeply disturbed by its gendered bias. These religious Jewish feminists stood next to those for whom Judaism was but a single strand of their lives, who, like Abzug and Holtzman (and, of course, Friedan), were prominent second-wave feminists. They expected feminism to transform all of American society. That it would also transform American Jewish life was, for them, a happy by-product of that wider fundamental revolution. So Abzug stood with those at the conference to proclaim: “Today we are writing a different kind of history. Your being here is the history of the future.”³⁴

As the conference ended, the delegates launched several projects reflecting their diversity and their different aims. They planned to encourage Jewish consciousness-raising and study groups, to found an abortion-counseling service for Jewish women, and to spread Jewish feminism through a speakers’ bureau and publications.³⁵ Soon the issues raised by this first National Jewish Women’s Conference—and the other conferences and publications that followed in the mid-1970s, including the emergence of Lilith, the first Jewish feminist magazine in 1976³⁶—reached the women who had long found outlets for their communal activism through the national Jewish women’s organizations.³⁷

What then are the major points of the constellation Jewish feminism? For many Jewish feminists, transformation of their roles within the synagogue sat atop their feminist agenda. For those affiliated with the liberal denominations of American Judaism, with the Reform, Conservative, and Reconstructionist movements in Jewish life, this meant reconfiguring the synagogue as an egalitarian institution. In time this came to mean, for some, women wearing the prayer shawls and head coverings traditionally worn only by men,³⁸ women counting toward the quorum of ten necessary for a complete prayer service,³⁹ women learning Hebrew and the liturgical skills they had never acquired as girls and celebrating, as adults, a bat mitzvah, women taking on new roles in their synagogues, like reading regularly from the Torah, women elected synagogue presidents,⁴⁰ and, most visibly and dramatically, women becoming rabbis.

The history of women’s quest for rabbinic ordination dates back to the late nineteenth century when the debate over woman’s right to be a rabbi emerged as part of a larger debate about American women’s access to all the learned professions. If women wanted to become doctors, lawyers, and ministers, then professions that largely excluded them, why should they also not want to be rabbis? Yet, despite a series of challengers and engagement of the question for nearly a century, it took the collision of second-wave feminism with American Judaism to propel women into the rabbinate. In 1972 in Reform Judaism, in 1974 in Reconstructionist Judaism, and in 1985 in Conservative Judaism the first women rabbis emerged.⁴¹ Eventually, the presence of hundreds of female rabbis would further the feminist agenda in American Jewish life.

Not surprisingly, the constellation Jewish feminism also includes within its orbit Orthodox Judaism. In fact, Orthodoxy has created its own small bright feminist constellation. The “spiritual mother” of Orthodox feminism is Blu Greenberg, author of On Women and Judaism: A View from Tradition. Greenberg gave the opening address at the 1973 National Jewish Women’s Conference (although conference organizers first thought to invite her husband, distinguished scholar and communal activist Rabbi Yitz Greenberg!), and she came to lead the charge on feminist challenges to Orthodoxy, daring to ask “Will there be Orthodox women rabbis?” Convinced that “where there’s a rabbinic will, there’s a halakhic way,” she asserted that if rabbis wanted to solve the plight of women chained by Jewish matrimonial law to marriages that were no longer tenable, they could. (Under Jewish law only men can initiate divorce; if a couple obtains a civil divorce but the husband refuses to give his wife a Jewish divorce, the woman cannot remarry as an Orthodox Jew.) In 1997 Greenberg gave the keynote at the International Conference on Feminism and Orthodoxy and founded the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance (JOFA).⁴² Its Web site reveals feminism’s impact on Orthodoxy. JOFA suggests “possible trajectories for women being ordained as rabbis,” advocates ritual innovation by highlighting wedding ceremonies transformed “within the framework of halakha in order to make them more inclusive of women, in general, and the bride, in particular,” and includes a section on “challenges to the community” that covers body image, domestic and sexual abuse, and lesbians.⁴³

Signs of feminism’s redefining women’s roles in the Orthodox world proliferate. Orthodox parents celebrate a daughter’s bat mitzvah, adopting the innovation that permits adolescent Jewish girls to mark a rite of passage to maturity just as their brothers do in their bar mitzvah, although the Orthodox bat mitzvah service is not identical with that of the bar mitzvah.⁴⁴ A “learning revolution” has transformed what Jewish girls learn in Orthodox educational settings and has come to include for many a year of post-high school study of religious texts in women’s educational settings in Israel. There women scholars have won the right to become advisers in religious courts and to represent women—and men—in divorce and custody cases. In America Orthodox women gather in women’s prayer groups. By choosing to pray in a single-sex setting, they may take on ritual roles not open to them when men are present. In New York a few Orthodox synagogues pioneered a new position of congregational intern to permit learned women to teach and to counsel members, customarily rabbis’ duties. Not surprisingly, a few Orthodox women have even studied for rabbinical ordination.⁴⁵ Thus all the movements of American Judaism fall within the constellation Jewish feminism.

