Judith Plaskow Feminism Theology and Justice PDF

Judith Plaskow
Library of Contemporary
Jewish Philosophers
Editor-in-Chief
Hava Tirosh-Samuelson, Arizona State University
Editor
Aaron W. Hughes, University of Rochester
Volume 6
The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/lcjp

Judith Plaskow
Feminism, Theology, and Justice
Edited by
Hava Tirosh-Samuelson and Aaron W. Hughes
Leiden • boston
2014
Cover illustration: Courtesy of Judith Plaskow. Photographed by Richard Fish.
The series Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophers was generously supported by the
Baron Foundation.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Judith Plaskow : feminism, theology, and justice / edited by Hava Tirosh-Samuelson and
Aaron W. Hughes.
p. cm. — (Library of contemporary Jewish philosophers, ISSN 2213-6010 ; volume 6)
Includes bibliographical references.
Summary: “Judith Plaskow, Professor of Religious Studies Emerita at Manhattan College in New
York, is a leading Jewish feminist theologian. She has forged a revolutionary vision of Judaism as an
egalitarian religion and has argued for the inclusion of sexually marginalized groups in society in
general and in Jewish society in particular. Rooted in the experience of women, her feminist Jewish
theology reflects the impact of several philosophical strands, including hermeneutics, dialogical
philosophy, critical theory, and process philosophy. Most active in the American Academy of
Religion, she has shaped the academic discourse on women in religion while critiquing Christian
feminism for lingering forms of anti-Judaism”— Provided by publisher.
ISBN 978-90-04-27979-7 (hardback : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-90-04-28000-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) —
ISBN 978-90-04-27980-3 (e-book) 1. Plaskow, Judith—Philosophy. 2. Women in Judaism. 3. Women
and religion. 4. Feminism—Religious aspects—Judaism. 5. Judaism—21st century. I. Tirosh-
Samuelson, Hava, 1950– editor. II. Hughes, Aaron W., 1968– editor.
BM729.W6J84 2014
296.3092—dc23
2014022388
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covering Latin, IPA, Greek, and Cyrillic, this typeface is especially suitable for use in the
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ISSN 2213-6010
ISBN 978-90-04-27979-7 (hardback)
ISBN 978-90-04-27980-3 (e-book)
This hardback is also published in paperback under ISBN 978-90-04-28000-7.
Copyright 2014 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.
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Contents
The Contributors .............................................................................................. vii
Editors’ Introduction to Series ..................................................................... ix
Judith Plaskow: An Intellectual Portrait ................................................... 1

Hava Tirosh-Samuelson
The Academy as Real Life: New Participants and Paradigms

in the Study of Religion ............................................................................ 27
Judith Plaskow
Jewish Theology in Feminist Perspective ................................................. 45

Judith Plaskow
Authority, Resistance, and Transformation: Jewish Feminist

Reflections on Good Sex ........................................................................... 69
Judith Plaskow
Anti-Judaism in Feminist Christian Interpretation ............................... 83

Judith Plaskow
Interview with Judith Plaskow .................................................................... 97

Select Bibliography .......................................................................................... 139

The Contributors
Hava Tirosh-Samuelson (Ph.D., Hebrew University, 1978) is Irving and

Miriam Lowe Professor of Modern Judaism, the Director of Jewish Stud-
ies, and Professor of History at Arizona State University in Tempe, AZ.
Her research focuses on Jewish intellectual history, Judaism and ecology,
science and religion, and feminist theory. In addition to numerous articles
and book chapters in academic journals and edited volumes, she is the
author of the award-winning Between Worlds: The Life and Work of Rabbi
David ben Judah Messer Leon (1991) and the author of Happiness in Pre-
modern Judaism: Virtue, Knowledge, and Well-Being in Premodern Judaism
(2003). She is also the editor of Judaism and Ecology: Created World and
Revealed World (2002); Women and Gender in Jewish Philosophy (2004);
Judaism and the Phenomenon of Life: The Legacy of Hans Jonas (2008);
Building Better Humans? Refocusing the Debate on Transhumanism (2011);
Hollywood’s Chosen People: The Jewish Experience in American Cinema
(2012); and Jewish Philosophy for the Twenty-First Century (2014). Professor
Tirosh-Samuelson is the recipient of several large grants that have funded
interdisciplinary research on religion, science, and technology.
Aaron W. Hughes (Ph.D., Indiana University Bloomington, 2000) holds

the Philip S. Bernstein Chair in Jewish Studies at the University of Roch-
ester. Hughes was educated at the University of Alberta, The Hebrew
University of Jerusalem, and Oxford University. He has taught at Miami
University of Ohio, McMaster University, the Hebrew University of Jeru-
salem, the University of Calgary, and the University at Buffalo. He is the
author of over fifty articles and ten books, and the editor of seven books.
His book titles include Abrahamic Religions: On the Uses and Abuses
of History (Oxford, 2012); Muslim Identities (Columbia, 2013); The Study of
Judaism: Identity, Authenticity, Scholarship (SUNY, 2013); and Rethinking
Jewish Philosophy: Beyond Particularism and Universalism (Oxford, 2014).
He is also the Editor-in-Chief of Method & Theory in the Study of Religion.
Editors’ Introduction To Series
It is customary to begin studies devoted to the topic of Jewish philoso-

phy defining what exactly this term, concept, or even discipline is. We
tend not to speak of Jewish mathematics, Jewish physics, or Jewish soci-
ology, so why refer to something as “Jewish philosophy”? Indeed, this is
the great paradox of Jewish philosophy. On the one hand it presumably
names something that has to do with thinking, on the other it implies
some sort of national, ethnic, or religious identity of those who engage
in such activity. Is not philosophy just philosophy, regardless of who phi-
losophizes? Why the need to append various racial, national, or religious
adjectives to it?1
Jewish philosophy is indeed rooted in a paradox since it refers to philo-
sophical activity carried out by those who call themselves Jews. As philoso-
phy, this activity makes claims of universal validity, but as an activity by a
well-defined group of people it is inherently particularistic. The question
“What is Jewish philosophy?” therefore is inescapable, although over the
centuries Jewish philosophers have given very different answers to it. For
some, Jewish philosophy represents the relentless quest for truth. Although
this truth itself may not be particularized, for such individuals, the use
of the adjective “Jewish”—as a way to get at this truth—most decidedly is.2
The Bible, the Mishnah, the Talmud, and related Jewish texts and genres
are seen to provide particular insights into the more universal claims pro-
vided by the universal and totalizing gaze of philosophy. The problem is
that these texts are not philosophical on the surface; they must, on the
contrary, be interpreted to bring their philosophical insights to light. Within
this context exegesis risks becoming eisegesis. Yet others eschew the term
1 Alexander Altmann once remarked:

It would be futile to attempt a presentation of Judaism as a philosophical system, or
to speak of Jewish philosophy in the same sense as one speaks of American, English,
French, or German philosophy. Judaism is a religion, and the truths it teaches are
religious truths. They spring from the source of religious experience, not from pure
reason.
See Alexander Altmann, “Judaism and World Philosophy,” in The Jews: Their History,
Culture, and Religion, ed. Louis Finkelstein (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of
America, 1949), vol. 2, 954.
2 In this regard, see Norbert M. Samuelson, Jewish Faith and Modern Science: On the
Death and Rebirth of Jewish Philosophy (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008), e.g., 10–12.
x editors’ introduction to series
“philosophy” and instead envisage themselves as working in a decidedly

Jewish key in order to articulate or clarify particular issues that have direct
bearing on Jewish life and existence.3 Between these two perspectives or
orientations, there exist several other related approaches to the topic of
Jewish philosophy, which can and have included ethics,4 gender studies,5
multiculturalism,6 and postmodernism.7
Despite their differences in theory and method, what these approaches
have in common is that they all represent the complex intersection of
Judaism, variously defined, and a set of non-Jewish grids or lenses used to
interpret this rich tradition. Framed somewhat differently, Jewish philoso-
phy—whatever it is, however it is defined, or whether it is even possible—
represents the collision of particularistic demands and universal concerns.
The universal or that which is, in theory, open and accessible to all regard-
less of race, color, creed, or gender confronts the particular or that which
represents the sole concern of a specific group that, by nature or definition,
is insular and specific-minded.
Because it is concerned with a particular people, the Jews, and how to
frame their traditions in a universal and universalizing light that is believed
to conform to the dictates of reason, Jewish philosophy can never be about
pure thinking, if indeed there ever can be such a phenomenon. Rather
Jewish philosophy—from antiquity to the present—always seems to have
3 See, e.g., Strauss’s claim about Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed, perhaps one of the
most important and successful works of something called Jewish philosophy ever written.
He claims that one “begins to understand the Guide once one sees that it is not a philo-
sophic book—a book written by a philosopher for philosophers—but a Jewish book: a
book written by a Jew for Jews.” See Leo Strauss, “How to Begin to study The Guide of the
Perplexed,” in The Guide of the Perplexed, trans. Shlomo Pines, 2 vols. (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1963), vol. 1, xiv.
Modern iterations of this may be found, for example, in J. David Bleich, Bioethical Dilem-
mas: A Jewish Perspective, 2 vols. (vol. 1, New York: Ktav, 1998; vol. 2, New York: Targum
Press, 2006).
4 See, e.g., David Novak, Natural Law in Judaism (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1998); Elliot Dorff, Love Your Neighbor and Yourself: A Jewish Approach to Modern
Personal Ethics (New York: Jewish Publication Society of America, 2006).
5 E.g., the collection of essays in Women and Gender in Jewish Philosophy, ed. Hava
Tirosh-Samuelson (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2004).
6 E.g., Jonathan Sacks, The Dignity of Difference: How to Avoid a Clash of Civilizations
(London: Continuum, 2003); Jonathan Sacks, To Heal a Fractured World: The Ethics of
Responsibility (New York: Schocken, 2007).
7 E.g., Elliot R. Wolfson, Language, Eros, Being: Kabbalistic Hermeneutics and Poetic
Imagination (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004); Elliot R. Wolfson, Open Secret:
Postmessianic Messianism and the Mystical Revision of Menahem Mendel Schneerson (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2009); Elliot R. Wolfson, A Dream Interpreted within a
Dream: Oneiropoiesis and the Prism of Imagination (New York: Zone Books, 2011).
editors’ introduction to series xi
had and, for the most part continues to have, rather specific and perhaps
even practical concerns in mind. This usually translates into the notion that
Judaism—at least the Judaism that Jewish philosophy seeks to articulate—
is comprehensible to non-Jews and, framed in our contemporary context,
that Judaism has a seat at the table, as it were, when it comes to pressing
concerns in the realms of ethics and bioethics.
Jewish philosophy, as should already be apparent, is not a disinterested
subject matter. It is, on the contrary, heavily invested in matters of Jewish
peoplehood and in articulating its aims and objectives. Because of this
interest in concrete issues (e.g., ethics, bioethics, medical ethics, feminism)
Jewish philosophy—especially contemporary Jewish philosophy—is often
constructive as opposed to being simply reflective. Because of this, it would
seem to resemble what is customarily called “theology” more than it does
philosophy. If philosophy represents the critical and systematic approach to
ascertain the truth of a proposition based on rational argumentation,
theology is the systematic and rational study of religion and the articula-
tion of the nature of religious truths. The difference between theology and
philosophy resides in their object of study. If the latter has “truth,” however
we may define this term, as its primary object of focus, the former is con-
cerned with ascertaining religious dogma and belief. They would seem to
be, in other words, mutually exclusive endeavors.
What we are accustomed to call “Jewish philosophy,” then, is a paradox
since it does not—indeed, cannot—engage in truth independent of reli-
gious claims. As such, it is unwilling to undo the major claims of Judaism
(e.g., covenant, chosenness, revelation), even if it may occasionally rede-
fine such claims.8 So although medieval Jewish thinkers may well gravitate
toward the systematic thought of Aristotle and his Arab interpreters and
although modern Jewish thinkers may be attracted to the thought of Kant
and Heidegger, the ideas of such non-Jewish thinkers are always applied
to Jewish ideas and values. Indeed, if they were not, those who engaged in
such activities would largely cease to be Jewish philosophers and would
instead become just philosophers who just happened to be Jewish (e.g.,
Henri Bergson, Edmund Husserl, and Karl Popper).
Whether in its medieval or modern guise, Jewish philosophy has a ten-
dency to be less philosophical simply for the sake of rational analysis and
8 A good example of what we have in mind here is the thought of Maimonides.
Although he might well redefine the notion of prophecy, he never abnegates the concept.
On Maimonides on prophecy, see Howard Kreisel, Prophecy: The History of an Idea in Medi-
eval Jewish Philosophy (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2001), 148–56.
xii editors’ introduction to series
more constructive. Many of the volumes that appear in the Library of

Contemporary Jewish Philosophers will bear this out. The truths of Judaism
are upheld, albeit in often new and original ways. Although Jewish philoso-
phy may well use non-Jewish ideas to articulate its claims, it never produces
a vision that ends in the wholesale abandonment of Judaism.9 Even though
critics of Jewish philosophy may well argue that philosophy introduces
“foreign” wisdom into the heart of Judaism, those we call Jewish philoso-
phers do not perceive themselves to be tainting Judaism, but perfecting it
or teasing out its originary meaning.10
The result is that Jewish philosophy is an attempt to produce a particular
type of Judaism—one that is in tune with certain principles of rationalism.
This rationalism, from the vantage point of the nineteenth century and up
to the present, is believed to show Judaism in its best light, as the synthesis
or nexus between a Greek-inflected universalism and the particularism of
the Jewish tradition.
What is the status of philosophy among Jews in the modern period?
Since their emancipation in the nineteenth century, Jews have gradually
integrated into Western society and culture, including the academy. Ever
since the academic study of Judaism began in the 1820s in Germany, Jewish
philosophy has grown to become a distinctive academic discourse prac-
ticed by philosophers who now often hold positions in non-Jewish institu-
tions of higher learning. The professionalization of Jewish philosophy has
not been unproblematic, and Jewish philosophy has had to (and still has
to) justify its legitimacy and validity. And even when Jewish philosophy is
taught in Jewish institutions (for example, rabbinic seminaries or universi-
ties in Israel), it has to defend itself against those Jews who regard philoso-
phy as alien to Judaism, or minimally, as secondary in importance to the
inherently Jewish disciplines such as jurisprudence or exegesis. Jewish phi-
losophy, in other words, must still confront the charge that it is not authen-
tically Jewish.
The institutional setting for the practice of Jewish philosophy has shaped
Jewish philosophy as an academic discourse. But regardless of the setting,
9 This despite the claims of Yitzhak Baer who believed that philosophy had a negative
influence on medieval Spanish Jews that made them more likely to convert to Christianity.
See Israel Jacob Yuval, “Yitzhak Baer and the Search for Authentic Judaism,” in The Jewish
Past Revisited: Reflections on Modern Jewish Historians, ed. David N. Myers and David B.
Ruderman (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 77–87.
10 Indeed, Jewish philosophers in the medieval period did not even see themselves as
introducing foreign ideas into Judaism. Instead they saw philosophical activity as a recla-
mation of their birthright since the Jews originally developed philosophy before the Greeks
and others stole it from them.
editors’ introduction to series xiii
Jewish philosophy as an academic discourse is quite distinct from Jewish

philosophy as constructive theology, even though the two may often be
produced by the same person.
Despite the lack of unanimity about the scope and methodology of
Jewish philosophy, the Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophers insists
that Jewish philosophy has thrived in the past half century in ways that
will probably seem surprising to most readers. When asked who are the
Jewish philosophers of the twentieth century, most would certainly men-
tion the obvious: Franz Rosenzweig (d. 1929), Martin Buber (d. 1965), and
Emmanuel Levinas (d. 1995). Some would also be able to name Abraham
Joshua Heschel (d. 1972), Mordecai Kaplan (d. 1983), Joseph Soloveitchik
(d. 1993), and Hans Jonas (d. 1993). There is no doubt that these thinkers
have either reshaped the discourse of Western thought for Jews and non-
Jews or have inspired profound rethinking of modern Judaism. However, it
is misleading to identify contemporary Jewish philosophy solely with these
names, all of whom are now deceased.
In recent years it has been customary for Jews to think that Jewish phi-
losophy has lost its creative edge or that Jewish philosophy is somehow
profoundly irrelevant to Jewish life. Several reasons have given rise to this
perception, not the least of which is, ironically enough, the very success
of Jewish Studies as an academic discipline. Especially after 1967, Jewish
Studies has blossomed in secular universities especially in the North
American Diaspora, and Jewish philosophers have expressed their ideas in
academic venues that have remained largely inaccessible to the public at
large. Moreover, the fact that Jewish philosophers have used technical lan-
guage and a certain way of argumentation has made their thought increas-
ingly incomprehensible and therefore irrelevant to the public at large. At
the same time that the Jewish public has had little interest in professional
philosophy, the practitioners of philosophy (especially in Anglo-American
departments of philosophy) have denied the philosophical merits of Jewish
philosophy as too religious or too particularistic and excluded it entirely.
The result is that Jewish philosophy is now largely generated by scholars
who teach in departments/programs of Jewish Studies, in departments of
Religious Studies, or in Jewish denominational seminaries.11
11 See the comments in Aaron W. Hughes and Elliot R. Wolfson, “Introduction: Charting
an Alternative Course for the Study of Jewish Philosophy,” in New Directions in Jewish Phi-
losophy, ed. Aaron W. Hughes and Elliot R. Wolfson (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University
Press, 2010), 1–16.
xiv editors’ introduction to series
The purpose of the Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophers is

not only to dispel misperceptions about Jewish philosophy but also to
help nudge the practice of Jewish philosophy out of the ethereal heights
of academe to the more practical concerns of living Jewish communities.
To the public at large this project documents the diversity, creativity, and
richness of Jewish philosophical and intellectual activity during the sec-
ond half of the twentieth century and early twenty-first century, showing
how Jewish thinkers have engaged new topics, themes, and methodologies
and raised new philosophical questions. Indeed, Jewish philosophers have
been intimately engaged in trying to understand and interpret the momen-
tous changes of the twentieth century for Jews. These have included the
Holocaust, the renewal of Jewish political sovereignty, secularism, post-
modernism, feminism, and environmentalism. As a result, the Library of
Contemporary Jewish Philosophy intentionally defines the scope of Jewish
philosophy very broadly so as to engage and include theology, political the-
ory, literary theory, intellectual history, ethics, and feminist theory, among
other discourses. We believe that the overly stringent definition of “philos-
ophy” has impoverished the practice of Jewish philosophy, obscuring the
creativity and breadth of contemporary Jewish reflections. An accurate and
forward looking view of Jewish philosophy must be inclusive.
To practitioners of Jewish philosophy this project claims that Jewish
philosophical activity cannot and should not remain limited to profes-
sional academic pursuits. Rather, Jewish philosophy must be engaged in
life as lived in the present by both Jews and non-Jews. Jews are no longer a
people apart, instead they are part of the world and they live in this world
through conversation with other civilizations and cultures. Jewish philoso-
phy speaks to Jews and to non-Jews, encouraging them to reflect on prob-
lems and take a stand on a myriad of issues of grave importance. Jewish
philosophy, in other words, is not only alive and well today, it is also of the
utmost relevance to Jews and non-Jews.
The Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophers is simultaneously
a documentary and an educational project. As a documentary project, it
intends to shape the legacy of outstanding thinkers for posterity, identifying
their major philosophical ideas and making available their seminal essays,
many of which are not easily accessible. A crucial aspect of this is the inter-
view with the philosophers that functions, in many ways, as an oral his-
tory. The interview provides very personal comments by each philosopher
as he or she reflects about a range of issues that have engaged them over
the years. In this regard the Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophers
editors’ introduction to series xv
simultaneously records Jewish philosophical activity and demonstrates its

creativity both as a constructive discourse as well as an academic field.
As an educational project, the Library of Contemporary Jewish
Philosophers is intended to stimulate discussion, reflection, and debate
about the meaning of Jewish existence at the dawn of the twenty-first cen-
tury. The individual volumes and the entire set are intended to be used in
a variety of educational settings: college-level courses, programs for adult
Jewish learning, rabbinic training, and interreligious dialogues. By engag-
ing or confronting the ideas of these philosophers, we hope that Jews and
non-Jews alike will be encouraged to ponder the past, present, and future of
Jewish philosophy, reflect on the challenges to and complexities of Jewish
existence, and articulate Jewish philosophical responses to these chal-
lenges. We hope that, taken as individual volumes and as a collection, the
Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophers will inspire readers to ask
philosophical, theological, ethical, and scientific questions that will enrich
Jewish intellectual life for the remainder of the twenty-first century.
All of the volumes in the Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophers
have the same structure: an intellectual profile of the thinker, several semi-
nal essays by the featured philosopher, an interview with him or her, and a
select bibliography of 120 items, listing books, articles, book chapters, book
reviews, and public addresses. As editors of the series we hope that the
structure will encourage the reader to engage the volume through reflec-
tion, discussion, debate, and dialogue. As the love of wisdom, philosophy is
inherently Jewish. Philosophy invites questions, cherishes debate and con-
troversy, and ponders the meaning of life, especially Jewish life. We hope
that the Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophers will stimulate think-
ing and debate because it is our hope that the more Jews philosophize, the
more they will make Judaism deeper, durable, and long-lasting. Finally, we
invite readers to engage the thinkers featured in these volumes, to chal-
lenge and dispute them, so that Judaism will become ever stronger for
future generations.
Judith Plaskow: An Intellectual Portrait
Hava Tirosh-Samuelson
Judith Plaskow is perhaps the most famous and influential Jewish feminist
theologian. For the past four decades she has been a preeminent voice
among Jewish feminists, contributing to the profound transformation of
contemporary Judaism. With a passion for justice that took its inspiration
from biblical prophets, Plaskow has substantiated the claim that Judaism
is a patriarchal religion based on inequality and injustice and, in its place,
has called for the creation of feminist Judaism. Plaskow was the first femi-
nist to argue that the problem of women in Judaism is neither sociological
nor political but rather theological. Because the sacred texts of the Jew-
ish tradition have been composed, transmitted, and interpreted by men
alone, they have constructed a male-centered God-language that ignored
women’s experience, made maleness normative, and created a Jewish soci-
ety that subordinated and marginalized women. If contemporary Judaism
is to achieve the prophetic vision of justice, Jewish God-language has to
change; the three pillars of Judaism—God, Torah, and Israel—have to be
reinterpreted; and new religious rituals have to be composed. Plaskow’s
reconstruction of Judaism in accord with feminism is truly revolutionary.
The Feminist Vision: Methodology, Critique, and Reconstruction
Wishing to end millennia of male dominance which has been harmful to