Another sign of feminist transformation is ritual invention. As feminists turned a critical lens upon Judaism, they realized, despite its array of blessings and religious ceremonies, that few affirmed the great moments in women’s lives. From birth, Judaism treats girls and boys differently. Feminists have sought to unite Judaism to the occasions, great and small, that rest at the core of women’s lives and are so often intimately linked to the feminine, to the female body.

Not surprisingly then, some of the first feminist ritual innovations focused on the newborn. Baby girls are traditionally welcomed into the community with relatively little fanfare, especially when compared to the powerful ceremony of circumcision required for boys on the eighth day after their birth. Hence early feminist ritual creativity offered new ceremonies that would give “as much ceremonial importance to a girl’s birth as to a boy’s.”⁴⁶

In this arena of ritual creativity female rabbis have stood out. They came to take the lead as they realized just how little the tradition they had mastered met their own spiritual needs, especially around “invisible life passages.”⁴⁷ Hence an astonishing array of prayers, readings, and ceremonies dot the constellation Jewish feminism. They include prayers for going to the mikveh (the ritual bath) to be said on the evening the couple wishes to conceive,⁴⁸ for the first months of pregnancy and for entering the ninth month, for the onset of labor, for a Caesarean birth, and for nursing for the first time. New rituals sustain those grieving infertility, suffering stillbirth, seeking medical intervention, and turning to adoption. Ceremonies mark the onset of menses and the completion of menopause, offer solace after rape, affirm remaining single, and acknowledge marital separation.⁴⁹ This remarkable creativity suggests that no event or personal milestone in the female life cycle has remained untouched by feminist spiritual innovation.

Feminists have not only sought to sanctify the private, they have also turned their attention to public rituals and celebrations, creating new venues for communal feminist spirituality. They reclaimed Rosh Chodesh, Judaism’s marking of each new month in its lunar calendar, as a women’s holiday, inventing “ceremonies which draw upon the similarity between women’s cycles and the moon’s cycles, the capacity of both women and the moon to physically wax and wane, ebb and flow, give birth, die, and be reborn.”⁵⁰ They reappropriated mikveh, the pool in which observant married women immerse for the ritual purification required to resume sexual relations following their proscription during and immediately after menstruation. This reappropriation transforms mikveh into a space for women to celebrate Rosh Chodesh, to mark a milestone, or to bring closure to a crisis.⁵¹ Feminists have imagined public ceremonies for “croning,” honoring women who have reached the age of sixty, the age of wisdom. Some have formed feminist spirituality groups. Their retreats and gatherings over the years have offered spaces for ritual invention and liturgical creativity.⁵²

Of the public communal feminist spiritual innovations, the one that has reached most widely is the women’s seder. The foremother of these seders took place in New York in 1976. Over the years it included well-known second-wave feminists: politician Bella Abzug, Ms. magazine editor Gloria Steinem, feminist psychologist Phyllis Chesler. Rewriting the Haggadah, the traditional text recited in the home on the eve of Passover, the women’s seder “regendered the players. The rabbis of old became the wise women connected to them; the questions of the four sons were put into the mouths of the four daughters.” The feminist seder incorporates a broad critique of gender relations in American society and within Judaism. It asks: “Why have our Mothers on this night been bitter?” answering: “Because . . . they did the serving but not the conducting. They read of their fathers but not of their mothers.” It recovers those mothers, telling of “the legacy of Miriam,” and naming women from the Jewish past, especially learned women who have become role models for contemporary Jewish women.⁵³ By the end of the twentieth century women’s seders had sprung up in Jewish communities all across the United States.⁵⁴

Undergirding women’s new visibility within the synagogue and their enhanced ritual choices are the first explorations in Jewish feminist theology. Even as feminist theologians, among them Judith Plaskow and Rachel Adler, author of Engendering Judaism, critique Judaism’s androcentricity, its obliteration of the voices and perspectives of women, they work from within the body of Jewish tradition seeking avenues to the theological, legal, and liturgical transformations essential to redress the wrongs of women’s exclusion. For example, these theologians, and feminist liturgists like Marcia Falk, grapple with “the problems of engendering the language with which we speak to and about God.” They know, as Rachel Adler writes, that

She concludes: effecting “real inclusion” will “engender a world that Jewish women build together with Jewish men, a nomos we inhabit where we co/habit justly and generously.”⁵⁵

The feminist theologians’ critique forms part of the growing canon of Jewish women’s and gender studies. At the first National Jewish Women’s Conference, one woman mused, “We have the ideas, we have the potential to make history quite specifically as Jewish women; but we need the textbooks, the equipment, the basic technical skills, with which to explore our past and create our future.”⁵⁶ When the Association for Jewish Studies, the professional organization of Jewish studies scholars emerged in 1969, no woman was among its founders. However, since then, as women’s and gender studies have found a home in the academy, a generation of feminist Jewish studies scholars have become the first women in Jewish history to have acquired “the basic technical skills” needed to explore Jewish civilization from a feminist perspective. Some fields within Jewish studies, notably modern Jewish history, Jewish literatures, and the social sciences, have been more amenable than others to the integration of this new feminist scholarship.⁵⁷ Nevertheless, today no discipline concerned with Jewish studies—Bible, rabbinics, history, sociology, anthropology, literature, philosophy, film studies, and performance studies—remains untouched by this work.⁵⁸ Jewish feminists have embraced this scholarship and its scholars who, following in the footsteps of the women of Ezrat Nashim, lecture widely throughout the American Jewish community, sharing their insights with America’s Jewish women and men.