all women, including Jewish women, Plaskow offered a radical liberation
theology. It is “radical” in the original sense of the term, namely, going back
to roots. Since the revelation of the Torah at Sinai is the root experience
of Judaism, Plaskow has shown how Jewish men have written the experi-
ences of women out of the tradition by simultaneously silencing women
and excluding them from the process of interpretation. The only way to
respond to this profound injustice is to move women from the margins
to the center, making it possible for women to become equal interpreters
of divine revelation whose wisdom matters. The recognition of women’s
full humanity has implications for all aspects of society (e.g., law, poli-
tics, economics, religion, education, and culture), but it is most poignant
in terms of human sexuality. The unequal power relation between men
2 judith plaskow: an intellectual portrait
and women is the mark of heterosexuality, which has become even dou-
bly oppressive because it was posited as the only normative form of
relationship. To be fully liberated from male oppression it is necessary
for humanity to recognize all forms of human sexuality—lesbian, homo-
sexual, bisexual, and transgendered—as valid and treat those who mani-
fest nonheterosexual behavior with dignity and respect. Plaskow’s radical
liberation theology is thus inseparable from her woman-centered sexual
ethics and her social activism.
Although she has more recently rejected this dichotomy as overly sim-
ple, Plaskow’s critique begins with the basic feminist distinction between
sex (i.e., biological differences between men and women) and gender (i.e.,
socially constructed roles and expectations of men and women). In patri-
archal society gender and sex overlap: a given trait or mode of behavior
is considered “masculine” when it relates to power, control, and prestige;
conversely, traits associated with marginal social locations are considered
“feminine.” Moreover, in patriarchal society “masculine” terms stand for
what is human and male, while “feminine” terms connote only female-
ness, as if the female is a less-worthy variant of the male standard. From
a feminist perspective, the imbalance between the “masculine” and the
“feminine” operates throughout culture, giving rise to unequal and unjust
gender-based social practices. This aspect of patriarchy is especially perni-
cious when we consider religion, which expresses our ultimate concerns.
If God is conceptualized in masculine terms (e.g., “lord,” “master,” “king,”
“judge,” and “warrior”), we not only privilege the male over the female, we
also sanction these relations of domination to be normative, since humans
(especially Jewish males) are supposed to imitate God. To uproot injustice
to women we must repudiate male-centered language and construct a new
God-language that comes out of women’s experience, offering metaphors
that facilitate nonhierarchical, egalitarian relations and that reflect an
understanding of power as “power-with” rather than as domination.
Plaskow’s life, career, and academic writings demonstrate the ambiguity
and complexity of the term “Jewish philosophy.” If by “Jewish philosophy”
we refer to reasoned reflections about the Jewish religious beliefs, authori-
tative texts, rituals and practices, and historical experience, Plaskow is
undoubtedly a Jewish philosopher. When she subjects Judaism to a scath-
ing feminist critique, she weighs the relative merits of various arguments,
points out the logical flaws of various claims, and generalizes about what
is right, good, and true. However, if by “Jewish philosophy” we refer more
narrowly to an academic activity of engaging a well-defined body of philo-
sophical literature (by non-Jewish and Jewish philosophers), then defining
Plaskow as a Jewish philosopher is more complex. Although Plaskow holds
judith plaskow: an intellectual portrait 3
a B.A. in philosophy, her graduate training and academic career took shape
not in the discipline of philosophy but rather in the discipline of religious
studies. At Yale Divinity School she was trained in systematic (Christian)
theology and (to a lesser degree) the comparative study of world religions
and her conversation with Jewish and non-Jewish philosophical texts was
shaped by feminist concerns. Occasionally Plaskow refers to (male) Jewish
philosophers, but her point of departure is always feminist, that is to say,
she concerns herself with ideas of male philosophers only to the extent
that they are relevant to her feminist analysis. She is not interested in the
philosophic exposition of other people’s thought (be they Jews or non-
Jews) for its own sake.
Indeed, Plaskow never refers to herself as a “Jewish philosopher,” but
sees herself as a “Jewish theologian,” or more precisely as a “Jewish femi-
nist theologian,”1 and she regards her work not as “Jewish philosophy” but
as “Jewish theology” or “Jewish thought.”2 As a theologian, Plaskow is con-
cerned primarily with the interpretation of sacred texts, explaining how
the canonic tradition shaped the social location of Jewish women over the
centuries. Plaskow’s theology is quite different from that of other Jewish
theologians, because hers is a grass-roots theology. Her point of depar-
ture is not the received texts but the lived experience of the texts’ inter-
preters, the women who refused to accept their exclusion from the act of
interpretation and who courageously began to confront the canonic tradi-
tion. Feminist consciousness-raising groups forged this experience in the
1960s and 1970s, in which Plaskow took very active part. That group experi-
ence has shaped the style of Plaskow’s writing: instead of promoting her
own individual originality, Plaskow always speaks in the name of a larger
vision—religious feminism—and as part of a larger group, be they women,
feminists, or Jewish feminists. More specifically, Plaskow forged her fusion
of Judaism and feminism in the context of B’not Esh (Daughters of Fire), a
feminist “spirituality collective,” as Plaskow defined it, that she co-founded
in 1981. Writing as a spokesperson of a larger group to which she belongs,
Plaskow always acknowledges the work of others with whom she forged
1 Judith Plaskow, “Judith Plaskow: Jewish Feminist Theologian,” in Transforming the

Faiths of Our Fathers: Women Who Changed American Religion, ed. Ann Braude (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 219–26.
2 See Judith Plaskow, “Jewish Theology in Feminist Perspective,” in Feminist Perspectives
on Jewish Studies, ed. Lynn Davidman and Shelly Tenenbaum (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1994), 62–84; Judith Plaskow, “Jewish Feminist Thought,” in History of Jewish Phi-
losophy, ed. Daniel H. Frank and Oliver Leaman (London and New York: Routledge, 1997),
885–93. Whether Jewish philosophy is necessarily theological has been debated by histori-
ans of Jewish philosophy as well as by constructive Jewish philosophers.
her revolutionary vision and to whom she is intellectually indebted.

Plaskow’s feminist theology is thus a collective endeavor rooted in collec-
tive experience and not just the musing of an individual philosopher. As a
feminist, Plaskow’s primary loyalty is to other feminists, but her theoriz-
ing as a feminist reflects the influence of several philosophical strands,
especially hermeneutics, dialogical philosophy, critical theory, and process
philosophy. The hermeneutical tradition in western philosophy was rooted
in the activity of Scriptural interpretation. From the Greek verb herme-
neuein, “hermeneutics” means “to interpret,” “to exegete,” “to explain,” or “to
translate.” Named after the Greek god Hermes, the messenger of the gods,
hermeneutics was understood as a way to communicate knowledge, but
the knowledge conveyed was not simply theoretical or abstract; rather the
knowledge is intended to instruct and to direct the recipient of knowledge
toward living rightly, very much as Torah does. Positioning itself against sci-
entific Positivism, philosophical hermeneutics articulated the theory that
explored the conditions and possibility of interpretation not only of literary
texts but of all “texts,” including art and artifacts. Plaskow’s feminist project
is thoroughly hermeneutical, although she does not devote her energy to
the exposition of the leading figures of philosophical hermeneutics (e.g.,
Wilhelm Dilthey, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Paul Ricouer).
Plaskow’s project is hermeneutical because she wishes to understand
what transpires between texts and interpreters and how the act of inter-
pretation shapes lived reality at the same time that social location shapes
the act of interpretation. In agreement with philosophical hermeneutics,
Plaskow’s feminist hermeneutics is based on one crucial philosophical
point: understanding is not possible without pre-understanding, or pre-
judgment. Best expressed by Gadamer, this insight is her point of depar-
ture: to theorize as a feminist requires one to be acutely self-aware of one’s
own positionality, one’s own prejudices, and one’s own horizon of mean-
ing. Acknowledging positionality entails that no matter how abstract the
pursuit of truth is, philosophy is always historically grounded and socially
embedded, and it requires the thinker to declare where she stands rather
than hide behind the “veil of objectivity,” as male philosophers or nonfemi-
nist female philosophers tend to do. This is why Plaskow openly discusses
her biography and intellectual development to shed light on her feminist
reinterpretation of Judaism.3 For Plaskow, philosophy does not consist of
3 Judith Plaskow, “Intersections: An Introduction,” in The Coming of Lilith: Essays on

Feminism, Judaism, and Sexual Ethics, 1972–2003, ed. Judith Plaskow and Donna Berman
(Boston: Beacon Press, 2005), 5–19.
disembodied, value-neutral theorizing; rather, philosophizing begins with

lived historical experience, be it the experience of all women or specifically
the experience of Jewish women or a Jewish woman, herself.
The emphasis on positionality is linked to yet another theoretical claim:
all knowledge is linguistical, contextual, and inseparable from a tradition.
Although Plaskow is not a philosopher of language per se, her feminist
project presupposed a certain understanding of language: language does
not mirror or reflect reality because language is not transparent. Rather,
language construes reality, especially social reality in interhuman relations.
If we want to change social relations, especially the relations between men
and women, we must first be attentive to language, in particular the lan-
guage about the ultimate reality we call “God.” How we (or more precisely
the men who construct and control social reality) have imaged God tells
us not about the nature of God, who is beyond description or under-
standing, but about the nature of human beings and their values, ideals,
and norms. The linguisticality of human existence means that not only is
knowledge always refracted through language, but that all social reforms
must begin with language since it frames how we think, speak, and act.
Human claims to knowledge are always socially embedded, emerging
out of lived experience and in specific sociocultural conditions. These con-
ditions necessarily reflect underlying (but often unacknowledged) power
relations, including the power imbalance between men and women within
the context of patriarchy. Patriarchy, Plaskow charges along with other fem-
inists, is neither “natural” nor “divinely ordained,” although she does not
regard sexism as more fundamental than racism or ethnocentrism, as other
feminists have argued. For Plaskow, patriarchy is a set of social institutions
that emerged at a certain point in human development, privileging men
over women. Once in place, patriarchy has pervaded all aspects of society
and culture, making maleness the norm of being human: women are the
Other, defined only in relations to men, against which they are found want-
ing. In the words of Aristotle, women are “incomplete males,” a perception
that persisted since antiquity to our own day.
Since patriarchy has shaped all aspects of culture, the feminist must
realize that all cultural products, including canonic texts, reflect the
assumptions, values, and norms of patriarchy. Therefore, the feminist must
approach all texts with the “hermeneutics of suspicion” that subjects all
expressions of patriarchal culture, especially canonic texts, to close analy-
sis in order to show their inherent partiality. Even when these texts claim
to speak truth about God, the world, and human beings, they in fact speak
only about men and for men, because these truth claims were made by men.
The hermeneutics of suspicion is thus a hermeneutic of refusal, namely,
the refusal to accept what men have said as authoritative and normative,
even though the men-centered tradition has presented itself as such. By
expositing the exclusion of women from the formation of the tradition, by
demanding inclusion, and by offering alternative readings of the canonic
texts, the hermeneutics of suspicion and refusal is the first step in the lib-
eration of women from the oppression and abuses of patriarchy.
As historical entities human beings are necessarily “children of tradition,”
as Gadamer aptly put it. Tradition itself, with its unique religious symbols,
beliefs, ritual practices, ethical norms, moral sensibilities, and social ideals,
shapes the human horizon necessarily and inescapably. To be immersed in
tradition means that feminists, especially those who define themselves in
religious terms, cannot critique “religion” in general; rather, they must carry
out the critical project within their own particular religious tradition. To
critique a given religious tradition from within means that feminists must
engage not only in “hermeneutics of suspicion,” but also in “hermeneutics
of remembrance.”4 As a Liberal/Progressive Jew, Plaskow defines herself in
religious categories and feels deep connection to Judaism as a religious way
of life. After several years of engaging in feminist critique, Plaskow realized
that she is not just a religious feminist who critiques the abuses of patri-
archy but a Jewish feminist who cares deeply about Judaism and Jews. The
feminist revolution that Plaskow sought to accomplish had to take place
from within Judaism, by focusing on the interpretation, exposition, and
application of the canonic sources of Judaism, first and foremost the Bible
and secondarily the rabbinic corpus. The task of the feminist philosopher
is thus dual: critique and analysis as well as recovery and reconstruction.
Standing within the Jewish tradition, she insists on rereading the canonic
sources against their male-centered grain, exposing their biases, gaps, and
silences.5 The feminist reading of the traditional sources is not simply an
4 The dynamics between “hermeneutics of suspicion” and “hermeneutics of remem-

brance” is discussed in Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism from a Feminist Perspective (San
Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1990), 13–15. Both terms and their methodologies were
developed by Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, with whom Plaskow has worked closely since
the 1970s. See, for example, Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Transforming Vision: Explorations
in Feminist Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2011).
5 Feminist hermeneutics has some overlap with postmodern philosophy, especially its
post-Structuralist strain, articulated by Derrida’s Deconstruction and Michel Foucault’s
critique of power/knowledge. However, on the whole, I do not consider Plaskow as a post-
modernist thinker for the simple reason: she believes that it is possible to generalize about
and reconstruct “women’s experience” and she wishes to reform society in light of feminist
ideals and for the sake of women. Plaskow’s feminism is somewhere between modernism
act of claiming to decipher what God wants the Jews to be and to do; it is
rather a reflexive and critical reading of Judaism that calls Jews to recon-
sider everything they take for granted about it.
To be a feminist, then, entails taking a critical stance toward a socially
constructed reality constituted by language and a particular historical expe-
rience. This posture makes Plaskow’s thought critical in the broad sense of
the term, even though she does not engage the leading thinkers of Critical
Theory (e.g., Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Walter Benjamin)
in sustained analysis. As a critical theorist she weighs, evaluates, judges,
and adjudicates claims, situations, and texts with the intent of exposing
their distorting “blind spots,” gaps, and silences of the ruling ideology (i.e.,
patriarchy). This critical engagement with the patriarchal Jewish tradition
exposes the injustice done to women when they were silenced, excluded,
or marginalized by Jewish men who claimed to be the exclusive interpret-
ers of divine revelation. Since in rabbinic Judaism the act of interpreting
Torah is the very activity by which Jews communicate with God and reach
the ultimate end of human life, the exclusion of women from the act of
interpretation is not just morally unjust but also religiously harmful. The
feminist interpreter cannot limit herself to uncovering that truth or theo-
rizing about the past; rather, she must act within the social spheres that
reform and transform the social reality that brought about the marginaliza-
tion, exclusion, and subordination of women. With the feminist recovery of
women’s experience and the restoration of the female voice to the Jewish
tradition, Plaskow offers Jewish philosophers a different way of philoso-
phizing: philosophy begins with the lived experience of the philosopher,
engages pressing social issues, and leads to action in the social world. As
a critical activity, the task of philosophy (like the task of feminism) is ulti-
mately practical: to make the world into a just place by ending oppression,
exclusion, or marginalization of individuals and groups. To philosophize
as Plaskow calls us to do is to engage in tikkun olam, the very lofty rabbinic
goal to which Plaskow gave a new feminist interpretation.6
and postmodernism: it endorses the modernist, democratic notion of individual rights but
eschews generalization about humanity; conversely, it endorses the social constructivism
of postmodernism but rejects its consequent relativism.
6 Appropriately the final chapter of Plaskow’s Standing Again at Sinai is entitled “Femi-
nist Judaism and Repair of the World.” See Judith Plaskow, Standing Again at Sinai, 211–38.
Biography and Career
Judith Plaskow was born in Brooklyn on March 14, 1947, into a family of
Jewish professionals.7 Her mother, Vivian Cohen Plaskow (1920–1979) was
a teacher and her father, Jerome Plaskow (1918–2002), a certified public
accountant. With the suburbanization of the Jews in the postwar years, the
family moved to West Hempstead on Long Island where she grew up dur-
ing the 1950s and 1960s attending the local public schools. Religiously the
family identified as Reform and belonged to Nassau Community Temple,
whose spiritual leader at the time was Rabbi Sidney Ballon (1912–1974).
Classical Reform in those decades stood for three main tenets: the essence
of Judaism is ethical monotheism; the task of the Jewish people is to serve
as “a light unto the nations;” and Jews must improve the world by working
tirelessly to attain social justice. Accordingly, as Plaskow herself tells us,
she believed that “Jews had given the world the purifying vision of belief
in one universal God”8 and that Jews had an obligation to translate that
vision into just social relations. Growing up in the postwar years, Plas-
kow became intensely fascinated and even obsessed with the Holocaust,
recognizing that it raises profound theological questions about God and
his relationship with the Jewish people as well as about the meaning of
victimhood. Because she viewed Jews as victims she was led “to identify
with other victims of oppression, especially African-Americans.”9 She
became increasingly informed about the plight of Africans and African-
Americans and was deeply and personally transformed by Martin Luther
King’s speech “I Have a Dream” on October 16, 1963. That transformative
experience has launched her career as a social critic, religious reformer,
and feminist activist.
Plaskow was educated in America’s top institutions of higher learning.
She received her B.A. from Clark University majoring in Philosophy and
an M.A. (1971) and Ph.D. (1975) in Religious Studies from Yale Divinity
School. At Yale she studied systematic Christian (mainly Protestant) theol-
ogy and wrote a doctoral thesis later published under the title Sex, Sin, and
Grace: Women’s Experience and the Theologies of Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul
7 For a short and very useful overview of Judith Plaskow’s life and works see Rachel
Adler, “Judith Plaskow,” in Jewish Women’s Archives: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclo-
pedia, http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/plaskow-judith. Additional information about
Plaskow’s life and intellectual development is available in Judith Plaskow, “Intersections:
An Introduction,” in The Coming of Lilith, 5–19.
8 Plaskow, “Intersections,” 5.
9 Ibid., 6.
Tillich.10 Written under the supervision of Julian Norris Hartt, this revised
version of the 1975 dissertation is an early feminist attempt to understand
“women’s experience” and show that when (Christian) theologians speak
about human nature, human sin, or human need for grace, they in fact have
in mind men only. The uninformed reader cannot tell that the author of
the book is a Jew, let alone a committed religious Jew; the critical perspective
adopted in the book is feminist rather than Jewish and the methodology
is that of systematic theology as practiced in (Christian) divinity schools.
Plaskow, then, began her intellectual career not as a Jewish theologian or a
scholar of Jewish studies but as a scholar who subjected Christian theology
to feminist analysis.
The experience at Yale Divinity School formed Plaskow as a feminist
theologian. She entered Yale Divinity School in 1968 at the height of the
feminist transformation of American society. A year later women were
admitted to Yale undergraduate college, setting the stage for the transfor-
mation of American higher education at large. She joined the Yale Women’s
Alliance, a group engaged in consciousness raising as well as in various
issues related to the life of women at Yale, where she became friends with
Carol P. Christ and other feminists who subjected their own religious tra-
ditions to sustained feminist critique.11 In retrospect, Plaskow defined the
exposure to feminism as a “conversion,” an intense personal experience
that shifts the way one sees one’s place in the world. Married at the time
to Robert Goldenberg, a rabbi and scholar of rabbinic Judaism, she real-
ized that as a woman she occupies a secondary, marginalized place within
Judaism. The new feminist self-awareness brought her to realize that in tra-
ditional synagogue services “her presence was irrelevant to the purpose for
which we have gathered.”12 As a woman she was not counted in the minyan,
was not called to the Torah, and was not involved in the interpretation of
the received tradition. Refusing to give up Judaism for feminism or live as
a woman whose identity is split between the two, Plaskow would gradually
seek to affirm herself as a “Jewish feminist and a feminist Jew.”13 That project
10 Judith Plaskow, Sex, Sin and Grace: Women’s Experience in the Theologies of Reinhold
Niebhur and Paul Tillich (Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1980).
11 With Carol P. Christ, Plaskow edited Womanspirit Rising: A Feminist Reader in Religion
(San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1979) and Weaving the Visions: New Patterns in Feminist
Spirituality (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1989), anthologies that survey feminist religious
writings from the 1970s and 1980s.
12 See Standing at Sinai, xi.
13 Ibid.
took place within the contours of the discipline of religious studies and its
leading professional organization, the American Academy of Religion.
Already as a graduate student she became the Co-Chair of the Women
and Religion Group (1972–1974) and later was a member of its steering
committee once it became regularized as the Woman and Religion Section.
During the early 1970s she worked closely with other feminists and women’s
studies scholars, first as a research associate in Women’s Studies at Harvard
(1973) and later in the New York Area Feminist Scholars in Religion (1974).
With Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, the Catholic, feminist, biblical scholar,
Plaskow co-founded the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion and served
as its co-editor (1983–1994),14 a position that made Plaskow both intimately
familiar with feminist scholarship and in a position to shape its direction.
In the 1980s and 1990s Plaskow became a household name in the disciplines
of religious studies and women’s studies. Benefitting from the growth of
both disciplines, Plaskow moved smoothly from Assistant Professor of reli-
gion in Wichita State University in Kansas (1976–1979), where she taught
courses on feminist studies in religion, and thereafter in Manhattan College,
a Lasallian Catholic institution, which she joined in 1976, rising steadily
from Assistant Professor (1976) to Associate Professor (1984) and finally
to Full Professor (1990). At this Catholic institution, Plaskow, the Jewish
feminist, was clearly the Other, albeit a respected Other who had a voice.15
Her impact on the field was exercised through the American Academy of
Religion where she rose to positions of leadership: she served two terms
as Associate Director (1992–1994 and 1998–1999), a term as Vice President
(1995–1996), President-Elect (1996–1997), and President (1997–1998). As a
Jewish feminist she has had more influence on one of America’s leading
academic institutions—perhaps more than most Jewish members of the
organization, with the exception of Jacob Neusner.
The more Plaskow engaged other feminist academics, both Christian
and post-Christian, the more she became aware of her own Jewishness and
her need to reconcile her Jewish and feminist identities. In part that aware-
ness grew out of the realization of the “persistence of anti-Semitic stereo-
types in feminist literature” and the need to confront “Christian feminist
14 For an overview of this professional relationship and the history of the journal see
Judith Plaskow, “A Short History of JFSR,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion: 20th Anni-
versary Issue 21, no. 2 (2005): 103–6.
15 This is based on Plaskow’s own self-description in a personal e-mail communication,
December 4, 2013.
anti-Judaism,”16 a point to which we shall return below, but it also grew out
of the need to fully express herself. During the summer of 1980, five years
after writing her dissertation, Plaskow taught her first course on Jewish
feminist theology at the first National Havurah Summer Institute, and that
transformative experience launched her new attempt to integrate her femi-
nist and Jewish identities.17 Against other Jewish feminists who defined the
problem of women in Judaism in sociological or political terms (e.g., Betty
Friedan, Bella Abzug, or Cynthia Ozick), Plaskow argued that the problem is
theological, requiring feminist reinterpretation of Judaism.18 As she began
to integrate her feminist and Jewish identities, she joined forces with other
Jewish feminists, including Martha Acklesberg, Marcia Falk, Drorah Setel,
and Sue Levi Elwell, women who were members of the Jewish feminist
group, B’not Esh.19 Gathering at the Grail Retreat Center in Cornwall-on-
Hudson, this group of originally sixteen (now thirty-two) Jewish feminists
was determined to create a feminist Judaism, and saw themselves as a “new
Yavneh” of sorts. In this context they not only talked about feminism but
also enacted changes that will transform the Jewish community at large.
Characteristic of feminist consciousness-raising groups, this “spiritual
collective” shaped her methodology: truth comes out of lived experience
through empathetic encounters with others and with the intent of making
a difference in the life of Jews.
The women-centered experience of B’not Esh led to personal changes
as well. In 1984 Plaskow came out as a lesbian and her marriage ended in
divorce. From then on her theological reinterpretation of Judaism devel-
oped in two complimentary trajectories: first, she directed her critical
stance toward compulsory heterosexuality, showing its inherently unjust
nature and the need to find a place for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and trans
gender people within religious communities. Second, she applied the cri-
tique of power not only to traditional Judaism but also to the policies of the
16 Judith Plaskow, “Feminist Anti-Judaism and the Christian God,” in The Coming of Lil-
ith, 100, 101.
17 Plaskow, “Intersections,” 11.
18 Judith Plaskow, “The Right Question Is Theological,” in On Being a Jewish Feminist: A
Reader, ed. Susannah Heschel (New York: Schocken book, 1983), 223–33; reprinted in The
Coming of Lilith, 56–64.
19 For a full list of the women involved in the early years of this group see Martha A.
Acklesberg, “Spirituality, Community and Politics: B’not Esh and the Feminist Reconstruc-
tion of Judaism,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 2, no. 2 (Fall 1986): 109–20; the list is
on p. 109. The composition of the group has changed repeatedly over the years and today
it consists of thirty-two women.
State of Israel, especially toward the Palestinians.20 A regular contributor to

the Left-leaning magazine, Tikkun,21 Plaskow emerged as a prominent voice
of self-critical, liberal Judaism taking a stance on a variety of hotly con-
tested social and political issues, such as the rights of homosexuals and the
Israeli presence in Lebanon. For Plaskow, the ideal of justice could not be
limited to women; it had to be applied to any group that suffers oppression
and injustice. Precisely because she was committed to justice and truth,
she could not ignore the fact that some Christian feminists tried to make
the case that “Jesus was a feminist” by drawing on traditional anti-Jewish
themes. Others uncritically rejected Yahweh as the God of patriarchy, per-
petuating the dichotomy between Jewish “law” and Christian “grace,” which
has been implicated in the history of anti-Semitism. She took her Christian
sisters to task by exposing and confronting feminist anti-Judaism.22 A cou-
rageous critic, Plaskow speaks truth as she sees it, even when the truth goes
against accepted conventions of Jews, Israelis, and even feminists.
Jewish Feminist Theology
Plaskow’s life work is governed by one overarching and purposeful vision:

to create a feminist Judaism. This mission has been articulated in numer-
ous essays and public addresses but its most systematic expression is
Plaskow’s Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism from a Feminist Perspective
(1990). Based on over two decades of sustained work as a feminist theolo-
gian, scholar of religion, editor of an academic journal, and social activist,
this powerful book has transformed contemporary Judaism, generating
a robust examination of Judaism in light of feminism among academics
and nonacademics, Jews and non-Jews, men and women, and across the
religious spectrum of Judaism. No one writing about feminism and Judaism
20 Plaskow, Standing Again at Sinai, 107–19.