Scholars are not the only writers energized by Jewish feminism. Its constellation encompasses an explosion of feminist literary creativity. In The Women’s Torah Commentary female rabbis from across the denominations interject women into almost every one of the fifty-four weekly Torah portions. They discover female characters unnamed in the text, like Naamah, Noah’s wife, and use the laws of kashrut to comment upon Jewish women cooking holiday foods and to raise concerns about anorexia.⁵⁹ This creativity includes midrashim, imaginative recreations of the biblical text, like Anita Diamant’s wildly successful The Red Tent. Here Diamant imagines Jacob’s daughter Dinah whispering the stories of her father’s wives.⁶⁰ Each month as they bled, they retreated to the red tent where “they traded secrets like bracelets” and handed them down to Dinah, their only surviving daughter.⁶¹ Feminist writers of serious fiction also riff upon Jewish tradition, as Cynthia Ozick does in The Puttermesser Papers, where her protagonist Ruth Puttermesser creates a female golem (a character out of Jewish folklore, a human figure made of clay) who gets her elected mayor of New York.⁶²

Another point in the constellation Jewish feminism illuminates transformations affecting marriage and the Jewish family. Jewish tradition celebrates both. The rabbis taught: “A man who does not have a wife lives without joy, without blessing, and without goodness”⁶³ and “Who brings no children into the world is like a murderer.”⁶⁴ A point of contention between Jewish feminists and many second-wave feminists was the latter’s depiction of the nuclear family as the source of women’s oppression. Jewish feminists, by and large, continued to uphold the centrality of marriage and family to Jewish life.⁶⁵ At the first National Jewish Women’s Conference they largely ignored notions then on the feminist agenda such as “radical role changes within the family” and shifting child-rearing “from the Jewish Mother to the day care center, in kibbutz fashion.”⁶⁶ Yet, by the beginning of the twenty-first century, American Jewish families had indeed been affected by shifts resulting from second-wave feminism and the transformations of postindustrial American society. A quarter of all Jewish adults surveyed in 2000–1 was single and had never married. Twenty-six percent of Jewish women aged forty to forty-four were childless.⁶⁷ These statistics point to the wide diversity of contemporary Jewish family configurations, and these families have come to include lesbians.

At the first National Jewish Feminist Conference “a staged invasion by a group of gay Jewish women who felt that they had been excluded by virtue of their lesbianism” launched this issue into the constellation Jewish feminism.⁶⁸ Evelyn Torten Beck’s 1982 Nice Jewish Girls: A Lesbian Anthology was but the first of a number of important books to expose the painful dichotomy of lesbian Jewish identity: that these women feel marginalized as lesbian s in the Jewish world and as Jews in their lesbian communities.⁶⁹ Since then other works have focused attention on specific groups of Jewish lesbians. In Lesbian Rabbis: The First Generation the authors write of the ramifications of revealing their sexuality to their teachers and congregants and of choosing whether or not to limit their work to leading one of the few gay and lesbian synagogues that now exist.⁷⁰ The 2001 film Trembling Before G-d depicts the despair of Orthodox gays and lesbians rejected by their religious communities.⁷¹ Asserting their right to remain fully within Jewish tradition, Jewish lesbians have stood under the chuppah, the canopy that hovers over the couple in a traditional Jewish wedding.⁷²

Perhaps the most widely known of the feminist transformations associated with lesbianism is the addition of an orange to the seder plate. In the mid-1980s the distinguished scholar Susannah Heschel, editor of the pioneering collection On Being a Jewish Feminist,⁷³ added an orange to her family’s seder plate (the platter of ritual foods essential for conducting the Passover seder) and asked all present to “eat it as a gesture of solidarity with Jewish lesbians and gay men, and others who are marginalized within the Jewish community.”⁷⁴

Even as the constellation Jewish feminism encompasses feminist denominational diversity, private and communal ritual and liturgical innovation, feminist scholarly and literary creativity, and new configurations of the Jewish family, it also includes within its borders transformations in the so-called secular Jewish world, among the network of national and local advocacy, welfare, and communal agencies that constitute a major aspect of American Jewish society. In 1972 Jacqueline K. Levine, then president of the Women’s Division of the American Jewish Congress and a vice president of the Council of Jewish Federations and Welfare Funds, told the Council’s General Assembly: “Women are stating, in clear and resounding cadences, that they will no longer be second-class citizens.” Pointing to the gross gender imbalance in Jewish communal leadership, she challenged her peers to restructure Jewish communal life to fully include its women as leaders.⁷⁵

A 2005 study found some, but insufficient, change.⁷⁶ In the intervening years some Jewish communal organizations, like the American Jewish Congress, which had long maintained separate women’s divisions, disbanded them in favor of integrating the sexes. Still others, like B’nai B’rith, saw its women’s division secede rather than face integration.⁷⁷ At the turn of the twenty-first century the Jewish women’s associations founded more than a century ago, like synagogue sisterhoods and Hadassah, continued to offer women rich and varied opportunities for voluntarism and professional work, but their agendas—training women to lead religious services,⁷⁸ opening a Washington Action Office that lobbies to end violence against women—had brought them within the constellation Jewish feminism.

Yet outside of the women’s organizations women’s progress in advancing as volunteer and professional Jewish leaders was checkered. A 2005 study by Ma’yan: The Jewish Women’s Project concluded: “Jewish organizations continue to limit women’s access to power in all areas of Jewish communal life.”⁷⁹ It observed that, despite incremental change, women seeking to advance in Jewish life hit a glass ceiling that runs over all Jewish institutions—synagogues, communal agencies, and schools.⁸⁰

If feminists have been disappointed in their failure to transform the Jewish community to the extent they envisioned when the constellation Jewish feminism burst forth, they have also been deeply disturbed and, in fact, shocked by anti-Judaism and antisemitism in the women’s movement in the 1970s and 1980s. Christian feminists have blamed Judaism for inventing patriarchy, the source of women’s oppression. They imagined that before ancient Hebrew civilization emerged, that “the goddess reigned in matriarchal glory.” They have charged that Jesus meant to restore egalitarianism, but that he was thwarted by lingering Jewish patriarchal influences.⁸¹ Jewish feminists were deeply disturbed by these theological charges, which perpetuate in a new feminist guise Christianity’s anti-Judaism. But the antisemitism of the international women’s movement shocked those who thought that their solidarity with feminists precluded their being singled out as Jews.

Jewish women were prominent second-wave feminists.⁸² In the early years of the women’s movement many of them subordinated their Jewish identities to their feminism. Yet in time they came to discover that the women’s movement not only dismissed their Jewishness as a legitimate category of difference, while embracing so many other kinds of distinction, but that it also spouted antisemitism.⁸³ Political attacks upon Israel at international women’s conferences sponsored by the United Nations in Mexico City in 1975 and in Copenhagen in 1980 revealed its depths. Said one who attended the Copenhagen conference: “I heard people say that Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan, and Bella Abzug all being Jewish gives the American Women’s Movement a bad name. I heard, ‘The only good Jew is a dead Jew.’ I heard, ‘The only way to rid the world of Zionism is to kill all the Jews.’ “Shaken by this “anti-Semitism that was overt, wild and irrational,”⁸⁴ some Jewish feminists reconsidered their Jewish affinities even as they tried to compel the women’s movement to grapple with its anti-Jewish animus.

In the nearly four decades since it has come into view, the constellation Jewish feminism has shone brightly. In fact, it is difficult to imagine American Jewish life stripped of feminist influence. Wherever one looks in the Jewish community, the constellation Jewish feminism is visible. It can been sighted from the pulpit where female rabbis preach, from classrooms where girls learn Talmud, from homes as couples gather family and friends to bring their infant daughters into the covenant of the Jewish people. It is present in Jewish communal boardrooms each time leaders deliberately seek out women for inclusion, in college classrooms where Jewish feminist scholars teach, and in Jewish community center day care programs. Its light illuminates synagogue sanctuaries as Jews pray that God blessed Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, Sarah, Rebekah, Leah, and Rachel.

The brightness of the constellation Jewish feminism was reflected during a celebration of 350 years of American Jewish women’s activism in Washington, DC in fall 2004. Of the twenty-two women honored that evening,⁸⁵ all had lived lives and had careers scarcely imaginable before second-wave feminism, and most did so within the orbit of the constellation Jewish feminism. They included creators of religious Jewish feminism: Rabbi Sally Priesand, the first woman rabbi, Orthodox writer Blu Greenberg, songwriter Debbie Friedman, whose celebration of Miriam’s dancing with timbrels has become a staple of the women’s seder,⁸⁶ and Ms. magazine editor Letty Cottin Pogrebin, who had turned away from Judaism when, as a teen, she was told that her prayers did not count toward the quorum needed to mourn her mother, but who found antisemitism in the women’s movement driving her back to Judaism.⁸⁷ Female Jewish communal leaders were there, like Shoshana Cardin, whose long list of “firsts” includes being the first woman to head the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. Jewish studies professor Deborah Lipstadt was honored for battling Holocaust denier David Irving in a British courtroom, but also for contributions to Jewish feminism, such as what happened when “Deborah Made Ten” (the number needed for a minyan).⁸⁸ Not surprisingly, that evening, others stood out, just as had Abzug and Holtzman at the first National Jewish Women’s Conference. This time the politicians were Vermont’s first Jewish governor Madeline Kunin and Congresswomen Shelley Berkley and Nita Lowey. Surely, the brightest star in the constellation that evening was Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Justice Ginsburg made her mark as a lawyer battling sex discrimination, and she credited anti-Jewish discrimination in this country with sensitizing her to all forms of discrimination.⁸⁹

If Jewish feminism has not achieved all that it set out to do and some of its stars, especially the one shining light on the women’s movement, have at times flickered, it has, nevertheless, as this celebration proved, in a few short decades transformed American Jewish life. At the beginning of the twenty-first century the constellation Jewish feminism was fixed in the firmament hovering over American Jewry.