21 For a representative sample of articles see Michael Lerner, ed., Tikkun Reader: Twen-
tieth Anniversary (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2007). Judith Plaskow’s
essay, “Burning in Hell, Conservative Movement Style: Beliefs that Jews and Homosexuals
Deserve Eternal Punishment” (ibid., 77–82) illustrates her role as a public intellectual criti-
cal of America’s political Right.
22 Judith Plaskow, “Christian Feminism and Anti-Judaism,” CrossCurrents 33 (Fall 1978):
306–9; reprinted as “Blaming the Jews for the Birth of Patriarchy” in Lilith 7 (1980): 11–12,
and in Nice Jewish Girls, ed. Evelyn Torton Beck (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989), 298–302;
Judith Plaskow, “Christian Feminist Anti-Judaism: Some New Consideration,” New Con-
versations 9 (Spring 1987): 23–26; “Anti-Judaism in Feminist Christian Interpretation,” in
Searching the Scriptures: A Feminist Introduction, ed. Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorneza (New
York: Crossroad, 1993), 117–29, reprinted in this volume; Judith Plaskow, “Feminist Anti-
Judaism and the Christian God,” in The Coming of Lilith, 100–109.
since then has ignored (or could have afforded to ignore) this compelling
book; by the same token, no one today could deny that Judaism has been
profoundly transformed because of the feminist vision, most powerfully
articulated by Judith Plaskow.23
Let’s look more closely at Plaskow’s seminal work, presenting her femi-
nist theology in her own words.24 As stated above, Plaskow was the first to
argue that the problem of women in Judaism is first and foremost theo-
logical, because “theology surreptitiously affects many aspects of Jewish
practice” (Sinai, 23). Since all aspects of Jewish society and culture have
been shaped by theological presuppositions that have normative power, all
Jews today, no matter how religious or secular they are, must pay atten-
tion to theology, if they wish to address the marginalization, exclusion, or
subordination of women in Judaism. Plaskow names this theological enter-
prise, “Godwrestling” (Sinai, 33), a term coined and popularized by Arthur
Waskow, a fellow, Left-leaning Jewish theologian.25 Godwrestling is an invi-
tation to Jews to ask poignant theological questions and not to shirk from
inconvenient truths about inherent injustice within Judaism. As much as
Jacob’s wrestling with the angel transformed him into “Israel,” giving birth
to a nation, so will contemporary wrestling with problematic Jewish theol-
ogy give rise to a more just and egalitarian Judaism.
The feminist critical engagement with Jewish theology, however, does
not begin with exposition of Jewish sacred texts in an attempt to fathom
what they say and what they mean. Rather, the feminist theological critique
begins with historiography, precisely because human beings are temporal
beings who live in history. Understanding how the past is recorded, trans-
mitted, and interpreted is precisely the point of departure for feminist the-
ology. In patriarchal Judaism that task was the exclusive privilege of men:
only men composed the sacred texts of Judaism; only men interpreted
their meaning for all Jews; only men translated that meaning into norma-
tive legislation; and only men created and staffed the social institutions
which turned law into daily practice. Thus, even though the Jewish People,
or Jewish society through the ages, comprises of both men and women, the
experience of Jewish women did not shape the tradition.
23 This point is well stated by Debora Nussbaum Cohen, “Judith Plaskow is Still Stand-
ing, Twenty Years On,” in Forward, January 28, 2011, http://forward.com//articles/134754/
judith-plaskow-is-still-stading-twenty-years-on.
24 Given the large number of citations, the references to Standing Again at Sinai will be
listed in the text rather than in the notes.
25 Arthur Waskow, Godwrestling (New York: Schocken Books, 1978).
By “women’s experience” (a topic analyzed already in her doctoral dis-

sertation) Plaskow refers to “the daily, lived substance of women’s lives,
the conscious events, thoughts, and feelings that constitute women’s real-
ity” (Sinai, 11). Women’s experience, Plaskow reminds her readers, is “not
an essence” or “some innate capacity of women” (ibid.). Rather, women’s
experience is a “product of culture” and as such needs to be and indeed
can be recovered through historical research, once we acknowledge the
partial nature of the records we have at our disposal. Yet, that partiality
does not mean that women were historically absent. Indeed, women were
and always are present in Jewish society and collective experience, but
they were made to be silent, their voice taken away from them. Feminism
has restored voice to Jewish women,26 enabling them not only to express
and share their present experiences, but also to recover the experiences of
women through the ages, beginning with the root experience of Judaism:
Sinai.27 “Standing again at Sinai” is thus the most appropriate symbol for
the task of Jewish women: they need to reassert the historicity of women’s
presence as recipients of divine revelation and they must engage in the
reinterpretation of the entire Jewish tradition in order to create a Judaism
in which women are active and equal participants.
The creation of feminist Judaism required the reinterpretation of the
three pillars of Judaism: Torah, Israel, and God.28 “Torah” does not refer just
to the Five Books of Moses, the Bible in its entirety, or even to the Bible as
interpreted by the rabbinic tradition. “Torah” is that and more because it
consists of the memory and traces of the root experience in which Torah
was given to Israel at Sinai. The Torah, namely, instruction, that Israel
received at Sinai included also “women’s words, teachings and actions hith-
erto unseen” (Sinai, 28), the rich and diverse women’s experiences which
the Jewish tradition has silenced, occluded, and marginalized. To recover
the full meaning of Torah we must use the modern historiographical
method “of careful and critical sifting of sources” (Sinai, 35) in order to
26 It is no coincidence that the title of a major feminist Orthodox journal in Israel is
called Kolekh (Your Voice).
27 As Plaskow acknowledges, presenting the Sinai event as “root experience” is indebted
to Emil Fackenheim, God’s Presence in History: Jewish Affirmations and Philosophical Reflec-
tions (New York: New York University Press, 1970), 8–14.
28 It is interesting to note that this formulation was first articulated by medieval kab-
balists, for whom the dominant metaphor for God is Shekhinah, the female aspect of God.
Jewish feminists have been quick to appropriate Shekhinah symbolism into their Goddess-
language but the appropriateness of that move is not without problems.
recover what Yosef Haim Yerushalmi called “Jewish group memory.”29

Although Yerushalmi was no feminist, Plaskow shows how his analysis
of Jewish history and Jewish memory is precisely the method that Jewish
feminists adopt when they recover the full meaning of Torah. As feminist
historians look “at history from a woman-centered perspective, they have
tried to reconstruct independent women’s cultures developed within or
over against the prevailing assumptions of patriarchal society” (Sinai, 37).
Plaskow makes clear then that her interest in historiography is “theological
rather than historical” because she is “concerned with the way in which
feminist historiography can open up our understanding of Torah by offer-
ing as Torah a new range of sources” (ibid.).
Feminist biblical hermeneutic begins with the awareness that men’s
editorial work read women out of existence. Even though the biblical
records themselves are therefore partial, they can provide information about
“patterns and ideologies of sex roles, evidence that might shed some light
on the social and religious situation of the mass of women in a given time”
(Sinai, 40). Feminist biblical scholarship offers an entire new way of read-
ing the biblical narratives written in the early periods of Israelite history,
uncovering the leadership role women played in ancient society as well as
“women’s religious lives outside of ‘normative’ structures” (Sinai, 42). When
the Bible is read through a feminist lens we “see a larger Torah behind the
Torah, a Torah in which women’s experience is rendered visible, and the
social and religious forms to which they adhered are depicted in their com-
plexity and power” (Sinai, 43). Thus the feminist “reconception of Torah,”
“reveals another world around and underneath the textual tradition, a world
in which women are historical agents struggling within and against patriar-
chal culture” (Sinai, 50). Once we recognize that women’s experience is part
of “the fuller Torah we need to recover,” we can no longer take “any Jewish
text as given, as having emerged organically from an eternal, unambiguous,
uncontested religion vision” (Sinai, 50). The feminist approach necessarily
relativizes the normative tradition, reminding us that the Judaism we have
is not for all Jews but only “the Judaism of the male elite” (Sinai, 51). Judaism
is much “richer, more complex and more diverse than either ‘normative’
sources or most branches of modern Judaism would admit” (ibid.).
From this critical and incontrovertible argument follows the construc-
tive or reconstructive dimension of feminist Judaism. All Jewish women,
29 Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zachor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Seattle: Univer-
sity of Seattle Press, 1982), 94; cited in Plaskow, Standing Against at Sinai, 35.
but especially the feminists among them, must become actively engaged
in the reconstruction of Torah, of Jewish collective memory, and of Jewish
social and religious life. They must (as indeed they have done) be engaged in
composition of new midrashim,30 new rituals, and new liturgy that express
their religiosity, spirituality, sensibility, and values. Plaskow celebrates and
promotes feminist creativity and inventiveness, through the innovative
ceremonies of Rosh Hodesh, feminist haggadot, feminist welcoming of a
baby girl, and Sabbath liturgy. The new feminist rituals, however, could
not remain mere feminist fancy, whim, or intellectual entertainment. If
they are to transform contemporary Judaism once and for all, they have
to become regarded as legally binding. Halakha, much more than midrash
or liturgy, is the real challenge to feminism and its innovative, progressive
spirit. So long as halakha is presented as an unchanging and in principle
unchangeable divine revelation to be interpreted by expert men, a feminist
Judaism will remain untenable.
Plaskow addresses the halakhic challenge in two ways. First she invokes
Martin Buber’s philosophy of relation or dialogical philosophy in support
of her view, since Buber insisted that divine-human relations are not law-
governed. Law belongs to the functional and instrumental I-It relations,
whereas true dialogue between the human “I” and the “Eternal Thou” is
direct, unmediated, and in principle not amenable to systemization. Divine
revelation, then, cannot be reduced to law and halakha must not replace
God as the center of Jewish life. Second, and more importantly but pro-
vocatively, Plaskow challenges the very assumption that halakha as we have
it is authoritative. Halakha, like all legal systems, is a human product, the
work of human beings who operated within certain historical conditions.
The human origins of halakha, Plaskow asserts as a Liberal/Progressive Jew,
means that halakha is inherently subject to change, reinterpretation, and
reformation. Rabbinic Judaism was itself a novel interpretation of Judaism
and the rabbis “believed that their interpretations gave the true meaning of
Scripture,”31 but the rabbis represented their own views and not the views
of the community in its entirety. Precisely because religious authority,
Plaskow argues, always rests “in a community of interpreters” the defini-
tion of the interpretative community must be as inclusive as possible so
30 Plaskow’s feminist appropriation of ancient Jewish midrashim on the female demon,

Lilith, exemplifies the role of midrash in the construction of Jewish feminist theology. See
Judith Plaskow, “The Coming of Lilith: Toward a Feminist Theology,” in Womanspirit Rising,
198–209, reprinted in The Coming of Lilith, 23–34.
31 Judith Plaskow, “It Is Not in Heaven: Feminist and Religious Authority,” in The Coming
of Lilith, 123–27; quote on p. 126.
that the halakhic tradition must continue to respond to “the experience of

ever-widening communities.”32 In the ideal, future feminist Judaism, laws
that govern human relations, especially the formation and dissolution of
relationship, will have “to acknowledge women’s full agency” and women
will have to be active participants in the interpretation of the halakhic tra-
dition and the process of decision making about women. Plaskow does not
exclude halakha from the ideal future but she maintains that “any halakha
that is part of a feminist Judaism would have to look very different from
halakha as it has been” (Sinai, 72). Needless to say, most Orthodox Jews,
including Orthodox women, would not endorse Plaskow’s understanding
of Jewish law. However, there is no denying her point that feminist the-
ology is inseparable from feminist legal theory and that the debate about
women and gender touches the most fundamental aspects of Jewish reli-
gious self-understanding.
Plaskow’s understanding of “Torah” is inseparable from her understand-
ing of “Israel.” Plaskow puts it succinctly: “If Torah is Jewish memory as it
lives in and forms the present, Israel is the people that remembers and
transforms the memory” (Sinai, 75). The feminist reconstruction of Judaism
demands a new understanding of “Israel,” the recipient of divine revela-
tion. To begin, Plaskow argues for a new understanding of human selfhood,
or personhood. Contrary to the dominant trend in modern philosophy
since Descartes, the human person is not an autonomous entity that is the
bearer of human rights by virtue of rationality, but a relational being whose
“personhood is shaped, nourished and sustained in community.” Plaskow’s
emphasis on the relational or social nature of the human self is indebted
to Buber’s philosophy of relation no less than to Judaism’s belief that God
entered a covenant with Israel. The covenant means that the “Jewish rela-
tionship to God is mediated through this community” (Sinai, 80); a Jew
cannot have a relationship to God outside the community. Because “God is
fully present only with and among the community” (ibid.), it is necessary
to define the community inclusively rather than exclusively and remember
that the community of “Israel” has continued to evolve in history.
The rabbinic understanding of “Israel,” alas, is inadequate because the
rabbis excluded women from Torah study, exempted women from time-
bound commandments, forbade women to lead public prayers, and regu-
lated women’s place within the patriarchal family. In so doing the rabbis
underscored the Otherness of women. Plaskow’s analysis of Otherness is
indebted mainly to Simone de Beauvoir and it stands in contrast to the
32 Ibid., 127.
interpretation by Emmanuel Levinas, the philosopher who made Otherness

the center of his Jewish critique of Western philosophy. Whereas for
Levinas Otherness is understood positively, the Other is the source of ethi-
cal obligation, for Plaskow, following de Beauvoir, Otherness is understood
negatively; the Other is always the one-who-is-not-the-norm, the one who
is less-than-the standard, the one who-has-no-selfhood. The reason for
Plaskow’s preference of de Beauvoir over Levinas is quite obvious: whereas
the French non-Jewish female philosopher offers a vantage point for the cri-
tique of patriarchal Judaism, the French male Jewish philosopher perpetu-
ates the traditional stereotypes of the female in Judaism, which Plaskow
calls into question.
Plaskow’s feminist redefinition of Israel has far-reaching consequences
for contemporary Judaism, because she insists that “women’s contributions
to Jewish community are not driven underground, thwarted, or distorted,
and men’s are not given more weight and status than they ought to enjoy”
(Sinai, 87). The feminist revolution empowers women to define themselves,
reassess the causes of their oppression, and restate how women differ from
men. The more women take ownership of their life and their place in the
society the more they have to struggle with the problem of difference, diver-
sity, and hierarchy. After all, Judaism insists on the inherent and inheritable
difference between Jews and all other nations and interprets the covenantal
relationship with God in hierarchical terms of being the Chosen People. In
the morning prayers the observant male Jew expresses gratitude to God for
not being a Gentile, a slave, or a woman, three groups who are either pre-
cluded from the observance of Jewish law, or excluded from some aspects
of the Jewish law. As a feminist Plaskow is justly troubled by the hierarchi-
cal understanding of chosenness and endorses the Reconstructionist the-
ology of Mordecai Kaplan who explicitly rejected such concept. Plaskow’s
project is to show the interconnection between the “rejection of chosen-
ness and the rejection of women’s Otherness” (Sinai, 103). Jews were eman-
cipated because of the assumption that they possess humanity, but they
were denied their particularity as Jews. Plaskow flatly rejects the notion of
“generic humanity,” because she maintains that selfhood is always commu-
nal, but she also argues that communal identity does not necessitate the
negation of other groups. The challenge for Jews today is how to continue
to see themselves as covenantal people, without interpreting the covenant
with God in hierarchical and exclusive terms.
As a religious person and a theologian, Plaskow rejects a strictly secular
understanding of Jewish existence, because the root experience at Sinai
was profoundly religious. To reconstitute Judaism as egalitarian, nonhierar-
chical, and pluralistic is a religious project that requires first the critique of
male-centered God-language and then the creation of a new God-language.

Traditional Judaism images God as a masculine, albeit asexual, deity. This
has far-reaching consequences for women: “When God is pictured as male
in a community that understands ‘man’ to have been created in God’s
image, it only makes sense that maleness functions as the norm of Jewish
humanity” and “when maleness becomes normative, women are neces-
sarily Other, excluded from Torah and subordinated in the community of
Israel” (Sinai, 127). Androcentric God-language is wrong not only because
it inevitably marginalizes women, but also because of its understanding
of divine power as domination, or as “power over” (Sinai, 130). Whether
divine power is asserted over nature, over history, over other gods, or over
humans, this understanding of power is itself the cause of injustice because
it is perpetuated in human “schemes of dominance.” To construct a just and
egalitarian Judaism, it is necessary to articulate a new, nonhierarchical, plu-
ralistic God-language that expresses fluidity, multiplicity, and movement
in God as the source of all being. The first generation of Jewish feminists
(e.g., Marcia Falk, Lynn Gottlieb, Elyse Goldstein, and Maggie Wenig among
others) have done precisely that when they wrote their own midrashim, lit-
urgy, and rituals. Plaskow embraces the work of other feminist theologians
who called for employing feminine imagery (e.g., “bride,” “queen,” “mother,”
etc.) when one prays to the Goddess, or nonpersonal, nature-based symbols
(e.g., “fountain,” and “source”). Her own preference is to retain a personalist
language of God, but to think about God not as a “dominating Other” but as
a “friend, lover, companion and co-creator” (Sinai, 164). God’s power should
be understood not as dominion or domination but as “empowerment,” and
God is understood not as the Other who stands over us but the one “who is
with us . . . a partner in dialogue who ever and again summons us to respon-
sible action” (ibid.). Plaskow’s alternative God-language resonates with
Buber’s dialogical philosophy as well as with process philosophy, although
Plaskow herself does not engage process philosophers systematically. That
task was accomplished by Carol P. Christ, Plaskow’s long-term academic
collaborator, whose influence on Plaskow is unmistakable.33
Justice and Sexual Ethics
The feminist project is guided by the pursuit of justice for women who
have been subject to male dominance. In the above section we saw how
33 See Carol P. Christ, She Who Changes: Reimagining the Divine in the World (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).
Plaskow exposes the injustice to all women and to Jewish women in partic-
ular and how she proposes to deal with it within the contours of Judaism.
Whereas her feminist critique of male-centered Judaism so far focused on
the category of gender, Plaskow’s revolutionary project goes a step further
by rethinking human sexuality in order to do justice to sexually marginal-
ized groups in society in general and in Jewish society in particular. It is
usually asserted that Judaism, in marked contrast to Christianity, views
sexuality positively, rejecting celibacy and celebrating sexual reproduc-
tion within the institution of marriage. In Jewish society the heterosexual
family is the smallest social unit within which the rhythm of Jewish reli-
gious life is experienced. Going beyond the feminist critique of patriarchy,
Plaskow turns her critical gaze toward heterosexuality, both exposing its
inherent limits and calling for celebration of nonheterosexual forms of
human sexuality (i.e., homosexual, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender).
Human sexuality itself (and not just women) has to be liberated from the
constraining and narrow understanding of “compulsory heterosexuality,”
allowing for a freer, pluralistic, and playful understanding of human sexu-
ality. An expansion of her feminist pursuit of justice, Plaskow’s discourse
on human sexuality blends philosophical, theological, social, and ethical
considerations, applying them to sexually oppressed and marginalized
groups and carving space for them within Jewish society.
Plaskow’s point of departure is that human sexuality, like gender, is
socially constructed; it is neither biologically determined nor divinely
ordained. Human beings are indeed biological creatures that must engage
in heterosexual intercourse to reproduce the human species, but procre-
ation by no means captures the significance of sexuality for human beings.
How sexuality is perceived, interpreted, and applied within a sociocultural
context is no less and perhaps even more important than biological sex,
and those perceptions are socially constructed not biologically deter-
mined. Because the act of social construction takes place within a given
sociocultural context, it necessarily manifests underlying power relations.
In patriarchal society where men have dominion over women, conceptions
of human sexuality are necessarily refracted through the male lens. Men
created “compulsory heterosexuality,” which has not only perpetuated the
unequal relations between men and women but also made same-sex sexual
attraction to be “deviant,” “abnormal,” or “unnatural.” To experience the full
range of human sexuality, it is necessary to liberate society from oppressive
and unjust “compulsory heterosexuality.”
Within patriarchal Judaism underlying the ideology of normative het-
erosexuality is a deeply negative perception of women’s sexuality. Rabbinic
Judaism, according to Plaskow, expresses deep anxiety and fear of women’s