1. “Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions, Seneca Falls, 1848,” in Miriam Schneir, ed., Feminism: The Essential Historical Writings (New York, 1972), 77.

2. Ernestine Rose’s speech to the National Woman’s Rights Convention in Worcester, Massachusetts, October 15, 1851; http://www.brandeis.edu/centers/wsrc/Ernestine_Rose_Website/1851speech.html; accessed January 20, 2005. On Rose see Carol A. Kolmerten, The American Life of Ernestine L. Rose (Syracuse, 1999).

3. Elinor Lerner, “Jewish Involvement in the New York City Woman Suffrage Movement,” American Jewish History 71 (June 1981): 442–61.

4. On the Congress and the founding of the NCJW, see Deborah Grand Golomb, “The 1893 Congress of Jewish Women: Evolution or Revolution in American Jewish Women’s History?” American Jewish History 70 (September 1980): 52–67; Faith Rogow, Gone to Another Meeting: The National Council of Jewish Women, 1893–1993 (Tuscaloosa, 1993); Pamela S. Nadell, Women Who Would Be Rabbis: A History of Women’s Ordination, 1889–1985 (Boston, 1998), 31–40.

5. On women’s organizations in these years, see Anne Firor Scott, Natural Allies: Women’s Association s in American History (Urbana, 1991). On the national denominational sisterhood bodies, see Pamela S. Nadell and Rita J. Simon, “Ladies of the Sisterhood: Women in the American Reform Synagogue, 1900–1930,” in Maurie Sacks, ed., Active Voices: Women in Jewish Culture (Urbana, 1995), 63–75; Jenna Weissman Joselit, “The Jewish Priestess and Ritual: The Sacred Life of American Orthodox Women,” in Pamela S. Nadell, ed., American Jewish Women’s History: A Reader (New York, 2003), 153–74. On Hadassah see Joyce Antler, “Zion in Our Hearts: Henrietta Szold and the American Jewish Women’s Movement,” ibid., 129–49.

6. Nancy F. Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven, 1987), 4.

7. Ibid., quotations, 3–4, 8–10, 49, 283.

8. Leila J. Rupp and Verta Taylor, Survival in the Doldrums: The American Women’s Rights Movement, 1945 to the 1960s (New York, 1987), 166.

9. Kirsten Lise Fermaglich,” ‘The Comfortable Concentration Camp’: The Significance of Nazi Imagery in Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963),” American Jewish History 91.2 (2003): 205–32.

10. Many have discussed the emergence of the second wave of American feminism; see, among others, William H. Chafe, The Paradox of Change: American Women in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1991); Ruth Rosen, The World Split Open: How the Modern Women’s Movement Changed American (New York, 2000).

11. “Ezrat Nashim: Jewish Women Call for a Change,” 1972; rpt. in Jacob Rader Marcus, ed., The American Jewish Woman: A Documentary History (New York, 1981), 894–96.

12. Charlotte Baum, Paula Hyman, and Sonya Michel, The Jewish Woman in America (New York, 1975, 1976), xii.

13. Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism, 282.

14. Susan M. Hartmann, The Other Feminists: Activists in the Liberal Establishment (New Haven, 1998).

15. On Neumark, see Ellen M. Umansky, “Women in Judaism: From the Reform Movement to Contemporary Jewish Religious Feminism,” in Rosemary Ruether and Eleanor McLaughlin, eds., Women of Spirit: Female Leadership in the Jewish and Christian Traditions (New York, 1979), 339–42; Nadell, Women Who Would Be Rabbis, 6272, 102–4, Neumark quoted, 104. For her account of her effort to become a rabbi, see Pamela S. Nadell, “Ordaining Women Rabbis,” in Colleen McDannell, ed., Religions of the United States in Practice, vol. 2 (Princeton, 2001), 389–417, Neumark quoted, 417.

16. Quotations from Ellen Dickstein (Kominers) interview with Judith Kaplan Eisenstein, 1 November 1974; copy of tape in my possession.

17. On the bat mitzvah, see Mel Scult, Judaism Faces the Twentieth Century: A Biography of Mordecai M. Kaplan (Detroit, 1993), 301–2.

18. Central Conference of American Rabbis Yearbook (1922), 171, quoting Rabbi Stern. No first names appear in the record of the debate. Possibly this refers to Rabbi Harry J. Stern (1897–1984); Kerry M. Olitzky, Lance J. Sussman, and Malcolm H. Stern, eds., Reform Judaism in America: A Biographical Dictionary and Sourcebook (Westport, CT: 1993), 205–6.