sexuality which it seeks to control within the institution of marriage.
Summarizing a lot of feminist research on this point, Plaskow calls for artic-
ulation of a “new theology of sexuality.” To accomplish this goal it is neces-
sary first to redefine “the legal framework of marriage” in accord with the
“feminist refusal to sanctify any hierarchical relations” (Sinai, 200). Second,
this new theology will situate biological sex in the broader category of the
erotic. Erotic energy expresses itself in “our capacity for intimacy, for shar-
ing, for touch,” which flows from the very fact that humans are communal
beings who seek connections with others. The erotic is an expression of
“fundamental life energy” (Sinai, 202) that manifests itself through the body
but is not reduced to the body. In contrast to Western (largely Christian-
Platonic) philosophy, which has denigrated the body as the prison of the
spiritual soul, Plaskow (along with many other feminists) celebrates the
body as the locus of spirituality. The erotic aspect of human life is spiri-
tual, because it expresses the power and desire for communication, and it
demands that relationship will be based on “mutuality, responsibility, and
honesty” (Sinai, 207). A feminist theology of sexuality thus rejects all rela-
tions that are based on control, domination, and hierarchy, while honoring
diversity, choice, and plurality of sexual expression.
The ability to choose how to express one’s innate sexuality stands at the
heart of Plaskow’s inclusive social vision that seeks to carve space for sexu-
ally marginalized, oppressed, or denigrated groups in Jewish society. For
the past three decades the Jewish community, as the rest of society, has
debated the social and religious status of gays and lesbians. Within non-
Orthodox forms of Judaism the debate crystallized around the admission
to religious seminaries and the ordination of gays and lesbians as rabbis.
Although Reform, Conservative, and Reconstructionist strands of con-
temporary Judaism have resolved the issue in favor of admitting gays and
lesbians to rabbinic seminaries, the issue remains controversial and full
social acceptance of sexually marginalized groups is still a desideratum.
Plaskow’s writings on human sexuality go beyond the demand for inclu-
sion of gays and lesbians.34 Unlike other “religious liberals” who opened
the room for inclusion of gays and lesbians by arguing that homosexuality
is an inborn trait over which one has no choice, Plaskow claims that “the
liberal position is riddled with contradictions” and calls for all to recognize
34 Several of Plaskow’s essays on human sexuality are available in The Coming of Lilith,
165–219.
“the complexity of sexual orientation” and “situate the issue in the larger
context of a reexamination of sexual identity and sexual ethics.”35 Human
sexuality is much more diverse, fluid, and porous than the binary distinc-
tions between “heterosexuals” and “homosexuals” and men and women
allow for. Gender dualism does not do justice to bisexuals, transsexual, and
transgender people who deserve respect and inclusion in Jewish society. In
order to go beyond constraining and unjust gender dualism, the feminist
critique and the feminist theology must be extended.
The rabbis themselves, Plaskow persuasively argues in a more recent
essay, have made this expansion possible in their discourse on the her-
maphrodite, the androgynous person that subverts simple dualism
between men and women. Building on the extensive work of feminists as
well as Talmudic scholars such as Daniel Boyarin and Charlotte Fonrobert,
Plaskow offers a much nuanced understanding of human sexuality which
continues and expands the feminist revolution. She succinctly summarizes
the connection between feminism and expansive understanding of human
sexuality as follows:
Feminists have argued that we can experience the reality of a God who tran-
scends maleness only by using a wide variety of gendered and non-gendered
images. Calling on God as Goddess, she, mother, queen, Shekhinah, birth-
giver, wellspring, source, and so on breaks the hold of dominant male images
of God in a way that cannot be achieved through theoretical discussion.
Similarly, we can fully understand the inadequacy of the gender binary only
by beginning to name the many ways of being in the world that fall outside
the dual gender version of reality. The rabbis were our forerunners in this
regard in that they were at least willing to think about the existence of per-
sons who threatened their gendered universe. Our awareness of gender and
sexual inequalities enable and requires us to go well beyond their tentative
and male-centered experiments with expanding gender categories.36
Plaskow challenges us to imagine “sex and relational intimacy in a world
of many, and possibly shifting, genders.”37 This democratic vision may not
be comfortable to all Jews, but it will definitely be the morally right thing
to do.
35 The Coming of Lilith, 182–83.

36 Judith Plaskow, “The Challenge of Transgender to Compulsory Heterosexuality,” in
Heterosexism in Contemporary World Religion: Problem and Prospect, ed. Marvin M. Ellison
and Judith Plaskow (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 2007), 34.
37 Ibid., 35.
The Chapters That Follow
Plaskow is a utopian thinker whose commitment to the pursuit of truth

about sex and gender is an expression of the rabbinic ideal of tikkun olam.
She has had the courage to imagine ideal reality and the tenacity to turn
the ideal into a social reality. Standing in the intersection of feminism,
Jewish feminism, religious studies, Jewish studies, and women and gender
studies, Plaskow has paved the way for a new generation of scholars and
activists who are all indebted to her. Today, non-Orthodox Jewish women
are ordained as rabbis, serve as cantors, religious educators, and leaders
of Jewish organizations, and even Orthodox women have access to formal
education, including halakhic learning, serving as legal advocates to other
women in rabbinic courts and generating their own interpretation of the
sacred texts.38 Within the academy, all fields of Jewish studies (i.e., his-
tory, literature, philosophy, biblical studies, rabbinics, politics, sociology
and ethnography, Holocaust studies, Israel studies, and film studies) have
been thoroughly transformed by feminism.39 In retrospect, then, the femi-
nist revolution has been exceedingly successful, and Plaskow should be
credited for it, even though she has not done so singlehandedly. Indeed, as
she reminds her readers repeatedly, the feminist revolution is necessarily
a collective enterprise. To this day the feminist discourse remains a collec-
tive endeavor expressed in anthologies more than in monographs, it forges
a close link between theory and practice, it is thoroughly (though not
exclusively) hermeneutical, and it is profoundly interested in challenging
us to understand the complexity of sex and gender. “Third-wave Jewish
feminists,” as they are now called, perpetuated Plaskow’s vision but also
go beyond it and even criticize it. For example, third-wave feminists have
continued to enrich our understanding of human sexuality and the place
of sexuality in Judaism, but they do so with more detailed engagement
38 A representative anthology of Jewish feminist writings that indicates the impact of
feminism on contemporary Judaism is Elyse Goldstein, ed., New Jewish Feminism (Wood-
stock, VT: Jewish Light Publishing, 2009). The word “new” in the title suggests a desire
to signify the novelty and maturation of Jewish feminism since its inception in the early
1970s.
39 A good expression of the robustness of feminist discourse in Jewish Studies is
Nashim: A Journal of Jewish Women’s Studies founded in 1998 as joint effort of the Jewish
Theological Seminary in America and Brandeis University. For an earlier assessment of the
impact of feminism on various subfields of Jewish studies consult Davidman and Tenen-
baum, Feminist Perspectives in Jewish Studies, cited in note 2.
with postmodern and queer theories,40 and some Jewish feminists have
argued that Jewish feminism is not about equality and justice for women,
but rather, ironically enough, “about power,” that is, the power to be in
control of the tradition.41 It is doubtful that Plaskow would agree, since
she has worked so tirelessly to dismantle the conceptual validity of “power
over,” but there is no doubt that third-wave feminists all walk in Plaskow’s
footsteps. Plaskow’s feminist revolution has also impacted the academic
discipline of Jewish philosophy, despite its resistance and reluctance to
take feminist philosophy seriously.42 Her feminist methodology has paved
the way for doing Jewish philosophy in a personally involved, historically
grounded, ethically concerned, and socially responsible manner. Philoso-
phy, and especially Jewish philosophy, is not “a view from nowhere,” to
borrow from Thomas Nagel; it is instead a form of personal Godwrestling.
The chapters that follow give a taste of Plaskow’s life’s work. The first essay
is her presidential address to the American Academy of Religion, delivered
in November 1998.43 The essay spells out Plaskow’s conviction that “the
academy is very much part of real life,”44 and showcases the impact of femi-
nism on the academic study of religion, highlighting the interplay between
the academy and the society at large and arguing for the socially embed-
ded nature of feminist theorizing. The second essay, “Jewish Theology in
Feminist Perspective,” presents the methodology of Jewish feminist the-
ology and summarizes the accomplishments of the feminist theologi-
cal discourse from 1970–1990, featuring Plaskow as a spokesperson of the
discourse.45 The third essay, “Authority, Resistance, and Transformation:
Jewish Feminist Reflection on Good Sex,” exemplifies the expansion of
feminist liberation theology to the realm of human sexuality, and offers an
40 See Danya Ruttenberg, ed., The Passionate Torah: Sex and Judaism (New York: New
York University Press, 2009).
41 Suzannah Heschel, “Foreword: It’s Not about Equality—It’s about Who’s in Charge!”
in Yentl’s Revenge: The Next Wave of Jewish Feminism, ed. Danya Ruttenberg (Seattle: Seal
Press, 2001), xvi. Heschel’s claim is confirmed by the current political debate about wom-
en’s prayer at the Western Wall, a political struggle that involves women of all strands of
contemporary Judaism. See Phyllis Chesler and Rivka Haut, eds., Women of the Wall: Claim-
ing Sacred Ground at Judaism’s Holy Site (Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights Publishing, 2003).
42 For overview of the impact of feminism on the academic discipline of Jewish phi-
losophy see Hava Tirosh-Samuelson, “Feminism and Gender,” in The Cambridge History
of Jewish Philosophy: The Modern Era, ed. Martin Kavka, Zachary Braiterman, and David
Novak (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 154–89.
43 Judith Plaskow, “The Academy as Real Life: New Participants and Paradigms in the
Study of Religion,” Journal of American Academy of Religion 67, no. 3 (1999): 521–38.
44 Ibid., 522.
45 Judith Plaskow, “Jewish Theology in Feminist Perspective,” 62–84.
argument for the inclusion of sexually marginalized and oppressed groups

within Judaism.46 The essay argues that the “authority for singling out the
self-critical and dissident elements in our textual traditions comes not from
the traditions themselves, but rather from the new possibilities envisioned
and created by the particular communities of solidarity and resistance
within which we participate.”47 The fourth and final essay, “Anti-Judaism
in Feminist Christian Interpretation,”48 exemplifies her Jewish critique of
feminist anti-Judaism, inspired by traditional Christology. Together these
four essays illustrate how theology, hermeneutics of canonic texts, social
criticism, and political activism are intertwined in the life, career, and writ-
ings of Judith Plaskow.
46 Judith Plaskow, “Authority, Resistance, and Transformation: Jewish Feminist Reflec-

tion on Good Sex,” in Good Sex: Feminist Perspectives from the World Religions, ed. Patricia
Beattie Jung, Mary E. Hunt, and Radhika Balkrishnan (New Brunswick, NJ, and London:
Rutgers University Press, 2001), 127–39; reprinted in Body and Soul: Rethinking Sexuality as
Justice Love, ed. Marvin Ellison and Sylvia Thorson-Smith (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 2003),
45–60; reprinted in The Coming of Lilith, 193–205.
47 The Coming of Lilith, 205.
48 Judith Plaskow, “Anti-Judaism in Feminist Christian Interpretation,” in Searching the
Scriptures, ed. Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza (New York: Cross Road, 1993), 117–29.
The Academy as Real Life: New Participants and Paradigms
in the Study of Religion*
Judith Plaskow
I find it impossible to speak here tonight at Disney World without taking

note of the space in which we are gathered. I’m not sure whether to call
it hyperreal or surreal, but we meet in a homogenized, sanitized, relent-
lessly friendly universe, in which both nature and civilization are deprived
of their sting, and human differences are reduced to a series of stereo-
types whose primary purpose is to sell as many useless souvenirs as pos-
sible. That we have actually come here to work and think together seems
a contradiction in this huge playground, in which even the workers are
cast as players. Everything that reminds us of our everyday lives is meant
to be banished from this “empire of leisure”: work, poverty, crime, litter,
surliness, certainly ambiguity or complexity (Soja:100; Sorkin:208, 228, 231;
quotation, Sorkin:228). To note the ways in which issues of race and class
obtrude themselves into this paradise—to observe the contrasting colors
of tourists and workers, or the ways in which the rough equality created
by people standing in lines together breaks down at night as they go off
to their hotels to eat and sleep with their own class—seems rude and
curmudgeonly, a refusal to join in this celebration of the existing order of
things, masquerading as escape (Sorkin:228).
Although some might claim that the academic world is a similarly rar-
efied and unreal environment, it is my thesis that the academy is very
much part of real life. It participates in the same tensions and contradic-
tions, challenges and possibilities as the society in which it is situated, and
is often a microcosm of wider cultural conflicts. Moreover—and this is the
important point—our scholarship and teaching are broadened and deep-
ened to the extent that they are in touch with and responsive to larger cul-
tural currents. As I reflect on the ways in which the AAR has changed over
the twenty-eight years that I have been a member, I am struck at how both
the politics of this organization, and the work that we are able to do as
scholars, have been transformed by and contributed to the changes that
* “The Academy as Real Life: New Participants and Paradigms in the Study of Reli-
gion,” Journal of American Academy of Religion, 67, no. 3 (1999): 521–38 (1998 presidential
address).
28 the academy as real life
have taken place in the larger society. I want to explore the relationships
between social change, organizational change, and what we are able to
think as scholars and teachers, first by looking back at the last quarter cen-
tury and then by turning to some issues facing the AAR and the wider acad-
emy, now and in the immediate future.
Let me begin by sketching for you a few features of the AAR as it was in
1970. This was not just the first year that I attended but also, serendipitously,
the first year for which the national office had a program on file.1 The mere
eighteen pages of listings of information and program make clear that in
terms of its leadership, its membership, and its scholarly agenda, the AAR
was a white, male, Protestant organization. Of the 226 participants listed
on the program, three had identifiably female names. There was not a single
woman serving as a national or regional officer, or chairing a section. As for
gender as an analytic category, there was a lone paper in the Philosophy of
Religion and Theology Section on “The Feminine Factor” (AAR/SSSR/SBL
Annual Meeting Program 1970:11). There were also no Blacks in leadership
positions, but there were two sessions on Black religion in the United States
(11, 21). An augury of the way in which broader social movements would soon
reshape the AAR, these reflected the growing intellectual ferment among
Black scholars, who, galvanized by the Black Power Movement, developed
a new theological and political agenda, and brought their emerging conver-
sation into the AAR (Peter Paris, e-mail message, September 15, 1998).
Perhaps the most striking aspect of the 1970 program, however, is
the fact that there were a total of only ten “discipline sections,” as the pro-
gram units were then called. These reflect an organization still very much
anchored in its Protestant past but also struggling to become more pluralis-
tic and methodologically sophisticated. There were four sections mirroring
the Protestant divinity school curriculum, three relating religious stud-
ies to other disciplines, and then sections on Asian Religions and History
of Religions (that was one!), History of Judaism, and Roman Catholic
Studies (3).2 I find it revealing of the state of religious studies at the time
that the two non-Protestant traditions that had their own sections were
1 Graduate students will find more than one fascinating dissertation on the history and
politics of religious studies embedded in the AAR program books. I can barely hint at their
riches here.
2 Discipline sections that mirrored the divinity school curriculum were Biblical Litera-
ture, Ethics, History of Christianity, and Philosophy of Religion and Theology. Those that
related religion to other disciplines were Art, Literature, and Religion; Religion and the
Social Sciences; and the Academic Study of Religion. On the early self-understanding of
the AAR, see Hart:211–213.
the academy as real life 29
“others” near at hand (Neusner:1049). Judaism had particular interest to

Christians as the “Judeo” of the so-called Judeo-Christian tradition, while
Catholicism was the other within the Christian fold.3 The named presence
of these three units on the program allows us to see that the generic “reli-
gion” of the American Academy of Religion was still Protestant Christianity.
In the years since 1970 the AAR membership has become far more
diverse, of course, and the program has vastly expanded. The dominant
paradigm has been assaulted from many directions, and incompletely
decentered. Our understanding of religion has been immeasurably com-
plicated and enriched. It would be possible to lift up any of a number of
strands in this decentering process and trace its intellectual and political
roots. In order to explore the ways in which shifts in AAR participants, poli-
tics and leadership, and scholarly agenda, are connected with each other
and with changes in the wider society, I will focus on the area that has been
most important to me personally and professionally: the involvement of
women and the development of feminist studies in religion.
Surely, the increase in women’s participation and the presence of femi-
nist perspectives and gender analysis throughout the program are two of
the more dramatic changes in the AAR over the last twenty-eight years.
On the one hand, I do not want to argue for any essential or necessary rela-
tionship between these two developments. While throughout the 1970s
papers by women were clustered in a few sections, by the mid-’80s this was
far from true.4 The overall direction of two decades of change has been
toward inclusion of women in almost every program unit of the AAR, and
women’s interests appear as unpredictable and various as those of men. On
the other hand, it was not a coincidence that the great increase in women’s
involvement in this organization occurred at the moment of emergence
of the second wave of feminism. In 1970, as I mentioned, there were only
three identifiably female names on the program. In 1971 there were still
only eight, out of a total of 237 participants. But 1971 was also the year that
3 The fact that Jews and Catholics were entering universities in greater numbers in
the 1960s played an important role in the emergence of these two sections. This develop-
ment is thus an earlier instance of my central theme: how larger social and demographic
changes have affected what we can think in religious studies. See Neusner: 1049–1051; Mars-
den: esp. 26, 34, 35.
4 When I perused programs from the 1970s, I could look at the title of a session and
predict with great accuracy whether it would include any papers by women. During this
period presentations by women were heavily concentrated in the Women and Religion
Group and then Section; the Arts, Literature, and Religion Section; and the Academic
Study of Religion Section.
the Women’s Caucus held its organizational meeting and, addressing the
political and intellectual dimensions of women’s exclusion, nominated a
woman for vice-president and laid plans for a Working Group on Women
and Religion in 1972 (AAR/SBL Annual Meeting Program 1971:22). The exis-
tence of a substantial and vocal group of women who were committed
both to making the ethos and structures of the Academy more hospitable
to women and to doing serious scholarly work that placed women at the
center created a political and programmatic space for women’s participa-
tion that could then develop in a variety of directions—including the free-
dom of women to study whatever they pleased. By 1973, despite a program
cover that featured two male hands gripping each other in a, perhaps anx-
ious, shake, fifty-nine women presented or presided at the Annual Meeting,
20 percent of the total.
The Caucus and the Women and Religion Group did more than pro-
vide a context for a hitherto excluded group to find an entry into the AAR,
however. They also changed what we are able to think, the questions we
know to ask about religion, and the ways in which we conceptualize and
teach about the field. In 1970 scholars of religion and their subject matter
were both ungendered! There was no female other, in body or in theory, to
question the dominant male paradigm. In one sense, the very establish-
ment of the Women and Religion Group constituted a challenge to the
hegemonic discourse—an eruption of the suppressed other who, simply
by naming herself, exposed the particularity of the supposedly generic
religious subject. But the Women and Religion Group was certainly not
content to let its presence speak for itself; it consciously defined its task
as systematically rethinking the rest of the program. I am struck in look-
ing back at the Women and Religion Group’s first sessions by the extent to
which they deliberately took up the subject matter of the other program
units in order to reconceptualize the content and methodology of the vari-
ous disciplines. A packed session in 1975 on “The Feminist Transformation
of Religious Studies” summarized and solidified the Group’s early achieve-
ments, examining the paradigm shift from an androcentric to an inclusive
model of humanity as it affected history of religions, theology, religion and
literature, religion and psychology, and biblical studies (SBL/AAR Annual
Meeting Program 1975:18–19).5
5 These presentations are collected in Gross 1977. It is worth noting that, in a petition
to the AAR Program Committee for section status, which the Women and Religion Group
was granted in 1975, the Group argued that it required a maximum number of sessions
It was not simply the AAR that the Group was intent on transforming,
moreover, but also the position of women in religion and society. Its ability
to bring new data, methodologies, and perspectives to bear on the study
of religion was fed by participants’ commitment to larger movements for
women’s liberation. The connections between feminist movements and
the thinking of many members of this Academy have been so various and
fruitful over the years that it is difficult to settle on particular examples.
Certainly, women’s engagement in concrete struggles for increased par-
ticipation in religious institutions opened up numerous areas of scholarly
investigation. It provided the impetus for the recovery of women’s history
in mainstream religious movements and in marginal and heretical groups.
It encouraged increased attention to popular piety and devotion, to the reli-
gious practices of women as part of the common folk. It generated critical
and sophisticated accounts of the ways in which religious texts are created
and transmitted, and of how they construct meaning through both what
they say and what they erase.6 In a very different vein, the fact that mem-
bers of the AAR have participated in movements against violence against
women has compelled them to bring new lenses to traditional texts and
symbols. It has focused attention on the ways in which specific beliefs
about women combine with underlying symbolic structures to encourage
or permit violence.7 It has engendered new critical readings of particular
texts and teachings, such as the prophetic metaphors of marriage and adul-
tery, and the doctrine of atonement.8 It has given rise to multiple strate-
gies of resistance, among them constructive efforts to rethink core symbols,
laws, and teachings (Adams and Fortune; Brown and Bohn). I could give
endless examples of the ways in which involvements with feminism as a
multi-faceted social movement have generated new scholarly questions
and perspectives that have both influenced the study and teaching of reli-
gion and fed back into particular feminist struggles to better women’s lives.
on the program because it sought to address and transform the subject matter of every
other section.
6 Rather than generate a bibliography of dozens of entries, I will simply suggest that
the interested reader look at Gross’s excellent book on the development of feminist studies
in religion (1996).
7 Again, there is a large bibliography. Two representative collections are Brown and
Bohn, and Adams and Fortune.
8 For an early example of the critique of prophetic metaphors, see Setel; for a later and
much fuller example, see Weems. For one important critique of the doctrine of atonement,
see Brock.
But I don’t want simply to celebrate the Women and Religion Group and
the Caucus. Their efforts to change the ethos and scholarly agenda of the
AAR have met with both successes and failures. Thus papers on women, or
papers using gender as an analytic category, are now present throughout
the program, but this “mainstreaming” has often come at the cost of femi-
nist critical perspectives. Work on women has been incorporated into the
framework of the disciplines; it has not transformed them. And although in
1977 the Women’s Caucus successfully pressured the AAR to pass a resolu-
tion to boycott states that had not ratified the Equal Rights Amendment
(AAR/SBL Annual Meeting Program 1978: inside cover), the Caucus has
generally been far more effective in lobbying for women’s incorporation
into the leadership structures of the Academy than in making the AAR
more activist as an organization. But it is not just that the radical edge of
the Women and Religion Group and the Caucus had to be compromised
as the changes they sought were or were not incorporated into the larger
AAR. The Group and then the Section themselves operated both against
and within the dominant disciplinary and cultural paradigms. In seeking to
take on and rethink the rest of the program, they also reproduced its exclu-
sions. The Group was—and to a large extent, the Section remains—very
western and Christian focused. It took many years before the Section began
to address the concerns of Jewish women, women of color, and lesbians.
It was thus inevitable that new groups would come forth that would try to
decenter the decenterer, repeating the process of creating new conceptual
and political space on the program and in the structures of the Academy,
and both challenging the program and generating their own exclusions.
The emergence of the Womanist Group is paradigmatic of a process that,
with some significant variations, also led to the creation of the Lesbian
Feminist Issues Group (in 1986), the short-lived History of Women in
Judaism Consultation (in 1986), and a number of other feminist consulta-
tions and groups. Caught between an African-American Religious History
Group that was started in 1975 but did not engage the topic of Black Women
and the Church until 1980 and a Women and Religion Section that began
in 1972 but did not have a full session on Black Women’s Religious Thought
until 1983, a group of Black women launched the Womanist Approaches to
Religion and Society Consultation in 1989. As was the case with the Women
and Religion Group, the very creation of the Womanist Group constituted
a critique of the exclusions of the dominant feminist, African-American,
and broader academic discourses—and, also like the Women and Religion
Group, the Womanist Group deliberately took up issues in teaching, eth-
ics, literature, theology, and biblical interpretation in order to think about
them in new ways. Rooting itself in the Black church, in movements for
social change, and in the struggles of grassroots Black women, the Group
has explored the patterns of coping and resistance embedded in the every-
day lives of the most marginalized and used them as a foundation for theo-
logical and ethical reflection. But if the Womanist Group has contributed in
important ways to the assault on the dominant paradigm, it has also, until
this year, accepted its Christian-centeredness, focusing on the Black church
to the neglect of other vibrant religious strands in the Black community.9
Similarly complex tales, but with many different elements, could be
told about the other profound changes that in the past twenty-five years
have radically reshaped the AAR program: the genuine internationaliza-
tion of the concept of religion; the introduction of new methodologies,
approaches, and theoretical perspectives; the efforts to explore the inter-
section of religion with a host of social and political concerns. From ten
“discipline sections” in 1970 the program has expanded to include fourteen
sections, fifty-two groups, seven seminars, and six consultations, organized
along an amazing variety of lines (AAR/SBL Annual Meeting Program
1998:20–22).
This does not mean that the old Protestant paradigm has been com-
pletely decentered, however. It still hangs on tenaciously in places—not
simply in terms of overt content but also in the more subtle ways in which
religion gets defined and studied, in terms of a focus on doctrine or text,
for example (Gill; Christ). Moreover, the program does not yet reflect the
extraordinary growth of religious pluralism, and the challenge to Protestant
hegemony, within the contemporary United States. Non-western traditions
are still treated as if they belonged to others across the sea rather than to us
here, now (conversation with Karen McCarthy Brown, September 8, 1998).
From many perspectives, what we have at the AAR is a huge, sprawling
program, laden with contradictions, in which very different conceptions of
religion and how to study it compete and co-exist with each other.
Welcome to non-Disney World, the academy as real life! As Gerald Graff
argues in his book Beyond the Culture Wars, our professional organiza-
tions—like the academic curriculum—have “become prominent arena[s]
of cultural conflict because [they] are microcosm[s], as [they] should be,
of the clash of cultures and values in [the United States] as a whole” (8).
9 I say, until this year, because in 1998 the Womanist pre-conference program included
an entire session on “Recovering the Asé: Womanist Dialogical Approaches to African
Diasporic Religious Experience.” Moreover, the Group’s call for papers for 1999 begins by
soliciting papers on “womanism and world religions” (11).
As previously excluded groups have entered the AAR, we have brought