19. Judith Kaplan Eisenstein, “Looking Back: A Career in Jewish Music,” Reconstructionist (1987). This quotation comes from the typescript submitted for this article, which was published with significant cuts.

20. Ellen Dickstein (Kominers) interview with Judith Kaplan Eisenstein, November 1, 1974; copy of tape in my possession.

21. Nadell, Women Who Would Be Rabbis, chapter 3; Joyce Antler, “Between Culture and Politics: The Emma Lazarus Federation of Jewish Women’s Clubs and the Promulgation of Women’s History, 1944–1989,” in Vicki L. Ruiz and Ellen Carol DuBois, eds., Unequal Sisters: A Multicultural Reader in U.S. Women’s History, 3d rev. ed. (New York, 2000 [1995]), 519–41; Regina Stein, “The Road to Bat Mitzvah in America,” in Pamela S. Nadell and Jonathan D. Sarna, eds., Women and American Judaism: Historical Perspectives (Hanover, NH, 2001), 223–34; Deborah Dash Moore, To the Golden Cities: Pursuing the American Jewish Dream in Miami and L.A. (New York, 1994), 120–21.

22. Anne Lapidus Lerner,” ‘Who Hast Not Made Me a Man’: The Movement for Equal Rights for Women in American Jewry,” American Jewish Year Book 77 (1976): 3–38.

23. For other accounts of Jewish feminism’s emergence, see, for example, Reena Sigman Friedman, “The Jewish Feminist Movement,” in Michael N. Dobkowski, ed., Jewish American Voluntary Organizations (New York, 1986), 574–601; Sylvia Barack Fishman, A Breath of Life: Feminism in the American Jewish Community (New York, 1993), 1–15. Note that these narratives fail to consider that an old guard, like National Federation of Temple Sisterhoods’ executive director Jane Evans and the journalist Trude Weiss-Rosmarin, had been raising feminist issues for decades before the late 1960s. On both Evans and Weiss-Rosmarin’s feminism, see Nadell, Women Who Would Be Rabbis, 123, 125, 127–29, 131–35.

24. Jacqueline Levine, “The Changing Role of Women in the Jewish Community, 1972,” in Jacob Rader Marcus, ed., The American Jewish Woman: A Documentary History (New York, 1981), 902–7.

25. For a chronology of these developments, see Rosen, The World Split Open.

26. For a chronology of these developments, see ibid., quotation, xxi.

27. Nadell, Women Who Would Be Rabbis, 152, 161–62.

28. “Rabbi Sally,” Newsweek, February 23, 1970, 89; “Women at the Altar,” Time, November 2, 1970, 71ff.

29. Irving Spiegel, “A First in the States, a Woman Cantor,” New York Times, May 30, 1971, BQ56.

30. Alan Silverstein, “The Evolution of Ezrat Nashim,” Conservative Judaism 30 (1975): 41–51, 45–46.

31. This is based on ibid. The “Call for Change” appears in “Jewish Women Call for Change, 1972,” in Marcus, The American Jewish Woman, 894–96.

32. The short-lived Jewish Feminist Organization, founded in 1974, tried to be that address, but it lasted only two or three years; Friedman, “The Jewish Feminist Movement,” 584–87.

33. Ibid., 581–82. Note Judith Plaskow was then known as Judith Plaskow Goldenberg. Quotations from her 1973 address appear in Elisabeth S. Fiorenza, Changing the Paradigms (1990, accessed March 16, 2005); http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle,asp?title=439. Judith Plaskow, Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism from a Feminist Perspective (San Francisco, 1990).

34. Shirley Frank, “Women—Writing the History of the Future,” Attah (1973): 4–5.

35. Shirley Frank, “Concrete Results Noted on Journals, Midwest Parley in Fall,” Attah (1973): 5.

36. See, for example, Elizabeth Koltun, ed., The Jewish Woman: New Perspectives (New York, 1976). This began in 1973 as a special issue of the journal Response.

37. Friedman, “The Jewish Feminist Movement,” 581–83.

38. At the 1973 National Jewish Women’s Conference, Rachel Adler excited many not only by wearing tallit (prayer shawl) and tefillin (phylacteries) but also by showing other women how to put them on; Rachel Adler, e-mail communication, May 6, 2005.

39. Irving Spiegel, “Conservative Jews Vote for Women in Minyan,” New York Times, September 11, 1973, 1.

40. A few women became synagogue presidents before the second wave of feminism burst forth; Nadell, Women Who Would Be Rabbis, 129. As a result of Jewish feminism, by 2005, women as synagogue presidents were commonplace everywhere except among the Orthodox. On the first woman to head an Orthodox congregation in Washington, DC, see Paula Amman, “Beth Sholom Breaks Ground: First Local Orthodox Shul to Elect Woman President,” Washington Jewish Week, April 7 2005, 9.

41. This history is detailed in Nadell, Women Who Would Be Rabbis. See also the film And the Gates Opened: Women in the Rabbinate, New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 2005.

42. This is based on the sketch of Greenberg in Shuly Rubin Schwartz, “Ambassadors Without Portfolio? The Religious Leadership of Rebbetzins in Late-Twentieth-Century American Jewish Life,” in Nadell and Sarna, Women and American Judaism, 235–67, 253–60. Greenberg’s advocacy for women’s ordination is discussed in Nadell, Women Who Would Be Rabbis, 215–19. Blu Greenberg, On Women and Judaism: A View from Tradition (Philadelphia, 1981).

43. JOFA: Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance (accessed May 6, 2005); www.jofa.org.

44. Norma Baumel Joseph, “Ritual Law and Praxis: Bat Mitsva Celebrations,” Modern Judaism 22.3 (2002): 234–60.

45. Laurie Goodstein, “Women Take Active Role to Study Orthodox Judaism,” New York Times, December 21, 2000, 1ff. She quotes Blu Greenberg. On the “learning revolution,” see Rochelle Furstenberg, The Flourishing of Higher Jewish Learning for Women (Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, May 1, 2000; accessed May 9, 2005); http://www.jofa.org/social.php/education/posthighscho. On Orthodox women and ordination, see Laurie Goodstein, “Ordained as Rabbis, Women Tell Secret,” New York Times, December 21, 2000, A29; Haviva Ner-David, Life on the Fringes: A Feminist Journey Toward Traditional Rabbinic Ordination (Needham, MA, 2000).

46. Sandy Eisenberg Sasso, “B’rit B’not Israel: Observations on Women and Reconstructionism,” Response: A Contemporary Jewish Review 8.2 (Summer 1973): 101–5, quotation, 103.

47. Debra Orenstein, Lifecycles: Jewish Women on Life Passages and Personal Milestones, vol. 1 (Woodstock, VT:, 1998), 117. Orenstein lists an array of moments Jewish men and women should honor in their lives. They include first love, first sexual experience, weaning, finding out the biopsy is negative, becoming a grandparent, cooking a grandmother’s recipe, and “discovering Jewish feminism”; 119–20.

48. Nina Beth Cardin, Tears of Sorrow, Seeds of Hope: A Jewish Spiritual Companion for Infertility and Pregnancy Loss (Woodstock, VT, 1999), 28.

49. Orenstein, Lifecycles; Laura Levitt and Sue Ann Wasserman, “Mikvah Ceremony for Laura,” in Ellen M. Umansky and Dianne Ashton, eds., Four Centuries of Jewish Women’s Spirituality (Boston, 1992), 321–26.

50. Lenore Bohm, “The Feminist Theological Enterprise,” CCAR Journal (Summer 1997) : 70–79, 76. A major collection of Rosh Chodesh readings is Penina V. Adelman, Miriam’s Well : Rituals for Jewish Women Around the Year, 2d ed. (New York, 1990).

51. Elyse Goldstein, “Rabbi Elyse Goldstein,” in Francine Zuckerman, ed., Half the Kingdom: Seven Jewish Feminists (Montreal, 1992), 71–88, quotations, 82–83.

52. Judith Plaskow, “Spirituality,” in Paula Hyman and Deborah Dash Moore, eds., Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia (New York, 1997), 1302–6.

53. E. M. Broner, The Telling (New York, 1993), 1, 193–94. The film Miriam’s Daughters Now shows a feminist seder, women celebrating tashlich, the casting away of sins on the Jewish new year, and a baby naming ceremony; Miriam’s Daughters Now, New York: Center for Visual History, 1986.

54. Nadine Brozan, “Waiting List Grows as Seders for Women Increase in Popularity,” New York Times, March 16 1999, B5. There is no standard text for these seders. Reflecting the grassroots nature of this transformation, women in the synagogue and Jewish communal groups sponsoring the seders tend to write their own, borrowing and adapting from various texts that circulate privately.

55. Rachel Adler, Engendering Judaism: An Inclusive Theology and Ethics (Boston, 1998), xxvi, 63–64, 212. Her introduction surveys developments in feminist Jewish theology.

56. Frank, “Women—Writing the History of the Future.”

57. Paula E. Hyman, “Judaic Studies,” in Hyman and Moore, Jewish Women in America, 705–9; Lynn Davidman and Shelly Tenenbaum, eds., Feminist Perspectives on Jewish Studies (New Haven, 1994).

58. Influential titles include, in Bible, Tikva Frymer-Kensky, Reading the Women of the Bible: A New Interpretation of Their Stories (New York, 2002); in rabbinics, Judith Hauptman, Rereading the Rabbis : A Woman’s Voice (Boulder, 1997); in philosophy, Hava Tirosh-Samuelson, Women and Gender in Jewish Philosophy, Jewish Literature, and Culture (Bloomington, 2004); in history, Paula Hyman and Deborah Dash Moore, eds., Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, 2 vols. (New York, 1997); in sociology, Fishman, A Breath of Life; in anthropology, Susan Starr Sered, Women as Ritual Experts: The Religious Lives of Elderly Jewish Women in Jerusalem (New York, 1992); in Jewish literatures, Naomi B. Sokoloff, Anne Lapidus Lerner, and Anita Norich, Gender and Text in Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Literature (New York, 1992).