with us the concerns, criticisms, and discord that our exclusion had kept
at a distance.10 It is no accident, for example, that despite greater num-
bers of women than Blacks in the AAR, the conscious consideration of race
appeared earlier on the program, because the Civil Rights and Black Power
Movements emerged earlier on the national scene. It is no accident that
Catholics and Jews, lesbians and gay men, Hispanics, and Asian Americans,
as they have sought a place in the larger society, have also sought a place
on the AAR program, refusing to allow “religion” and the appropriate study
of religion to be defined by a small and relatively homogenous group of
scholars (Graff:8). The fragmentation and conflict that these changes have
brought to the AAR are part and parcel of the conflicts in the larger society
among different visions of our collective life (Giroux and McClaren:xxii).
And that means we experience here in condensed form the wider cultural
malaise over the increasing fracturing of, and competition among, identi-
ties, the concern about where it will all end, and the desire to find some-
thing that holds us all together.
Frustrating and exhausting as the unwieldiness of the program can be,
it is also a sign that, unlike Disney World, the AAR is alive, that members
are allowing the changes in the wider culture to nuance and deepen our
understandings of religion, and, at the same time, are seeking to inter-
pret, intervene in, and have a hand in guiding those changes. The fact that
the tensions of the academy are those of real life is not a solution to the
problem of fragmentation, but it does say that our efforts to grapple with
diversity are part of, and contribute to, a larger context—that we have the
opportunity and the obligation as scholars and teachers to speak about our
own dilemmas in ways that are relevant and comprehensible to a wider
community. As scholars of religion in a nation and world in which religious
issues play an increasingly significant role in every aspect of public life, we
are in a unique position to provide our varied audiences with frameworks
for understanding and grappling productively with cultural and religious
differences (Berling:15–16). As teachers, our awareness not only of religious
differences but of the differences gender, race, and culture make within
religious traditions helps legitimate for those who learn from us the
importance of diversity in our academic institutions and our national life
(Nelson 1997b:30).
10 Graff is talking about the university curriculum in general; I am applying his remarks
to the AAR.
The current AAR program reflects the issues that have claimed our time
and energy over the last quarter of a century. Various of us have made gen-
der and/or racial or sexual analysis the center of our life’s work; we have
made the decision to study a tradition that did not fit the old Protestant
paradigm, or we have engaged in opening up new ways of looking at reli-
gion. Now, however, there are other changes coming at us of which we have
been less mindful, but that are increasingly affecting the nature of our day-
to-day work, and threatening the processes of broadening and decentering
that I’ve been describing (conversation with Karen McCarthy Brown, June
15, 1998). I’m referring to the changing shape of higher education, the adop-
tion of corporate models by college and university boards and administra-
tors, and the emergence of a two-tier system of employment in academia.
As those of us who were graduate students in the late 1960s and early ’70s
can well attest, the job crisis is, on one level, nothing new. But we have only
recently begun attending to the ways in which the extraordinary growth
in the number of part-time and adjunct faculty members over the past
twenty-five years is altering the face of our institutions of higher learning
and refashioning the work lives of faculty members at every level. The per-
centage of faculty appointments that are part-time or adjunct increased
from 22 percent in 1970 to over 40 percent in 1993. Between 1975 and 1993
the number of new non-tenure-track positions increased 88 percent, at
the same time that the number of probationary tenure-track appoint-
ments declined by 9 percent (Statement:54–55). While adjuncts used to
be mainly specialists who supplemented the expertise of the full-time
faculty, they have now become a permanent underclass that administra-
tors increasingly rely on to hold down costs. Not surprisingly, women, who
have always held a disproportionate number of part-time positions, have
been unequally affected by these changes. Although the percentage of
women gaining Ph.D.s has risen steadily since the 1970s, the percentage
of women with tenure has remained constant, while the percentage of
women in part-time and temporary slots has kept increasing. Women hold
33 percent of full-time positions and 51 percent of part-time positions; 35
percent of male faculty hold part-time positions, and 49 percent of female
faculty do (Statement:55; West:26–27; Thompson:278).
This is another—and very unfortunate—way in which the academy is
real life. The problems we are experiencing in our own institutions are part
of a larger global reorganization of labor that has changed the nature of
work for millions of people. Between 1969 and 1992 the number of part-time
workers in the United States rose by 89 percent. In the 1980s the number
of temporary jobs rose ten times faster than overall employment. In 1992
two out of three new jobs in the private sector were temporary (Pratt:265;
Rifkin:191). In other words, across the country and around the world cor-
porations are creating a two-tier system of employment—a core group of
permanent, full-time employees and another staff of easily expendable
temporary and part-time workers who earn substantially less money and
receive no benefits for doing the same work (Rifkin:190). These changes in
corporate culture are providing a handbook for how to treat part-time fac-
ulty: pay as little as possible, deny benefits and decent working conditions,
and abdicate responsibility for the consequences for people’s lives. Colleges
and universities are increasingly structurally dependent on a pool of cheap
labor to teach many of their bread-and-butter courses, and the practice is
regarded as sound financial management by many of those who oversee or
vote on funding for higher education (Nelson 1997a:3–5). The percentage
of part-time and temporary faculty in the academy, moreover, is more than
double the 16.9 percent figure for the workforce as a whole.
Most of us have experienced the corrosive impact of these developments
on our own work lives. A growing number of itinerant faculty members are
living close to the margins, either having to relocate every year or stringing
together a series of adjunct positions that add up to more than a full-time
job at a fraction of the pay, without the time or professional supports to
pursue their own scholarly work (Statement:55). After struggling, at great
financial and personal cost, to sustain a professional life, they find that
they are often passed over for fulltime positions because their teaching
part-time is taken as evidence that they are not committed to their careers
(AAUP:45). Meanwhile the tasks of curriculum planning, student advising,
committee work, and hiring and supervising of adjuncts, fall on a diminish-
ing number of increasingly overburdened full-time faculty members who
feel less and less like professionals. These parallel developments diminish
the quality of the education available to students, precisely at an historical
moment when, because of their often poor preparation for college, they
need more time and attention from faculty members, not less (MLA:9–10;
Statement:56).
There is much I could say about what we can and must do to respond to
these issues, particularly about the importance of forming alliances across
traditional class lines. Since questions of strategy could be the subject of
a whole separate address, however, let me simply say that the AAR Board
of Directors has devoted a considerable amount of time over the past two
years to grappling with these problems and has committed itself to address-
ing them through its committee structures, the regions, the annual pro-
gram, and in cooperation with other scholarly organizations (Plaskow:4).
The question I want to raise here is how these changes in the structure of
the academy might change the ways we think, write, and teach as scholars
of religious studies. In asking this question I do not mean to turn individual
and institutional crises into grist for the academic mill, shifting our atten-
tion from politics to theory. On the contrary, I would argue that the reshap-
ing of the academy on an anti-human corporate model brings home to us
wider social changes that demand new ways of thinking and acting from
more members of the AAR. Just as the social movements of the last twenty-
eight years and more generated and were fed by a new academic politics
and new ways of thinking and teaching about religion, so we now need to
deepen and complicate the insights we have gained as we respond to the
current challenges we find on our own doorsteps.
One of the issues raised by the reshaping of the academy is whether
we will even be able to maintain, let alone deepen, the new perspectives
that have transformed our thinking about religion over the last quarter of
a century. In a recent issue of Religious Studies News Jack Miles argued that
adjunct professors and the academically unemployed are in particularly
privileged positions to produce learned writing for a lay audience, because,
as members of the lay public, they may follow the twists and turns of their
own curiousity rather than having to adhere to the rules of a guild (6).
I certainly hope that as more and more religious studies Ph.D.s find work
outside the academy, they will still have the time, energy, and will to bring
their training to bear on a wide range of social and intellectual questions,
and will address them in clear and accessible language geared to a wide
audience. But I fear that the shrinking number of full-time tenure-track
positions may equally well encourage an increase in arcane language and
research as marks of academic legitimacy, that it may lead to a narrowing
of intellectual interests and a retreat to traditional topics and approaches
on the part of both individuals and institutions (conversation with Stephen
Kaplan, June 14, 1998). I have often heard graduate students say that they
are advised not to write about gender, or race, or sexuality until they have
tenure. If that has been the case for the past two decades, what will hap-
pen as there is increasingly little chance of tenure and as more and more
women and men live many years on the fringes of the academic world, wait-
ing for the chance of a full-time position? And as departments are forced
to pare down, what subjects will they define as priorities? Will new areas
of research be regarded as expendable, even as the women and minorities
who are their most likely advocates are getting more doctorates at a time
when jobs are vanishing? In this period of retrenchment it becomes all the
more urgent that those of us fortunate enough to have tenured positions
commit ourselves to the continuing processes of diversifying the AAR

and our own institutions. We must insist that the work of challenging
reigning paradigms is not an adjunct to the curriculum but central to the
intellectual life.
But how might these changes in the academy and the larger society
redirect the content of our work? Given the ways in which the social
upheavals of the last decades have opened questions that have reshaped
our thinking, what new directions might our scholarship take as we begin
to deal with the issues before us? Obviously, I cannot answer this question,
any more than can any of us. The possible responses are as rich and multi-
faceted as the many program units of the AAR—and the new ones that will
undoubtedly emerge. I want to conclude modestly by describing two chal-
lenges I experience as I begin to struggle with these issues. The first comes
out of and pertains to my context as a feminist theologian. Many years
ago now, Beverly Harrison remarked that, since feminist theology is an
embodied theology that understands the everyday flesh and blood world as
the arena of divine/human relations, it should embrace the idea that sen-
suous labor and bread are foundational to the life of the spirit (75). Also a
long time ago, Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza commented that, if feminist
theology is to address women’s experiences in the struggle for survival, it
cannot ignore the work-place (xviii–xviv). Yet despite the passage of time,
the challenge implied in these observations has, for the most part, not been
taken up by Euro-American feminist theologians.
The great outpouring of creative and constructive theological work by
white feminists working in the Jewish, Christian, and Goddess traditions—
and I certainly mean to include my own writing in these remarks—has
focused on the transformation of the religious sphere, its institutions,
texts, concepts, and symbols. Feminists certainly have not isolated our-
selves from wider social and political problems. On the contrary, as I have
argued, we have been centrally concerned with the ways in which religious
teachings, symbols, and rituals interstructure with and legitimate various
forms of oppression and are also sources of resistance. But we have gener-
ally addressed these issues in ways that have placed our traditions at the
starting point and center of analysis. We have only rarely begun with an
economic or social or political analysis and brought to bear on it a femi-
nist theological perspective. Perhaps related to this problem, we have paid
lip-service to class as an analytic tool but, in reality, have largely ignored
it. We have paid virtually no attention to our own class positions as gradu-
ate students or faculty members located in class-stratified institutions in a
class-stratified society.
Neglect of these issues has obviously been a product of privilege, but

perhaps as our privilege begins to erode the issues will become less avoid-
able. Questions of economic inequality and economic justice that have
long been at the center of third world liberation theologies, feminist and
nonfeminist, are now at the heart of how we staff our departments. To my
mind, the central challenges for Euro-American feminists in this situation
are to broaden our focus from transforming religion to also bringing reli-
gious resources to bear on important social problems and, at the same time,
to do so in ways that fully reflect the processes of critique and transforma-
tion we have been engaged in for the past twenty-five years.
Fortunately, this work has already begun, and from several different direc-
tions. In addition to those feminist ethicists who have focused specifically
on issues of economic justice, feminists in many areas of religious studies
are writing about work, class, and economic relations in ways that are inte-
grated into, or potentially contribute to, feminist theologies.11 Moreover,
womanist and mujerista theologians and ethicists have been way ahead
of Euro-American feminists in connecting religious and socio-economic
issues. In highlighting the moral agency of Black women and Latinas both
in struggles for social justice and in ensuring the survivial of their commu-
nities, womanists and mujeristas have repeatedly shown the relevance of
religious resources to class inequalities.12 I am struck that no Jewish femi-
nist has yet followed the lead of womanist work on black women activ-
ists (see, e.g., a number of the essays in Townes) and turned to the radical
women labor organizers of the early part of this century as a resource for
theology. Their lives and work would be an interesting starting point for a
Jewish feminist theology focusing on economic issues.
But the intellectual challenges posed by growing economic inequality
are not limited to those of us whose work remains within western theologi-
cal paradigms; they pertain to all scholars of religion. In a recent issue of
the JAAR, David Loy argued that the current economic system, promising
as it does a new path to happiness and salvation, has come to fill a religious
function and is, in fact, “the first truly world religion . . . winning more con-
verts more quickly than any previous belief system . . .” (275–276). At the
same time that Loy reminds us of the intolerable and growing inequalities
11 For examples of the work of feminist ethicists, see—in addition to Harrison—Andol-
sen, Brubaker, and Robb. For feminist work in other fields that addresses economic issues,
see Brock and Thistlethwaite, and Peskowitz.
12 The literature is far too extensive to list in this context. For one womanist and one
mujerista example, see Cannon and Isasi-Díaz.
generated by market capitalism between countries of the North and South,

certain U.S. sociologists and economists are warning that, even here in the
heartland of capitalism, the new religion of the market will fail perma-
nently for the vast majority of people (e.g., Rifkin). The move to a two-tier
system of employment in academia and many other workplaces does not
represent a temporary adjustment in the market but is the foretaste of an
era in which life-time employment will be a thing of the past, and we in our
work-centered society will need to find “new ways of defining human worth
and social relations” (Rifkin:xviii).
As scholars of religion, we deal with systems of value that can offer a
challenge to capitalism’s diminished understanding of the world (Loy:285)
and help us imagine lives organized around principles other than the
importance of renumerative labor as a foundation for endless consump-
tion. We are familiar with criticisms of acquisitiveness and materialism
from numerous religious perspectives. We know how people celebrate and
mourn, create meaning and struggle with ethical dilemmas, even in the
midst of poverty and oppression. We have immersed ourselves in cultures
in which the work that women and men do in feeding and maintaining
their communities is an expression of embeddedness in larger systems
of value, and we have encountered many ways in which different peoples
relate work and ritual, other than ritual providing a short respite from lives
defined by paid employment.
The question is how we connect this knowledge and insight to the real
problems of society. How do we render visible these alternative universes
in ways that deliberately and effectively address our own positions as work-
ers in a global economic system that identifies value with profitability? And
how do we speak about other understandings of value without either skip-
ping over the realities of poverty and injustice or denying the contradictions
in the traditions that we turn to as resources? In other words, in speaking
a critical and constructive word to the dominance of the Market, we must
not move too quickly and easily to celebrating the anti-materialist elements
in the world’s religions, forgetting the fundamental importance of work in
giving people access to the means of material survival (Andolsen:114–115).
Nor can we neglect twenty-five years of feminist and other critical work lay-
ing bare the ways in which various traditions have created and supported,
as well as resisted, the racism, sexism, and class inequalities that structure
and deform the world economy.
In arguing that we must attend to these economic issues affecting our
lives as academics and the lives of people throughout the world, it is not my
purpose to offer some new center for our AAR meetings and discussions.
I am simply urging that we give higher priority to a crucial issue that is

already being addressed in places in the AAR but that, in my view, needs
to be more visible throughout the program. I am commending the notion
of the AAR as a space in which we allow current social and political ques-
tions to enrich our thinking, even as we seek to respond to and intervene
in them. We may not be able to resolve complex social problems, and we
may not even agree on which deserve our attention, but we are bound
together by the opportunity and necessity of grappling with the changes
in the academy, aware that in doing so we also grapple with changes in the
larger world.
When the AAR board of directors met at the Swan Hotel in Orlando in
the spring of 1998, we joked over lunch that I should enter the room for
my presidential address in a Cinderella coach: the young graduate student
overwhelmed by a male academy transformed into the president of the
AAR. But, of course, it was no fairy god-mother waving a magic wand that
changed the make-up of the AAR or that vastly expanded its agenda. It was
the concerted effort, hard work, and sustained pressure of many members
of this organization—as part of the larger social and demographic shifts in
U.S. society. We have the privilege and obligation of continuing that process
of diversification and change, without being sure of where it will lead us,
but knowing that we cannot separate real life from the academy.
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Jewish Theology in Feminist Perspective*
Judith Plaskow
Jewish feminist theology is not an academic field in the same sense that
feminist history or literature is. Rather, it is a triple outsider to Jewish
studies: first, because the place of theology in the academy is complex and
controversial; second, because theology has never had an esteemed role
within Judaism; and third, because it is feminist. In this chapter, I explore
the implications of each of these aspects of marginality, the first two for
the sake of laying to rest shibboleths that might otherwise get in the way
of discussion, the third as my central concern. What is Jewish feminist
theology, and what are its implications for Jewish studies?
Theology and the Academy
The place of theology within Jewish studies is part of a larger debate con-
cerning the place of theology in the academy, a debate that emerged with
the rapid growth of religious studies in the 1950s and 1960s. The founders
of new religious studies programs, especially in state universities, were
anxious to locate and justify these programs in the context of a religiously
pluralistic culture. Arguing that they held no brief for any particular reli-
gion but were simply exploring religion as a human phenomenon accord-
ing to accepted norms of university scholarship, many departments named
themselves religious studies specifically in contradistinction to theology.
The point of the distinction was that religious studies is serious, objective,
and scholarly—concerned with a significant dimension of human thought
and experience, with a clear impact on many aspects of life—while theol-
ogy is particularistic, engaged, and unscholarly. Theology not only comes
out of distinct communities of faith and is done from a stance of com-
mitment, but it deals with an object—God—that can be discerned only
by faith, using warrants—revelation—that are not publicly discernible or
* “Jewish Theology in Feminist Perspective,” in Feminist Perspectives on Jewish Studies,

ed. Lynn Davidman & Shelly Tenenbaum (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 62–84.
46 Jewish Theology in Feminist Perspective
testable.1 Although this dichotomy has been repeatedly questioned, it still

shapes many responses to the incorporation of theology into the univer-
sity curriculum.2
Since Jewish studies is itself particularistic according to these same cri-
teria, it cannot hold that fault specifically against theology. Yet Jewish stud-
ies can still object to theology on the ground of its engaged stance or lack
of scholarly neutrality. To the extent that Jewish studies is influenced by
a Wissenschaft des Judentums (the science of Judaism) approach that sees
the history, literature, sociology, and religious life of the Jewish people as
data to be studied objectively and critically,3 Jewish studies—like religious
studies—must be skeptical about the academic legitimacy of theology.
From a science of Judaism perspective, theology can be of interest only
insofar as it is studied historically or viewed as so much material on the
thought of some important figure, rather than as a living and constructive
art. I do not mean to deny that in practice many Jewish studies programs
encourage or at least tolerate constructive questions. But given the vulner-
ability of Jewish studies in the university, it is tempting to assert its respect-
ability by emphasizing its adherence to canons of disinterested scholarship
and critical research. When one adds to the committed stance of theology
the double commitment of feminist theology, the possible place of such a
subject within Jewish studies becomes even more problematic.
Theology and Judaism
The actual or potential tension between the nature of theology and the
nature of Jewish studies is just one issue confronting would-be Jewish fem-
inist theologians. Often this tension is never articulated because of a dif-
ferent and prior claim that theology is not Jewish or that Jewish theology
* “Jewish Theology in Feminist Perspective,” in Feminist Perspectives on Jewish Studies,

ed. Lynn Davidman & Shelly Tenenbaum (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 62–84.
1 Edward Farley, “The Place of Theology in the Study of Religion,” Religious Studies and
Theology 5 (Sept. 1985): 10; William F. May, “Why Theology and Religious Studies Need Each
Other,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 52 (Dec. 1984): 748.
2 For recent rethinking of the theology–religious studies polarity, see, e.g., the discus-
sion “Religious Studies/Theological Studies: The St. Louis Project,” Journal of the American
Academy of Religion 52 (Dec. 1984): 727–57, which includes papers by Walter Capps, Lau-
rence O’Connell, Jacob Neusner, P. Joseph Cahill, and William F. May; Wilfred Cantwell
Smith, “Theology and the Academic Study of Religion,” Iliff Review 44 (fall 1987): 9–18; and
Farley, “The Place of Theology,” 9–29.
3 Joseph L. Blau, Modern Varieties of Judaism (New York: Columbia University Press,
1964), 34–35.
Jewish Theology in Feminist Perspective 47
simply does not exist. The history of Jewish religious reflection from Philo
on is named philosophy or religious thought. Theology is defined nar-
rowly as the systematization of doctrines or the systematization of com-
munal beliefs about the nature of God. Christianity, it is then asserted,
rests on a common faith that makes one a Christian, a faith that theology
appropriately defines and refines. What most centrally defines Judaism,
however, is not beliefs but behaviors, and these are elaborated through
halakhah (Jewish law). The energy that Christianity has poured into theol-
ogy Judaism has poured into elaborating a legal system that encompasses
every aspect of life. Insofar as Jews have reflected on the foundations or
presuppositions of this system, this reflection has been more narrative
or midrashic than systematic, so that, again, the term theology would be
misplaced.4
It is not surprising, given these widely held assumptions, that all of us
who do Jewish theology, feminist or not, find ourselves in an odd and some-
what defensive position. Many recent works on Jewish theology begin with
a justification of the enterprise or describe as a goal putting theology back
on the Jewish map.5 Although a full-scale defense of Jewish theology is out
of place in this context, some discussion of the importance of theology
and its relation to Jewish studies seems necessary, or there is little point in
discussing the feminist transformation of theology at all.
As Arthur A. Cohen and Paul Mendes-Flohr point out in the introduc-
tion to their Contemporary Jewish Religious Thought, “Theology is the disci-
pline that Jews eschew while nonetheless pursuing it with covert avidity.”6
Provided that theology is not defined too narrowly, their comment makes
perfect sense. If theology is understood as sustained and coherent reflection
on the experiences and categories of a particular religious tradition, and as
reflection on the world in light of that tradition, then how can Jews not be
4 These sentiments are more often expressed orally—or even institutionally—than

in writing. For example, when I was a graduate student at Yale, Judah Golden frequently
insisted that there was no Jewish theology, so there was no possibility of our having a
course on the subject. More revealing, when I began graduate work in theology in 1968,
I had to study Christian theology because there was simply no place in the country to
study Jewish theology. Other Jews before me had found themselves in the same situation.
5 Arthur Cohen and Paul Mendes-Flohr, Contemporary Jewish Religious Thought (New
York: Scribner, 1987), xiii–xvii; Neil Gillman, Sacred Fragments: Recovering Theology for the
Modern Jew (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1990), xviii; Louis Jacobs, A Jewish
Theology (West Orange, N.J.: Behrman House, 1973), 10–12; Judith Plaskow, Standing Again
at Sinai: Judaism from a Feminist Perspective (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1990), 21–24;
Michael Wyschogrod, The Body of Faith: Judaism as Corporeal Election (San Francisco:
Harper and Row, 1983), xiii.
6 Cohen and Mendes-Flohr, Jewish Religious Thought, xiii.
at least closet theologians? The practices that are supposedly central to

Judaism are grounded in a series of theological claims: that God gave the
law to Moses on Sinai, that revealed law is both written and oral, that
the law constitutes part of the obligation of the covenant, that there is a
special covenantal relation between God and Israel, and so forth. All Jewish
observance rests on some sort of theological preunderstanding, some rela-
tion to these fundamental claims, however they are interpreted, modified,
or even rejected. What would be the meaning of a Jewish identity that had
no relation to any set of beliefs about the nature of Jewishness?
Feminist Theology
Jewish feminists have considerable experience of the extent to which the

boundaries of Jewish identity are guarded by theology. I know of no Jew,
for example, who would agree that “Jews for Jesus” are Jewish. Belief in the
messianic significance of Jesus seems to constitute a universally agreed-
upon end-point in the great spectrum of Jewishness. Jewish feminists are
discovering that another such point is the belief in a Goddess. Advocacy of
Goddess rituals—indeed, even mention of the Goddess—is enough in the
eyes of many Jews to place one outside the Jewish pale. No one has ever
asked me, when I speak on Jewish feminism, whether I keep kosher or
observe the Sabbath. But I have been asked again and again whether my
understanding of God is really Jewish, whether I think one can have Juda-
ism without monotheism, and how far I am willing to go in expanding the
boundaries of Jewish belief. Jewishness is being defined, in other words,
by theological criteria. And if this is happening covertly, surely these
criteria must be subject to public examination and criticism.
It is not simply because they already operate on a hidden level, however,
that theological assumptions need to be discussed openly. Jewish lack of
interest in theology is itself a separate and significant problem. Observance
of the law, I have suggested, is rooted in certain theological claims about
the origins of the law. But it is also true that over time, the law becomes
self-justifying and the legal system self-perpetuating. In applying the law
to ever-changing situations, one does not need to return to the original
situation of standing at Sinai. It is enough to study the sources, to know
one’s precedents, to quote text—as in any legal system. And so it can hap-
pen that over time the relation to God that was expressed through and ani-
mated the law—that was its foundation and purpose—is lost. A similar
process takes place in non-Orthodox Judaism, with social action, eclectic
forms of observance, or simply a sense of community with other Jews

replacing some deeper religious understanding and purpose. In either case,
a profound spiritual void lies at the heart of American Judaism. American
Jews do not know how to talk about God; they are embarrassed to do so.
Such spiritual experiences as they have often seem to take place outside the
realm of Judaism, and they do not know how to reconnect these experiences
with prayer or other forms of observance. At the same time, many Jews are
turning to other spiritual traditions for answers to questions that Judaism
seems not to address.
Theology, and in practice especially feminist theology, can help reani-
mate the connection between practice and larger questions of meaning.
Theology’s purpose is to reflect on the experiences and events that lie at
the heart of Judaism, to reformulate or transform central Jewish ideas in
response to contemporary needs, and to articulate a Jewish framework for
understanding basic human questions. Jewish feminist theology approaches
the tradition with both a profound critique of its sexism and a vision of the
religious meaning of women’s full participation in Jewish life. It is rooted in
the experience of a larger and richer way of being, which it seeks to express
within and against the terms of the tradition. It approaches theology not as
an intellectual exercise but with a deep stake in the outcome of theologiz-
ing, challenging other Jews to examine their religious assumptions and the
way they find expression in religious practice and institutions.
All this is to acknowledge that Jewish theology is not a strictly academic
enterprise, that it is rooted in and comes out of the Jewish community, and,
in the case of feminist theology, that it is concerned with concrete issues
of communal practice, liturgy, and experience. It does not, however, fol-
low that theology has no place in an academic program. On the contrary,
theology can expose the notion of the detached, disinterested scholar as a
dangerous myth. Feminist theology in particular, but other theologies as
well, make it amply clear that all thinkers have special interests and that
claims to objectivity serve only to disguise the interests of scholars who are
generally involved in serving the status quo. Thus, those who teach Jewish
studies as historical or literary “science” take an implicit stand in a theo-
logical debate about the meaning of Jewish history. Those who teach Jewish
studies using the many sources that make no reference to women perpetu-
ate the ideological contention that women have made no significant con-
tribution to the shaping of Judaism and implicitly support a particular
theological understanding of women’s proper role. Such assumptions can
be examined and criticized only when the theological presuppositions of
different Jewish frameworks become the subject of classroom discussion.
Jewish Feminist Theology as Critique and Recovery
If Jewish theology not only exists but is central to the Jewish studies enter-
prise, where does Jewish feminist theology fit into this larger context?
On the one hand, it provides one instantiation of theology. It deals with
all the questions of the meaning and purpose of Jewish and human exis-
tence that any Jewish theology is called on to deal with. On the other
hand, Jewish feminist theology is particularly important to the process
of critical reflection, for it subjects other Jewish theology—indeed, all
Jewish studies—to searching criticism. It comes at religious questions
with a passion that reanimates theological discussion, but it also asks
fundamental questions about the origins, nature, and function of theo-
logical discourse. It is concerned with the foundations of central Jewish
ideas, the groups that generated them, and the interests they serve. It is a
thoroughly critical theology, a theology as appropriate to the university as
it is necessary to the reconstitution of Jewish community.7
Jewish feminist theology, although it has its roots in the Jewish commu-
nity, is also part of the larger context of feminist scholarship as a critical
and constructive enterprise. Feminist scholarship in many disciplines has
gone through a number of stages that began with a critique of male scholar-
ship and moved to a thoroughgoing redefinition or transformation of many
fields. The first feminist works in many areas were criticisms of canonical
male texts, theories, presuppositions, and images. They attempted to show
the particularity of what have been accepted as universal perspectives, to
expose the androcentrism of traditional scholarship, and to highlight the
absence of the voices of women and other oppressed groups. This critique
of male sources was often followed by an emphasis on the recovery of lost
women, by efforts to show that certain disciplines, movements, and histori-
cal periods were not defined solely by men, but that women made impor-
tant contributions that had been forgotten or passed over. Often in this
second phase, feminist scholars accepted prevailing definitions of histori-
cal importance and sought to locate women in contexts deemed important
by reigning norms. The third or constructive phase of feminist scholarship
is characterized by a radical questioning of such norms, by redefinitions
of “importance” from the perspective of women’s experience, and by the
7 For the notion of feminist theology as a critical theology, see Elisabeth Schüssler-
Fiorenza, “Feminist Theology as a Critical Theology of Liberation,” Theological Studies 36
(1975): 605–26.
creation of theory from a feminist point of view. These phases were con-
secutive in terms of a shift in emphasis over the past twenty years, but they
are also concurrent in that no stage has disappeared to make way for the
other. Feminist scholarship remains critical scholarship and continues to
insist on the ubiquity of women’s historical agency.
These stages provide a useful structure for discussing Jewish feminist the-
ology, and for seeing how its development has been affected by the subordi-
nate role of theology within Judaism. It is striking, especially in contrast to
Christian feminist theology, that virtually no work has been done by Jewish
feminists that criticizes earlier Jewish theologians. Although Christian (and
non-Christian) feminists have analyzed the thought of Augustine, Aquinas,
Paul Tillich, Reinhold Niebuhr, and numerous other thinkers, no parallel
body of work exists that discusses Saadia, Maimonides, Franz Rosenzweig,
Martin Buber, or other Jewish figures.8 There is no specifically intratheo-
logical dialogue within Jewish feminism. This is probably owing in part to
the absence of an institutional base for such studies. The paucity of gradu-
ate programs in Jewish theology means that there are few places that might
generate or encourage such work. Perhaps Jewish feminists, however, also
have the sense that theology is not sufficiently central to Judaism to be
worth criticizing. If one has attacked Anders Nygren’s or Niebuhr’s view of
grace, one has deconstructed and unsettled a whole trend within modern
Protestantism. But supposing that one could demonstrate Rosenzweig’s
androcentrism, what would be the effects of that knowledge? What would
it change in the nature or practice of Judaism?
The transformative and communal bent of Jewish feminist theology
makes it unlikely that such theological critiques will ever constitute a major
part of Jewish feminist discourse. Yet there is interesting scholarly work
to be done in this area. Lauren Granite has pointed out, for example, that
the centrality of relation in Martin Buber’s work has led feminists uncriti-
cally to adopt aspects of his thought without thinking to analyze it from
8 For examples of a larger body of feminist work on Christian theologians, see Rose-
mary Radford Ruether, “Misogynism and Virginal Feminism in the Fathers of the Church,”
and Eleanor Commo McLaughlin, “Equality of Souls, Inequality of Sexes: Woman in Medi-
eval Theology,” both in Rosemary Radford Ruether, ed., Religion and Sexism: Images of
Woman in the Jewish and Christian Traditions, pp. 150–83, 213–66 (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1974); Valerie Salving Goldstein, “The Human Situation: A Feminine View,” Journal
of Religion 40 (April 1960): 100–12; Judith Plaskow, Sex, Sin, and Grace: Women’s Experience
and the Theologies of Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich (Lanham, Md.: University Press of
America, 1980).
the perspective of gender.9 Buber’s I-You theology, however, rests on the

assumption that we human beings spend most of our lives in the It-world,
only occasionally experiencing moments of I-You connection. Granite sug-
gests that “while relation is key both to Buber’s philosophy and feminist
theory, it seems that it enters their experience from opposite ends: Buber
works toward relation, while feminists begin with relation.”10 The relevance
of a gender analysis to Buber’s work becomes especially clear in connection
with his discussion of the emergence of the two modes of I-You and I-It
relation. Here Buber focuses on the experience of the child and its gradual
acquisition of self-consciousness without ever naming the mother as the
one with whom the child is in relation or looking at the mother-child rela-
tionship from the mother’s side.11 Were the child’s development seen from
the perspective of the mother, a third mode of relation might be required to
capture her experience. The child is not characteristically an object to the
mother—as in the I-It mode—but neither does she necessarily experience
a perpetual reciprocity of relation. Her experience of care and connection
even when mutuality is absent may constitute a third sort of relation insuf-
ficiently accounted for in Buber’s theology.12
If theological criticism in the narrow sense awaits the attention of a
new generation of Jewish feminist thinkers, criticism on a broader scale
is absolutely central to Jewish feminist theology. Starting from Jewish reli-
gious practice and the communal exclusion of women, Jewish feminists
have examined the theological presuppositions embedded in the Bible,
halakhah, and liturgical texts and have called into question a range of basic
assumptions from the normative character of maleness to the holiness of
separation.
This wide-ranging critique of the theological presuppositions of Jewish
religious and institutional practice presupposes the broad definition of
theology I discussed earlier. Once theology is understood, not just as teach-
ings about God, but as sustained reflection on all the fundamental cate-
gories and experiences of Judaism, the normative character of maleness
9 This paragraph is based on a conversation I had in May 1990 with Lauren Granite and
also on her reflections, “Some Notes toward a Feminist Critique of Buber’s Work” (June
1990, available from L. Granite). Granite is a graduate student at Drew University, who,
when she sat down to prepare a comprehensive exam on Buber, was startled to find that
there was no feminist criticism of his work.
10 Granite, “Some Notes,” 1–2, 10–11.
11 Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Scribner, 1970), 76–80.
12 Granite, “Some Notes,” 10f.
emerges clearly as the basic principle of Jewish theological anthropology.13

As I argued in my article “The Right Question Is Theological”—the first
sustained theological critique of Jewish women’s situation—women’s
otherness is not simply a sociological fact but a fundamental assumption
that underlies both the details of halakhah and a larger discourse about the
nature of Israel as a people.14 Israel, in both the narrative and legislative
portions of the Bible and in the basic categories of the Mishnah, is defined
as male heads of households. If one asks within Judaism: What is a Jew?
What is a person? What are the responsibilities of a Jew? the questions are
impossible to answer in any but the most abstract way without recourse
to gender differentiation and hierarchy. This is the starting point of the
feminist critique of Judaism: that a woman is not simply a Jew but always a
female Jew (as in “a woman rabbi”)—always the one perceived as Other in
relation to a male norm.
Drorah Setel makes the further point that maleness-femaleness is not
the only hierarchy within Judaism, but rather one of a host of dualistic
separations that together are taken to constitute holiness.15 From the very
beginnings of its history, Israel saw itself as called on to separate or dif-
ferentiate itself from the nations of surrounding peoples. This differentia-
tion was made manifest both in the theological claim to chosenness and
in many internal separations that were to mark the life of a holy nation:
Shabbat and week, kosher and trafe, male and female.16 Since a critique of
hierarchical dualisms has been central to the entire feminist project from
its beginnings, Setel locates the central tension between Judaism and femi-
nism at this point: in separative versus relational modes of understanding.
Her critique raises a series of fascinating questions for Jewish theology:
Why the centrality of separation as a mark of holiness, especially in those
cases where separation seems to have no moral significance (as in the sepa-
ration of linen and wool or different kinds of cattle)? How closely identified
are separation and holiness within Judaism? Is separation itself problem-
atic for feminism, or only hierarchical modes of separation?17
13 Judith Wegner completely misses this point when she reduces the theological status
of women’s Otherness to the “male patriarchal image of God”; Chattel or Person? The Status
of Women in the Mishnah (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 186.
14 Judith Plaskow, “The Right Question Is Theological,” in Susannah Heschel, ed., On
Being a Jewish Feminist: A Reader (New York: Schocken, 1983), 224–27.
15 T. Drorah Setel, “Feminist Reflections on Separation and Unity in Jewish Theology,”
Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 2 (spring 1986): 113–18.
16 Plaskow, Standing Again, 96; Setel, “Feminist Reflections,” 116.
17 See Marcia Falk’s response to Setel in the same issue of the Journal of Feminist Studies
in Religion 15: 121–25.
Seen in the context of these other issues, the image of God as male in
Judaism is not the only locus of feminist theological criticism but one
important aspect of a larger pattern. Jewish feminists have pointed out that
the overwhelming preponderance of male images for God in biblical and
rabbinic texts and in the traditional liturgy correlates with the normative
status of maleness. Since God in the fullness of God’s reality is ultimately
unknowable, our images tell us more about our social arrangements—in
this case the subordinate status of women—than they do about God.18
Moreover, the image of God as a being outside ourselves ruling over and
controlling the world fits into the pattern of hierarchical dualisms that
Setel identifies as central to Judaism. God as the locus of holiness, mean-
ing, and value is infinitely more than the world “he” created. The idea that
this God has chosen Israel supports the dualistic separation between Israel
and other people. The idea that this God is male supports the normative
character of maleness.19
These points do not exhaust the feminist theological critique of Judaism.
The fundamental nature of women’s otherness, of hierarchical dualisms,
and of the male image of God has implications for the concepts of rev-
elation and Torah as well as for other issues. What is the source of Jewish
understandings of self, world, and God? Why is it that these understand-
ings seem so clearly to reflect a patriarchal social order? What is the source
of Torah, and what are its parameters? If women’s voices and experiences
are excluded from Torah as it has been handed down, does it need to be
expanded? Is there a “woman’s Torah”? How do we recognize it, and what
would it include? A full theological critique of Judaism is beyond my scope
here, but even a brief outline of feminist criticism serves to suggest the
range and significance of a feminist probing of Jewish theological founda-
tions and its importance for the critical study of Judaism.
If we turn to the second stage of feminist scholarship, the recovery of
women’s history, we find that it has been similarly affected by the status
of theology within Judaism. Although it may well be that time will turn up
medieval or other women theologians whose names are as yet unknown
to us, there is no dense history of theologizing among Jews in whose twists
and tangles women can be easily lost. What feminists have attempted to
recover, therefore, is not necessarily full-blown theologies, but the history
18 Rita Gross, “Female God Language in a Jewish Context,” in Carol P. Christ and Judith
Plaskow, eds., Womanspirit Rising: A Feminist Reader in Religion (San Francisco: Harper and
Row, 1979), 168–71.
19 Setel, “Feminist Reflections,” 117; Plaskow, Standing Again, 123–35.
of women’s spirituality—understandings of God and Jewish life embedded

in ritual and prayer, memoirs and sermons—that may at some point be
incorporated into theologies by contemporary Jewish women.
In seeking out the history of women’s spirituality, feminist theologians
are dependent on the work of women in other areas of Jewish studies
who have examined ancient sources, studied archaeological remains, and
searched for new documents in modern women’s history. Since, particu-
larly for the early periods of Jewish history, few sources are interested in the
religious lives of women, hints concerning women’s experiences must be
carefully ferreted out from narratives, prophecies, and legal texts focused
on other matters. Biblical scholars, for example, have argued that the scant
sources concerning Miriam suggest that she was probably an important
cultic leader in early Israel.20 What exactly was the nature of her contribu-
tion and role? Or, in a different vein, Genesis tells us (34:1), “Dinah . . . went
out to visit the women of the land.” Does this bespeak some kind of connec-
tion on the part of Israelite women to Canaanite religion? Prophetic texts
accusing women of worshiping the Queen of Heaven (Jer. 44) or bewailing
Tammuz (Ezek. 8:14), son of the Goddess Ishtar, imply that women may
have been more resistant than men to giving up the worship of female dei-
ties. What are the implications of this resistance for our understanding
of both paganism and Israelite monotheism? From the rabbinic period,
the stories about Beruriah in the Talmud suggest that a small number of
women found pleasure and religious purpose in the study of rabbinic texts,
in the same way that an elite group of men has.21 Jewish women’s spiritual-
ity apparently has both diverged from and flowed into the mainstream of
Jewish spirituality.
As we get into the modern period, texts written by women provide evi-
dence of both a distinct religious outlook and one shaped by the role of
women within patriarchal Judaism. Chava Weissler, for example, has dis-
cussed the tkhines, or petitionary prayers of early modern Eastern European
Jewish women. These prayers, written for women and some by women,
reflect a spirituality structured by private events and experiences. Unlike
20 For example, Rita J. Burns, Has the Lord Indeed Spoken Only through Moses? A Study of
the Biblical Portrait of Miriam, Society of Biblical Literature Dissertation Series 84 (Atlanta:
Scholars Press, 1987), chap. 2, esp. p. 40. For development of these themes, see my Stand-
ing Again, 36–51.
21 David Goodblatt, “The Beruriah Traditions,” Journal of Jewish Studies 26 (spring–
autumn 1975): 68–85; but for the “bad end” assigned this uppity woman by the rabbis, see
Rachel Adler, “The Virgin in the Brothel and Other Anomalies: Character and Context in
the Legend of Beruriah,” Tikkun 3 (Nov. 1988): 28–32, 101–6.
the public liturgy of the siddur, the content of the tkhines revolves largely
around women’s special commandments (lighting the Sabbath candles,
taking the hallah dough, and ritual immersion), women’s biological expe-
riences, and personal and intimate moments (a visit to the graves of the
dead, the illness of a child, the desire to raise children well). Although these
prayers connect women to the larger tradition and occasionally even subtly
transform it, they most strikingly convey the emotionality and intimacy of
women’s piety and its relation to ordinary life. If the God of Jewish women
was the “God of our fathers” and of Jewish history, God was also the God of
the matriarchs, domestic routines, and biological experiences particular to
women.22
Interestingly, these same themes of the importance of religious feeling
and the presence of God in everyday life also come through in the work
of those modern women who have most claim to the title theologian, in
that they developed a coherent religious vision, which they shared with
others. Ellen Umansky has examined the sermons and addresses of Lily
Montagu, founder of liberal Judaism in England, and Tehilla Lichtenstein,
cofounder and leader of the Society of Jewish Science, to see whether and
how the religious visions of these women differed from those of the men
they saw as their mentors and teachers. Umansky finds that although the
women understood themselves as simply promulgating the teachings of
their mentors, in fact both saw religion as emotional and personal and
grounded their sermons in their own life experience, feelings, and percep-
tions. Thus, although Claude Montefiore, Montagu’s inspiration, preached
about abstract concepts like beauty, truth, and justice, Montagu rooted her
sermons in specific plays, movies, poems, books, and people that to her
embodied the principles of liberal Judaism and allowed the discovery of
these principles in everyday life. Similarly, although Lichtenstein’s husband,
Morris, spoke in general terms about human character and the capacities
of the mind, she always tied her discussions of Jewish science to concrete
examples, most drawn from her experiences of motherhood, marriage,
and the home.23 Whether this focus on the concrete comes from a specifi-
22 Chava Weissler, “The Traditional Piety of Ashkenazic Women,” in Arthur Green, ed.,
Jewish Spirituality from the Sixteenth Century Revival to the Present (New York: Crossroad,
1987), 247–49, 266–67; “The Religion of Traditional Ashkenazic Women: Some Method-
ological Issues,” AJS Review (June/July 1987): 87–88; “Voices from the Heart: Women’s Devo-
tional Prayers,” Jewish Almanac, ed. Richard Siegel and Carl Rheins (New York: Bantam,
1980), 544; “Women in Paradise,” Tikkun 2 (1987): 43–46, 117–20.
23 Ellen M. Umansky, “Piety, Persuasion, and Friendship: Female Jewish Leadership
in Modern Times,” in Paula Cooey, Sharon Farmer, and Mary Ellen Ross, eds., Embodied
cally women’s perspective or is simply the product of the restricted role of