59. Elyse Goldstein, ed., The Women’s Torah Commentary: New Insights from Women Rabbis on the Fifty-four Weekly Torah Portions (Woodstock, VT, 2000).

60. Gen 30:21, Gen. 34:1ff.

61. Anita Diamant, The Red Tent (New York, 1997), 2. First published in 1997, The Red Tent has gone through multiple reprintings and is available in more than twenty countries; http://www.jwa.0rg/this_week/week40.html.

62. Cynthia Ozick, The Puttermesser Papers, 1st ed. (New York, 1997).

63. Babylonian Talmud, Yevamot, 62b.

64. Ibid., 63b.

65. Paula Hyman, “Jewish Feminism Faces the American Women’s Movement: Convergence and Divergence,” in Nadell, American Jewish Women’s History, 297–312.

66. Frank, “Women—Writing the History of the Future.”

67. Laurence Kotler-Berkowitz, Steven M. Cohen, Jonathon Ament, Vivian Klaff, Frank Mott, Danyelle Peckerman-Neuman, “The National Jewish Population Survey, 2000–1: Strength, Challenge, and Diversity in the American Jewish Population” (New York, 2003), 3–4.

68. Frank, “Women—Writing the History of the Future.”

69. Evelyn Torton Beck, Nice Jewish Girls: A Lesbian Anthology, rev. ed. (Boston, 1989); Christie Balka and Andy Rose, Twice Blessed: On Being Lesbian, Gay, and Jewish (Boston, 1989); Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz and Irena Klepfisz, The Tribe of Dina: A Jewish Women’s Anthology, rev. ed. (Boston, 1989). See also the journal Bridges.

70. Rebecca Alpert, Sue Levi Elwell, and Shirley Idelson, eds., Lesbian Rabbis: The First Generation (New Brunswick, 2001).

71. Sandi Simcha Dubowski, Trembling Before G-d, Simcha Leib Productions, 2001.

72. Joe Berkofsky, “San Francisco Simchas? Gay Jews Among Those Lining Up to Wed, Seek ‘Equal Rights,’ “Deep South Jewish Voice 14.4 (2004): 39, 42.

73. Susannah Heschel, On Being a Jewish Feminist : A Reader (New York, 1983).

74. Susannah Heschel, The Origin of the Orange on the Seder Plate (Miriam’s Cup, 2001, accessed May 12, 2005); http://www.miriamscup.com/Heschel_orange.htm. Although this was originally conceived by Susannah Heschel as symbolizing the fruitfulness that would accrue to the Jewish community by fully including gays and lesbians, an alternative story circulated that made this a response to the exclusion of women from the rabbinate. In this widely repeated version a man told Heschel that a woman belongs on the bima (the podium in the synagogue) as much as does an orange on the seder plate.

75. Levine, “The Changing Role of Women in the Jewish Community, 1972.”

76. Tamara Cohen, Jill Hammer, and Rona Shapiro, Listen to Her Voice: The Ma’yan Report; Assessing the Experiences of Women in the Jewish Community and Their Relationship to Feminism (New York, 2005).

77. B’nai B’rith Women became independent in 1990 and is now known as Jewish Women International.

78. Shuly Rubin Schwartz, “Women’s League for Conservative Judaism,” in Hyman and Moore, Jewish Women in America, 1493–97.

79. Cohen, Hammer, and Shapiro, Listen to Her Voice, 25.

80. Ibid., 32ff.

81. This is discussed in Hyman, “Jewish Feminism Faces the American Women’s Movement,” 301–2.; she quotes Judith Plaskow.

82. In addition to those already named, leaders of its radical women’s liberation wing, like Shulamith Firestone, also stood out.

83. Letty Cottin Pogrebin, “Anti-Semitism in the Women’s Movement: A Jewish Feminist’s Disturbing Account,” Ms. (1982): 145–49. This is also discussed in Hyman, “Jewish Feminism Faces the American Women’s Movement,” 302; and Fishman, A Breath of Life, 9–12.

84. Pogrebin, “Anti-Semitism in the Women’s Movement.”

85. Lion of Judah Conference Program (2004, accessed May 18, 2005); http://www.ujc.org/content_display.html?ArticleID=127866.

86. Debbie Friedman, “Miriam’s Song” (ASCAP 1988).

87. Letty Cottin Pogrebin, Deborah, Golda, and Me: Being Female and Jewish in America (New York, 1991).

88. Lipstadt tells the story of her libel trial in Deborah E. Lipstadt, History on Trial: My Day in Court with Holocaust Denier David Irving (New York, 2005). Deborah E. Lipstadt, “And Deborah Made Ten,” in Heschel, On Being a Jewish Feminist, 207–9.

89. Malvina Halberstam, “Ruth Bader Ginsburg,” in Hyman and Moore, Jewish Women in America, 515–20.