women in Judaism, there is an interesting continuity between the work of
these modern women and the spirituality of more traditional women.
The search for the gaps and silences in traditional texts and for devo-
tional and sermonic material by women suggests a broadening of the defi-
nition of Jewish spirituality. Spirituality is found not simply in the products
of a male elite but in the experiences and testimonies of women and ordi-
nary men whose religious lives and theological presuppositions have gen-
erally been neglected. One could even argue that to understand the range
of women’s spiritual expression in the modern era, it is necessary to move
beyond the realm of texts altogether. The female social reformers of the late
nineteenth century, the founders of religious schools, settlement houses,
and Jewish women’s organizations, as well as participants in Zionist and
Bundist activities saw themselves as serving God through moral and social
action. Sharing the wider nineteenth-century belief in the innate piety of
women, they believed that this piety placed a special obligation on them
to worship God by helping others.24 Their activism came from a clear theo-
logical understanding that prefigured the insight of feminist liberation the-
ology: that theological reflection must always be rooted and expressed in
concrete actions.
Jewish Feminist Theology as Construction
The need to expand the definition of spirituality to incorporate women’s

experience begins to suggest the constructive and transformative nature
of Jewish feminist theology. A repetition or contemporary restatement of
traditional ideas is impossible for such a theology because it begins with
the critical moment in which all Jewish texts and ideas are viewed with
suspicion for their possible collusion with patriarchy in silencing wom-
en’s voices. Louis Jacobs, in the first chapter of his Jewish theology, sug-
gests that theological ideas are to be embraced or rejected according to
their “consistency with the tradition and coherence with the rest of our
knowledge. Where there are contradictions in the traditional sources the
Love: Sensuality and Relationship as Feminist Values (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1987),
189–206; and Lily Montagu and the Advancement of Liberal Judaism: From Vision to Vocation,
Studies in Women and Religion 12 (New York: Edward Mellen, 1983), 205–6.
24 Ellen M. Umansky, “Matriarchs and Monotheism: A History of Jewish Women’s Spiri-
tuality,” in Ellen Umansky and Dianne Ashton, eds., Piety, Persuasion, and Friendship: A
Sourcebook of Modern Jewish Women’s Spirituality (Boston: Beacon, 1992), 15–18.
contemporary Jewish theologian must try to decide which of the views

is closest to the spirit of the tradition.”25 But if all the sources on which
the theologian can draw take for granted the normative character of
maleness, then it is impossible for the feminist theologian to root herself
in the tradition without at the same time questioning some of its most
fundamental assumptions. This is why the stage of criticism is never left
behind in the move to construction. Rather, the transformative character
of Jewish feminist theology is revealed in the back-and-forth movement
between these stages.
Insistence on the value of women’s experience and its integration into
the tradition has ramifications for every theological question. In the rest
of this chapter, I look at some of the implications of women’s experience
for the concepts of God and Torah, but a similar dialectic of critique and
reconstruction would characterize a feminist discussion of any theological
issue. Feminist analysis, moreover, often lays bare important dynamics in
the nature of Judaism as a religion, so that specifically theological ques-
tions open up into “religious studies” questions concerning the function of
religious language, symbols, and rituals and the origins and consolidation
of religious traditions.
A Jewish feminist approach to Jewish God-language and Jewish concepts
of God begins with the critique and process of recovery of women’s spiritu-
ality I described earlier. The correlation between dominant images of God
as male and Jewish social and institutional arrangements raises basic ques-
tions about the nature and purpose of God-language. What are Jews say-
ing when we attribute particular qualities or characteristics to God? Are we
describing God in words that God has revealed to us? Are we projecting our
own wishes or social systems onto the cosmos? Are we responding to some
special dimension of our experience using the concepts and vocabulary
at our disposal? Although a theory of God-language is often more implicit
than explicit in feminist theological constructions, by and large Jewish fem-
inists insist on the socially shaped and created nature of religious language,
but without reducing language about God to purely social projection. On
the one hand, language about God is precisely that, language about God.
Everything we say about God represents a human attempt to recapture
or evoke experiences sustained within linguistic and cultural frameworks
that already color our experience and interpretation.26 On the other hand,
25 Jacobs, A Jewish Theology, 14.

26 Plaskow, Standing Again, 134–36.
language about God, if it is to move people and provide a sense of mean-

ing, must come from a genuine individual or communal experience. It can-
not be a product of individual fiat or scholarly consensus, nor can it be
a mechanical response to a diagnosed ailment in Jewish God-language of
the past.
For an increasing number of Jewish women and men, images of God
as a male Other no longer work. This is the communal, nonacademic
basis of the feminist theological quest. The search for the God of Jewish
feminism is a search for a God experienced in women’s new sense of
empowerment and presence within the context of the Jewish tradition.
Although feminist images of God draw on many sources, I see a fundamen-
tal experience out of which the new naming of God arises as the discovery of
women’s agency in the Jewish past and present in relation to a greater power
that grounds and sustains it. Women’s sense of coming to full selfhood in
community—which to me is the fundamental feminist experience—
is not simply self-referential but leads to a sense of participation in a reality
and energy that finally enfold the cosmos and that both the individual and
community can and must respond to.
The sense of women’s power and agency that has propelled the Jewish
feminist movement and its attempts at new God-language constitutes
a new Jewish situation in discontinuity with much of the spirituality
of Jewish women of the past. Gluckel of Hameln, whose memoir cap-
tures a segment of Jewish life and faith in seventeenth-century northern
Germany,27 the women who wrote or recited the tkhines, even as bold a
figure as Montagu, were all trying to define their own religious lives within
the context of a male-defined Judaism, be it traditional or Reform. Where
they departed from tradition—or in Montagu’s case, the Reform theol-
ogy of Montefiore—they did so unselfconsciously. Contemporary Jewish
feminists, by way of contrast, are deliberately claiming power as women to
criticize the oppressive aspects of tradition and to reshape our relation to
it. This means that although the history of women’s spirituality is an impor-
tant resource in that it reminds us that women always have been agents
within Judaism and that Jewish religious belief and practice have always
been broader than male elite texts would have us believe, women’s history
cannot simply be taken over whole. The relation between a self-consciously
27 The Memoirs of Gluckel of Hameln, trans. Marvin Lowenthal (New York: Schocken,
[1932] 1977).
feminist spirituality and traditional women’s spirituality remains an open

question that feminist theology needs to explore.
Thus, although earlier generations of Jewish women spoke to the God
of Jewish tradition as a God present in the details of their daily lives, for
the most part they spoke to “him” using traditional images. Contemporary
Jewish feminists also seek God in messy, embodied, everyday reality, but
they have tried to translate this sense of God’s immanence into the very
language of metaphors for God. Feminist God-language, moreover, seeks to
give expression not simply to God’s presence in ordinary events and situ-
ations, but more specifically to the amazing discovery of God’s presence
moving in and among women. Rita Gross’s article on female God-language,
the first to raise the issue in a Jewish context, argued that if we want to
reflect and affirm the “becoming” of women within the Jewish community,
then everything we say about “God-He” we must be equally willing to say
about “God-She.”28 Although on one level Gross’s text reads like a simple
political prescription for the disease of Jewish sexism, it also clearly rep-
resents an attempt to give concreteness to the image of God as present in
women. At the time Gross wrote her article, Naomi Janowitz and Maggie
Wenig were compiling a Sabbath prayerbook for women that not only used
female pronouns for God but also experimented with female metaphors.
God was not simply the traditional deity in female form, but a mother
birthing the world and protecting it with her womb. The accumulation of
female pronouns and images in both their prayers and those of later inno-
vators provides a wonderful celebration of women’s sexuality and power
rare in the culture and still rarer in a religious context.29
Important as such language was and is as an affirmation of female self-
hood in relation to the sacred, there is also a certain naïveté in the assump-
tion that the insertion of female pronouns or images into traditional
prayers provides a solution to women’s invisibility. Rather, insofar as male
images of God are part of a larger pattern of hierarchical dualisms, female
language introduces a contradiction into the pattern that begins to reveal
and disrupt it but does not in itself dislodge the larger system of dualisms.
28 Gross, “Female God Language,” 165–73, esp. 172–73.

29 Naomi Janowitz and Maggie Wenig, Siddur Nashim: A Sabbath Prayer Book for Women
(Providence: Privately published, 1976); short sections are reprinted in Womanspirit Rising,
pp. 174–78. Since Janowitz and Wenig, there have been many other prayer services using
female language, many privately circulating for use in small groups. Vetaher Libenu (Sud-
bury, Mass.: Congregation Beth El, 1980) and Or Chadash (Philadelphia: P’nai Or Religious
Fellowship, 1989) are two generally available prayerbooks that use female language, the
latter in Hebrew as well as English.
God-She can also be the supreme Other in a hierarchical system. Jewish

feminist God-language has therefore also tried to address the notion of God
as wholly Other, a notion that persists even in female imagery, by more rad-
ically challenging traditional metaphors and blessing formulas.
Lynn Gottlieb, for example, has drawn on images from various religious
traditions to create a litany of names and metaphors for God that evoke the
infinite, changing, and flowing depths of God’s nature. Gottlieb is much
interested in female metaphors, which she borrows from ancient Goddess
traditions and develops from the feminine resonances and associations of
many Hebrew terms. What characterizes her use of God-language above
all, however, is not just its female imagery but its fluidity, movement, and
multiplicity, its evocation of a God within and without, in women and all
that lives.30 Marcia Falk works in a different way to dislodge the traditional
conception of God and male images. Focusing on the blessing formula that
is so central in Jewish life, she challenges not simply its maleness but its
anthropocentrism. Her blessing over bread, for example, changes “Blessed
art thou Lord our God king of the universe,” to “Let us bless the source or
wellspring of life” that “brings forth bread from the earth.” The Hebrew
word for source (ayin) is feminine, adding an “ah” (ha-motziah) ending to
the word for bread that displaces the ubiquitous masculine. Beyond this,
the image of wellspring or source is both natural and nonhierarchical,
shifting our sense of direction from a God in the high heavens ruling over
us to a God present in the very ground beneath our feet, nourishing and
sustaining us.31
In some ways, it is easier to articulate the new conception of God
that lurks behind this abundance of imagery than it is to find the images
that express the conception. The effort to create new metaphors for God
bespeaks an understanding of monotheism that rejects the worship of a
single image of God in favor of a new and inclusive notion of unity. Many
Jewish feminists have pointed out that the inability of most Jews to imag-
ine God as anything but male is a form of idolatry in that it identifies a
finite image with the reality of God. Jews are used to thinking of idols as
stones and carved figures, but verbal images can be equally idolatrous
in their fixedness—indeed, can actually be more dangerous for being
30 Much of Lynn Gottlieb’s work is unpublished, but see “Speaking into the Silence,”
Response 41–42 (fall–winter 1982): 19–32, esp. 21–22, 32.
31 Marcia Falk, “Notes on Composing New Blessings: Toward a Feminist Jewish Recon-
struction of Prayer,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 3 (spring 1987): 39–49. I discuss
the new Jewish feminist God-language in Standing Again, 136–43.
invisible.32 Underlying feminist metaphors, by way of contrast, is a concep-

tion of monotheism, not as a single image of God, but, in Falk’s phrase, as
“an embracing unity of a multiplicity of images.”33 Since the divine totality is
all-embracing, every aspect of creation provides a clue to some dimension
of God’s reality. Every image of God is part of the divine reality that includes
the diversity of an infinite community of human and nonhuman life. A true
monotheism is able to discern the One in and through the changing forms
of the many, to glimpse the whole in and through its infinite images.34
The nature of this divine totality is developed in feminist discourse
through both what is denied and what is affirmed. God is not male. God
is not a lord and king. God is not a being outside us, over against us, who
manipulates and controls us and raises some people over others. God is not
the dualistic Other who authorizes all other dualisms. God is the source
and wellspring of life in its infinite diversity. God—as our foremothers
seem to have known—is present in all aspects of life, but present not just
as father and protector but as one who empowers us to act creatively our-
selves. God, to use Nelle Morton’s image, is the great hearing one at the
center of the universe, the one who hears us to speech and is altered by the
hearing.35 God is inside and outside us. God is transcendent in the way that
community transcends the individuals within it. God is the God known in
community, encountered by the Jewish people at Sinai at the same time
they became a community. But God embraces the inexhaustible particu-
larities of all communities and is named fully by none.
The difficulties of translating this conception of God into metaphor—
or better, many metaphors—is related to the nature of religious symbols.
Since new symbols cannot simply be invented as a response to some diag-
nosed problem in the tradition, but rather emerge from new experiences,
it takes time for experience to crystallize into imagery. Moreover, language
is just one vehicle—and in many ways a poor vehicle—for expressing the
nature of divine reality. The experiences that language tries to pin down are
many times undergone in silence, and the making of metaphor represents
but a halting attempt to translate that silence into a language that can be
shared with others. Ritual, because it involves the whole self, is potentially a
more effective vehicle for communicating a total conception of the sacred.
Both the communal roots of Jewish feminist theology and the nature of reli-
32 Gross, “Female God Language,” 169; Falk, “Notes on Composing New Blessings,” 44–45.
33 Falk, “Notes on Composing New Blessings,” 41 (emphasis in original).
34 Plaskow, Standing Again, 150–53.
35 Nelle Morton, The Journey Is Home (Boston: Beacon, 1985), 54–55.
gion make it important to look at feminist ritual as an expression of Jewish

feminist understandings of God. The rejection of hierarchical leadership in
feminist ritual, its preference for circles, its participatory style of prayer that
seeks to empower all present, offer testimony to a feminist conception of
God that is as powerful as any new metaphor.
A second important focus of feminist theological discussion is the nature
and meaning of Torah. Obviously, there is a connection between the con-
cept of Torah and the concept of God, for the assertion that God is the giver
of Torah is central to Jewish theology and, like many important theological
assertions, justifies itself through its circularity. Because God is the giver
of Torah, it reliably testifies to the nature of God, and the faithfulness of
God is warrant for the believability of Torah. But if feminists are suspicious
of traditional metaphors for God because they reinforce larger patterns of
male domination, this suspicion in turn implies a critique of Torah as itself
in bondage to patriarchy.
Feminist suspicion of Torah does not stem specifically from its male
God-language, but as I suggested earlier, from the normative character of
maleness Torah assumes. Whether understood in the narrow sense as the
five books of Moses or the wider sense as all Jewish teaching and learning,
Torah defines the male as the normative Jew and perceives women as Other
in relation to men. Torah is male texts—not simply in the sense of author-
ship, but in the sense that its concerns are defined and are circumscribed
from a male perspective. Women are often absent—“You shall not covet
your neighbor’s wife” (Exod. 20:14)—or nameless—Jephthah’s daughter
(Judg. 11) and Samson’s mother (Judg. 13). Women’s religious experiences
are passed over in silence. (What was Miriam’s true role in the Exodus com-
munity?) Women’s sexuality is strictly controlled in the interests of male
heads of household.36
Torah constructs a world that orders and makes sense of Jewish experi-
ence, but the world it constructs places men at the center. It is the written
record of those with the power to keep records and to interpret and define
the meaning of Jewish existence. In creating a particular vision of reality,
it disguises alternative Jewish realities that may have coexisted alongside it.
It understands the imperatives of Jewish life from the perspective of those
at the center: the prophets rather than the common people, who for centu-
ries “whored after false gods,” and the rabbis who said that only men could
36 See Wegner, Chattel or Person? for a thorough exploration of this theme in relation
to the Mishnah.
write a bill of divorce, rather than the individual women who gave them-
selves that power.37 The feminist relation to Torah thus begins in suspicion,
critique, and the refusal to assign revelatory status to the establishment and
reinforcement of patriarchy.
This insistence on suspicion does not mean, however, that Jewish femi-
nists view Torah as just a series of historical texts, interesting for what they
reveal about the past but of no enduring significance. The decisions to
struggle with Torah, to criticize it, to remain in relation to it, all presup-
pose a more complex attitude. Elsewhere, I have called Torah a “partial
record of the ‘Godwrestling’ of part of the Jewish people.”38 In using the
term Godwrestling, I am trying to encapsulate several assumptions about
the theological status of Torah. First, I suggest that Torah is, at least in part,
a record of response to some genuine encounter. To be sure, it is an inter-
pretation of encounter encoded in patriarchal language, but still, it tries to
remember and to actualize in the life of a concrete historical community
the workings of a God understood to be guiding and calling a particular
people to their destiny. It testifies to moments of profound experience,
illumination, and also mystery, when the curtain was pulled back from the
endless chain of historical circumstance and some underlying meaning
and presence were traced and read from the events of Jewish history.
The word suggests that Torah is incomplete because it is the nature of
religious experience that no oral or written record can either exhaust it
or spring entirely free from historical context. “Revelation” can challenge
those who receive it and open up perspectives that are genuinely new, but
Israel reached its understanding of God and its own destiny at a time when
patriarchy was being consolidated throughout the ancient Near East. Its
self-understanding helped to institute, support, and reinforce this historical
development; it rarely disputed it. My characterization of Torah suggests,
moreover, that it is the record of only part of the Jewish people because we
do not know how women experienced the large and small events of Jewish
history. We do not have Sinai seen through their eyes, their double enslave-
ment, or their wanderings in the desert. We have the names of some of their
prophets but not their prophecies. We do not know how women wrestled
37 Carol P. Christ, “Heretics and Outsiders,” in her Laughter of Aphrodite: Reflections on

a Journey to the Goddess (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1987), 35–40; Bernadette Brooten,
“Could Women Initiate Divorce in Ancient Judaism? The Implications for Mark 10:11–12 and
1 Corinthians 7:10–11” (Ernest Cadwell Colman Lecture, School of Theology at Claremont,
14 April 1981).
38 Plaskow, Standing Again, 33. My explication of the phrase here depends on my dis-
cussion in the book, pp. 32–34.
with God, or even whether, like Jacob, they would have named their experi-
ence wrestling.
Although some feminists would argue that reading the traditional Torah
from a new angle of vision can provide women with the history we need,
others seek to expand Torah, to redefine what Jews consider revelatory and
normative.39 On the one hand, there is no question that Torah as tradi-
tionally understood can be sifted and mined for more information about
women. Read through feminist lenses, it can provide fragmentary evidence
of women’s religious leadership, of changing patterns of family and gender
relations, of women’s lives in and outside normative religious institutions.
On the other hand, if we begin with the assumption that Judaism is consti-
tuted by women and men, then we must be open to finding Torah far out-
side the traditional canon. Archaeological evidence that challenges written
sources, the writings of nonrabbinic groups, the history of women’s spiri-
tuality, literature by Jewish women dealing with religious themes, midrash
“received” by contemporary women—all these become Torah in that they
are parts of the record of the Jewish religious experience, of what Jews have
found holy and meaningful in their lives, and of the Jewish attempt to give
order to existence.40
This new content of Torah is discovered and created in a number of
ways. In part, the findings of feminist historiography, when appropriated as
normative, themselves come to have the status of Torah. If the tkhines, for
example, were taught or recited alongside other Jewish liturgy as equally
valid forms of Jewish liturgical expression, their understanding of God
would eventually become part of the Jewish imagination much like the God
of the synagogue service. If divorce documents written by women had the
same status in Jewish legal history as the Mishnah’s view that women can-
not initiate divorce, the halakhic precedents for contemporary divorce law
would be greatly expanded and thereby transformed. If ancient inscriptions
39 Compare, e.g., Tamar Frankiel, The Voice of Sarah: Feminine Spirituality and Tradi-
tional Judaism (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1990), with Sue Levi Elwell, Texts and
Transformation: Towards a Theology of Integrity (Rabbinic thesis, Hebrew Union College-
Jewish Institute of Religion, 1986).
40 I have in mind such things as the ancient inscriptions testifying to women’s reli-
gious leadership studied by Bernadette Brooten (Women Leaders in the Ancient Synagogue:
Inscriptional Evidence and Background Issues, Brown Judaic Studies 36 [Chico, Calif.: Schol-
ars Press, 1982]); the New Testament as evidence for the right of Jewish women to initiate
divorce (see n.37); the tkhines; novels like E. M. Broner’s A Weave of Women (New York:
Bantam, 1978); and midrash like Ellen Umansky’s “Creating a Jewish Feminist Theology,”
in Judith Plaskow and Carol P. Christ, eds., Weaving the Visions: New Patterns in Feminist
Spirituality (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1989), 195–97.
describing women as presidents and leaders of synagogues were taken as

seriously as is the absence of women from the rabbinate, discussion of the
ordination of women in the Orthodox community might take on a much
different complexion.41 In each of these cases, historical evidence is given
theological weight that serves to shift and enlarge the meaning of Torah.
Yet historiography is not the only nor the best source for the feminist
expansion of Torah. Jews have traditionally used midrash to broaden or
alter the meanings of texts. The midrashic process of bringing contem-
porary questions to traditional sources and elaborating on the sources in
response to questions easily lends itself to feminist use. Lacking adequate
information on Miriam’s role in Israelite religion, we can fill in the gaps
with midrash; lacking texts on what women experienced at Sinai, we can
recreate them through midrash. Such midrash can then become part of the
content of Torah, both through study and through incorporation into lit-
urgy. Indeed, just as the structure of feminist liturgy conveys something of
the feminist understanding of God, so the content of feminist liturgy is an
important vehicle for communicating an expanded Torah.
Such extension of the content of Torah necessarily opens and challenges
traditionally normative texts and the theological conclusions we might
draw from them. Insofar as traditional texts become part of a larger Torah,
their authority is relativized and their claims to normativeness are shaken.
Including and valuing women’s religious experience as Torah precipitates a
new critical moment in feminist theology. It leads us to examine the pro-
cess by which particular texts become normative, the interests they repre-
sent, and the kind of social order they support and undergird. What is more
important from a theological perspective, broadening Torah broadens the
historical and textual basis of Jewish theological discourse. Highlighting
aspects of Jewish experience that had previously been obscured and
neglected, and valuing these as Torah, offer a richer and more diverse
Judaism on which to reflect theologically. The Jewish God is not simply the
God of the patriarchs and rabbis, but the God of the matriarchs, the tkhines,
and women who interpret and create Torah today. Any attempt to articu-
late a Jewish understanding of God must take account of all these sources,
exploring the concepts and images of God in the women’s Torah as part of
the heritage that a contemporary theology reworks or transforms. The same
must be said of any theological concept. It must be grounded in a history
41 See nn. 37 and 40.

and present that is wholly Jewish, one that represents the Jewishness of the
whole community rather than the religious experience of a male elite.
The challenge of Jewish feminist theology to Jewish studies should by
now be obvious. What part of the tradition does Jewish studies set out to
study? Who defines what is worth studying, what is centrally and norma-
tively Jewish? Whose interests does a supposedly objective and histori-
cally accurate Jewish studies support and share? Do theological judgments
concerning normativeness creep in under the guise of objectivity? When
and to what extent is Jewish studies male Jewish studies parading in the
cloak of universality? Jewish feminist theology calls into question our basic
understanding of Jewishness, the texts, the history, and the literature that
Jewish studies examines. It also moves beyond critical questions to ask
what Judaism looks like when we take seriously the perspectives and expe-
riences of women as they try to understand and construct their own visions
of the world. It pursues the task of shaping meaning, of making sense of
being a Jewish woman and human being in the world today. In this sense,
precisely as theology, it serves the central tasks of a liberal education: invit-
ing students to encounter and reflect on difference, fostering critical self-
consciousness, and encouraging the development of a personal worldview
accountable to the needs of a larger community.42
42 Neusner, “Religious Studies/Theological Studies: The St. Louis Project,” Journal of the
American Academy of Religion 52 (Dec. 1984): 740; Farley, “The Place of Theology,” 12.
Authority, Resistance, and Transformation:
Jewish Feminist Reflections on Good Sex*
Judith Plaskow
The effort to develop feminist accounts of good sex within the context of
patriarchal religious traditions raises a host of methodological problems.
The very formulation of the project recognizes the tensions between femi-
nism as a social movement committed to the liberation of women from
all forms of oppression, and the direction and intention of traditions that
have contributed directly and indirectly to women’s subordination and
marginalization in religion and society. The Good Sex project begins from
the reality that women have rarely participated in the formulation of sexual
norms and values in the major world religions, and that religious sexual
values have seldom been conducive to the health or well-being of women.1
In bringing together a group of women connected to different traditions,
the project seeks to create a space in which the participants can “think
new thoughts,” reflecting on sexuality from the perspective of the concerns
and experiences of women in our cultures. But at the same time, it assumes
that these new thoughts will somehow remain in relation to the religions
being transformed and will possibly authenticate themselves through
connection to neglected or dissident strands within those religions.2 The
project thus immediately becomes entangled in fundamental questions
about how feminists argue for and make change, especially when the
changes envisioned may radically challenge central elements of tradition.
Defining the Questions
My interest in this chapter is not so much in defining good sex from a

Jewish feminist perspective as in thinking about how to think about the
* Plaskow, Judith, “Authority, Resistance, and Transformation: Jewish Feminist Reflec-

tion on Good Sex”, in Good Sex: Feminist Perpsectives from the World’s Religions, ed. Patricia
Beattie Jung, Mary E. Hunt, and Radhika Balakrishnan. © 2001 by Rutgers University Press.
Reprinted by permission of Rutgers University Press.
1 Mary E. Hunt. “Good Sex: Women’s Religious Wisdom on Sexuality,” Reproductive
Health Matters 8 (November 1996): 97–103.
2 Ibid., 97.
70 authority, resistance, and transformation
issue. As a Jewish feminist theologian, I find that the task of transforming

Jewish sexual norms raises questions about authority that I must sort out
before I can begin to think substantively about the characteristics of good
sex. The Jewish feminist movement in the United States has flourished in
the context of a decentralized, remarkably diverse Jewish community, in
which there are many competing visions of the nature of Judaism and many
opportunities to shape Jewish life in new directions. In a situation in which
the great majority of U.S. Jews have rejected or are redefining elements of
traditional Jewish belief and practice, the issue of authority is crucial and
has implications well beyond the area of sexuality.3 The question of how
to ground and argue for criticisms or constructive reworkings of religious
tradition is pressing for any theology or group that does not simply assume
the validity of traditional sources of authority, such as Scripture, revelation,
or centralized religious leadership.4 Yet, because sexual control of women
is such a key element in broader patriarchal control, the topic of sexuality
raises the issue of authority with particular vividness and urgency. On what
basis can feminists advocate particular visions of sexuality in ways that will
prove intelligible and convincing to others?
The problem of authority arises for feminists as soon as we begin to chal-
lenge any aspect of the status and role of women. Once we acknowledge
the possibility of deeply questioning any element of tradition, we seem to
undermine the hope of religious certainty at a level that goes far beyond
the specific issue at hand. However narrow the grounds for a particular
criticism—and feminist criticisms of the treatment of women and reli-
gious sexual values are in fact deep and wide-ranging—rejecting any ele-
ment of tradition throws all the rest into question. This is because, however
much feminists still may value certain insights and perspectives we glean
from our traditions, we no longer value them simply because they are there.
Rather, we are confronted with having to self-consciously appropriate and
reappropriate from the conflicted strands within each tradition those
that make sense and bear fruit in our own lives, finding ways to explain
our choices that make sense both to ourselves and to others. Logically, we
cannot have it both ways. We cannot both deny the authority of religious
3 Only 50 percent of U.S. Jews are affiliated with any particular religious movement
within Judaism. Of that 50 percent, 80 percent are non-Orthodox. This means that, to vary-
ing degrees, they accept the notion of Judaism as an evolving tradition that must adapt
itself to changing historical and social circumstances.
4 Cf. Judith Plaskow, Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism from a Feminist Perspective (San
Francisco: Harper and Row, 1990), 18–21.
authority, resistance, and transformation 71
tradition where it negates our feminist values and, at the same time, build
on that authority where it seems to support those values.
A lot of recent scholarship on Jewish attitudes toward sexuality inten-
sifies this issue of authority in that it highlights the tensions and dis-
agreements within Jewish tradition, denying the reality of any unitary
perspective.5 Such a move is enormously helpful in deconstructing funda-
mentalist appeals to religious authority, in that it makes clear that all claims
to authority involve selectivity, that Jewish tradition by no means speaks on
sexuality with a self-evident, unambiguous voice. This scholarship is also
useful to feminist reconstructions of religion, in that it surfaces minority
or dissident viewpoints in the Jewish past that may counter dominant per-
spectives on issues of sexual values. At the same time, however, in dissolv-
ing the purported unity of Jewish tradition into a series of dissonant and
ever-shifting strands, it increases the difficulty of arguing for the priority or
authority of one strand over any other. Jewish tradition—like all religious
traditions—is characterized by continual contesting of key issues, which
issues are in turn continually redefined in different geographic locations
and different historical contexts. Notions of authority are also continually
reinterpreted in accordance with the outcome of such contests. Claiming
the authority of a specific strand, then, is not a matter of identifying the
essential and authentic voice of the Jewish tradition. Rather, it is part of a
contest in our own time over which voices claiming to speak for tradition
will prove compelling to a significant proportion of the Jewish people.
The complex and contradictory nature of Jewish teachings on sexual-
ity, moreover, points to another problem in privileging neglected, posi-
tive themes within Jewish tradition. All too often in feminist discussion,
highlighting the liberating elements of a tradition as its authoritative voice
involves disregarding the strands that have been oppressive. The trouble-
some aspects of a tradition do not disappear, however, simply because
we ignore them, but are left to shape consciousness and affect hearts and
minds. Thus, appealing to the first creation story, in which male and female
are made in God’s image, and ignoring the second, in which woman is
made from man, leaves intact the latter account to be used by others as a
5 I have in mind such works as Daniel Boyarin, Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmu-
dic Culture (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), and Unheroic
Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1997); Howard Eilberg-Schwartz, People of the Body:
Jews and Judaism from an Embodied Perspective (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York
Press, 1992); Mark Biale, Eros and the Jews: From Biblical Israel to Contemporary America
(New York: Basic Books, 1992); and Michael Satlow, Tasting the Dish: Rabbinic Rhetorics of
Sexuality, Brown Judaic Studies 303 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1995).
continuing justification for the subordination of women. Similarly, appeal-

ing to those elements in Judaism that honor the importance of married
sex as a value in its own right apart from procreation, while neglecting the
ways in which even married sex is restricted and controlled, allows the
sexual control of women to continue unexamined as part of the fabric of
Jewish marriage. But if one does acknowledge and attempt to grapple with
the oppressive aspects of a tradition, the question inevitably arises as to
the grounds on which its nonoppressive elements can be considered more
fundamental.
A final problem relating to authority concerns the sources that are
relevant in thinking about the subject of sexuality. Given that any recon-
struction of tradition necessarily selects from the conflicting voices on a
particular issue, still, what texts are even germane to a consideration of this
topic? It is striking that, when issues of sexuality are discussed in religious
contexts, a handful of texts are often cited and argued about over and over,
as if they were the only sources relevant to shaping norms around sexual
behavior. In the Jewish community, debates around homosexuality have
often revolved around two verses in Leviticus and rabbinic commentary on
them, while Christians add to the scanty resources in the Hebrew Bible a
third verse in Romans. This approach ignores the host of other injunctions
in the Bible and rabbinic tradition about forming ethical relationships, cre-
ating community, and ensuring social justice. It fails to view sexuality as
just one dimension of human relationship, embedded in a constellation of
familial, interpersonal, and communal connections that shape, support, or
deform it. Instead, sexuality is seen as a peculiar problem for ethics, a dis-
crete and troublesome domain requiring unique regulation. In addition to
confronting problems around grounding sexual values, therefore, feminist
accounts of sexuality also need to locate the issue in a larger social con-
text. Building on the early feminist insight that the personal is the political,
feminists need to insist that good sex on the interpersonal level is possible
only in the context of just social, political, and economic relations.6
Thinking about Compulsory Heterosexuality
I would like to illustrate the ways in which some of these issues concerning
authority come into play in relation to a particular dimension of sexuality,
6 This was a central and recurrent theme in all our Good Sex conversations, as many
chapters in this volume bear witness.
by reflecting on compulsory heterosexuality within the Jewish tradition as a

barrier to good sex. I choose to focus on a central oppressive element in my
tradition rather than on some emancipatory theme, because I believe that
it is the negative aspects of tradition that most profoundly shape women’s
current sexual situation, and that most require attention and transforma-
tion. In my view, the starting point for feminists in thinking about good sex
must be resistance. Feminists must begin by examining and dismantling
the institutions that stand in the way of women even imagining fully our
needs and desires.
The concept of “compulsory heterosexuality,” which Adrienne Rich
placed on the U.S. feminist agenda through her well-known essay on
the topic, refers to the complex social and political processes through
which people learn how and are made to be heterosexual.7 The first and
simplest way in which heterosexuality is made compulsory is that other
modes of sexual expression are forbidden on pain of punishment or death.
Such a prohibition on male/male anal intercourse appears in Leviticus
18:22 and 20:13 and forms the starting point for all Jewish discussion of
homosexuality—as well as Jewish gay and lesbian resistance to tradi-
tional attitudes toward homosexuality. Although lesbianism is not men-
tioned explicitly in the Bible, the rabbis find a reference to it in Leviticus
18:3, “You shall not copy the practices of the land of Egypt . . . or the land
of Canaan.” They interpret the practices in question as a man marrying a
man and a woman marrying a woman. Both the Palestinian and Babylonian
Talmuds also contain brief discussions of whether women who “ ‘rub’ with
each other” are considered to have committed an illicit sexual act and are
therefore forbidden to marry a priest.8 The rabbis’ consensus that such acts
are “mere licentiousness,” that is, not real sex, and therefore not disqualify-
ing, reveals another weapon in the arsenal of compulsory heterosexuality:
rendering sex between women invisible by defining it as impossible.9
7 Adrienne Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” Signs: Journal of

Women in Culture and Society 5/4 (1980): 631–660.
8 The Talmud is a compendium of Jewish law and lore, taking the form of a commen-
tary on the Mishnah, a second-century code of Jewish law. Since the Mishnah was the cen-
ter of study at rabbinic academies in both Palestine and Babylonia, there are two Talmuds.
The Babylonian Talmud is fuller and is considered the masterwork of rabbinic Judaism.
9 For some introductory material on these issues, see Rachel Biale, Women and Jewish
Law (New York: Schocken, 1984), 192–197; and Rebecca Alpert, Like Bread on the Seder Plate:
Jewish Lesbians and the Transformation of Tradition (New York: Columbia University Press,
1997), 25–34.
While contemporary Jewish debates about homosexuality generally

revolve rather narrowly around these verses in Leviticus and the few rab-
binic sources interpreting them, I find this material less useful for under-
standing heterosexuality as an institution than the pervasive assumption in
biblical and rabbinic texts that heterosexual marriage is the norm for adult
life. In getting at this larger context of Jewish attitudes toward marriage
and family relations, Genesis 3:16—“Your desire shall be for your husband
and he shall rule over you”—is far more revealing than Leviticus 18 and 20,
because it names the connection between gender complementarity, com-
pulsory heterosexuality, and the subordination of women. Gayle Rubin, in
her classic essay “The Traffic in Women,” argues that, in traditional societies,
the social organization of sex is built on the links between “gender roles,
obligatory heterosexuality and the constraint of female sexuality.”10 Gender
roles guarantee that the smallest viable social unit will consist of one man
and one woman whose desire must be directed toward each other, at the
same time that men have rights to exchange their female kin and control
their wives in marriage that women do not have either in themselves or
in men.
Genesis 3:16–19, which describes God’s punishments of Adam and Eve
for eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge, offers a remarkably condensed
and powerful statement of the connections laid out by Rubin. In increasing
Eve’s pain in childbearing and punishing Adam with having to sweat and
toil to gain his bread, God assumes or ordains differentiated gender roles
and, at the same time, defines them asymmetrically. Eve’s (heterosexual)
desire for her husband will keep her tied to childbearing, despite its painful-
ness, and will allow him to “rule over” her. My point is not that compulsory
heterosexuality as a Jewish institution is rooted in this story, but rather that
this myth of origins provides a lens for examining interrelationships that
are spelled out at length in Jewish narrative and law. In the Jewish case, as
in the traditional societies Rubin discusses, rigid gender roles support the
channeling of sex in marriage. A man who is not married (the texts speak
from a male perspective) is seen as less than whole, for only a man and
woman together constitute the image of God. The extensive laws regulating
women’s sexuality and placing it under the control of fathers or husbands
10 Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex,” in
Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna R. Reiter (New York: Monthly Review, 1975),
179–180.
ensure that women will be available for marriage to men who can be fairly
certain that their wife’s sexuality belongs only to them.
In a context in which good sex is defined as sex that is under male con-
trol, the question of what constitutes good sex from women’s perspectives
simply cannot be asked within the framework of the system. For the Bible
and for the rabbis, good sex is sex that supports and serves a patriarchal
social order. The so-called divinely ordained laws concerning marriage
and divorce, adultery, rape, and so on, allow for the regular and orderly
transfer of women from the homes of fathers to the homes of husbands,
or, if need be, from one husband to another. Women’s fears, desires, and
preferences, their efforts to find meaning in or to resist this legislation, are
nonissues and “nondata” that are also nonsense in the context of the rab-
binic world view.11 As Rachel Adler points out in a powerful article about
women’s role in the Jewish covenant community, the categories of a sys-
tem of thought determine the questions it can ask, allowing it to pile up
huge amounts of information on certain questions while rendering others
invisible. The problems that receive extensive attention in Jewish law are
the “status problems of marriage, desertion, divorce and chalitzah [leverite
marriage] which the tradition itself created and from whose consequences
it now seeks to ‘protect’ women, since by its own rules they can never pro-
tect themselves.”12 Insofar as the rabbis do attempt to “protect” women—by
trying to find ways to get a husband to divorce his wife if she so desires,
for example—they indicate some awareness of the limits and injustices
of the system they have created and, in this sense, offer some resources
for criticism. But insofar as they are willing to address these injustices only
within the framework of the system that gives rise to them, they close off
any possibility of women entering as subjects and reframing the issues in
genuinely new terms.
As Rubin’s analysis suggests, however, control of women’s sexuality is
just one dimension of the institution of compulsory heterosexuality, which
is also spelled out in halakha (Jewish law) in terms of property rights, work
roles, and religious obligations and exemptions. In her book on the con-
struction of gender in Roman-period Judaism, Miriam Peskowitz exam-
ines a Mishnaic passage that shows the rabbis in the act of extending a
husband’s power over the property his wife acquired before marriage, so
11 Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father (Boston: Beacon, 1973), 12.
12 Rachel Adler, “I’ve Had Nothing Yet So I Can’t Take More,” Moment 8/8 (September
1983): 24.
that, while the wife may continue to own property, the husband controls
it and is entitled to the profits that flow from it.13 In their ensuing debate
about the validity of this legal innovation, the rabbis involved presuppose
that a man has authority over his wife. What they need to determine is the
extent of that authority in the sphere of property ownership, much as in
other contexts they will discuss a husband’s power over his wife’s sexuality.
The conversation, Peskowitz argues, reveals that there are many nodes “in
the construction of sexual difference,” sexual control constituting only one
area in which marriage allows a man to “rule over” his wife.14
The Jewish division of religious labor also presupposes and helps con-
struct a social structure in which heterosexual marriage is the norm. The
exemption of women from positive time-bound commandments—in
particular, set times for daily prayer—assumes that they are involved in
household obligations that are their first responsibility and priority. In car-
ing for small children, observing the rules of kashrut (dietary laws), and
preparing for holy days by cooking special foods and making their homes
ready, women free men for their own prayer and Torah study and enable
them to observe the dietary laws and the Sabbath and holidays fully.
For their part, women need men to take the ritual roles in the home that
they themselves are neither obligated nor educated to assume. In other
words, the whole series of laws that exclude women from public religious
life, laws that Jewish feminists have analyzed and criticized from the per-
spective of women’s spiritual disempowerment, are also part of the system
of compulsory heterosexuality. That system is not just about sex, but also
about the organization of daily life around gender role differentiation and
the power of men over women.
Because compulsory heterosexuality is interstructured with a whole
network of sexual, social, economic, and religious relations in Jewish law,
creating the preconditions for good sex cannot end with questioning the
few biblical and rabbinic passages on same-sex relationships. The mate-
rial on such relationships is scanty and specific, so that those advocating
expanded rights for gays and lesbians have been able to challenge it from
a number of directions. Are other forms of male sexual interaction, other
than anal intercourse, forbidden by Leviticus?15 Did the Torah or the rabbis
13 On the Mishnah, see note 8.

14 Miriam B. Peskowitz, Spinning Fantasies: Rabbis, Gender, and History (Berkeley and
Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997), 35.
15 Saul Olyan, “ ‘And with a Male You Shall Not Lie the Lying Down of a Woman’: On the
Meaning and Significance of Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13,” Journal of the History of Sexuality
5/2 (1994): 185.
have any concept of homosexuality as an orientation, or were they con-

demning homosexual acts performed by heterosexuals?16 While such criti-
cal questions are important and useful in trying to gain acceptance for gays
and lesbians within the framework of Jewish law, they never step outside
that framework to confront the broader system of compulsory heterosex-
uality. That system controls and marginalizes all women, whether or not
they are heterosexual, and whether or not they are married. It also makes
illegitimate any sexual or life choice outside of heterosexual marriage, so
that self-pleasuring, celibacy, singleness, cohabitation without marriage,
et cetera, all constitute forms of resistance to compulsory heterosexuality.17
Once one begins to see the relationship between compulsory heterosex-
uality and sexism in its myriad forms, however, the questions about author-
ity that I raised in the first part of this chapter return in all their power. How
does one question this central aspect of Jewish tradition and still remain in
relation to the tradition? Are there voices in traditional Jewish texts that
dissent from or reveal fractures in this system, and on what basis can they
be mobilized? Where do I, where does any contemporary feminist critic,
stand in even raising these questions?
Starting Points
I would argue that the feminist critic must begin, not by allying herself
with dissenting voices within her tradition, but by questioning the author-
ity of tradition, resisting any framework that leaves no room for women’s
agency, and then proceeding to transform tradition by placing women at the
center.18 Feminism begins in resistance and vision, a resistance and vision
that are not simply personal but are rooted in “communities of resistance
16 Bradley Artson, “Gay and Lesbian Jews: An Innovative Jewish Legal Position,” Jewish
Spectator (winter 1990–1991): 11.
17 It is remarkable how little has been written criticizing the Jewish insistence on mar-
riage from other than gay and lesbian perspectives. See Laura Geller and Elizabeth Kol-
tun, “Single and Jewish: Toward a New Definition of Completeness,” in the first anthology
of Jewish feminist work, The Jewish Woman: New Perspectives, ed. Elizabeth Koltun (New
York: Schocken, 1976), 43–49. Also see the section “Being Single” in Debra Orenstein, ed.,
Lifecycles: Jewish Women on Life Passages and Personal Milestones (Woodstock, Vt.: Jewish
Lights, 1994), 99–116.
18 I am very grateful to the group conversation at the Good Sex meeting in Amsterdam
for pushing me to be clearer about the ways in which Jewish feminists have moved beyond
simply resisting women’s traditional roles to creating new forms of practice, identity, and
community. Mary Hunt’s concept of imagination in her chapter in this volume is a helpful
way of naming this dimension of feminist method and practice.
and solidarity” that are challenging specific forms of oppression out of

concrete experiences of alternative ways of being in the world.19 Thus,
the feminist and the lesbian, gay, and bisexual movements have allowed
women to feel the power and potential of bonds between women; to expe-
rience an intimacy, sexual and otherwise, that often has been trivialized or
undermined; and to claim our power as agents to participate fully in society
and religious communities on terms that we define. This experience of the
power of being, as Mary Daly described it early on, over against the institu-
tions that have consigned women to nonbeing, does not of itself threaten
these institutions or render them harmless, but it does provide starting
points for imagining a different future and criticizing the forces that stand
in its way.20 To my mind, this experience, rather than any dissident strands
within patriarchal religion, is the authoritative foundation of resistance
and transformation. Given the conflicting voices within any normative text,
the decision to claim such strands must come out of some experience of
their greater power to support fullness of life for a larger group of people.
Out of participation in a community of resistance and transformation, one
then looks for and consciously claims the resistive elements in a particular
tradition, in order to mobilize them toward a different future.21
What does this mean and not mean in relation to compulsory heterosex-
uality? Beyond the dimension of critique, which I see as central to a femi-
nist appropriation of tradition, there are several ways in which feminists
can find resources for resistance and transformation within our religious
traditions. One is by deliberately allying ourselves with the self-critical
strands in texts that have been understood as normative. In her early and
influential reinterpretation of Genesis 2–3, Phyllis Trible pointed out that
the explicit statement in Genesis 3:16 that a woman’s “desire shall be for her
husband, and he shall rule over [her],” occurs in the context of divine pun-
ishment for disobedience. Remarkably for a patriarchal society, the story
does not depict women’s subordination as natural and divinely ordained,
but as a perversion of the created order that is a result of sin. Trible thus
reads this story not as prescribing male supremacy but as describing it,
not as legitimating but as condemning it.22 For her, the insight that male
19 Sharon D. Welch, Communities of Resistance and Solidarity (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis,

1985).
20 Daly, Beyond, chapter 1.
21 See Daniel Boyarin, “Justify My Love,” in Judaism Since Gender, ed. Miriam Peskowitz
and Laura Levitt (New York: Routledge, 1997), 131–137.
22 Phyllis Trible, “Eve and Adam: Genesis 2–3 Reread,” in Womanspirit Rising, ed. Carol P.
Christ and Judith Plaskow (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1979), 80.
supremacy is a distortion of creation constitutes the true meaning of the

biblical text, which thus stands over against patriarchy.
Given that the description of compulsory heterosexuality is part of the
same passage, one could make a similar move, arguing that this aspect of
social life too appears under the sign and judgment of sinfulness. But aside
from the fact that such an approach would ignore Genesis 1, in which male
and female together constitute the image of God, there are deeper prob-
lems with claiming to have found the true meaning of any biblical text.
Just as every text was written in a specific historical, social, and religious
context, so texts are interpreted in particular contexts that give rise to par-
ticular exegetical needs.
The current desire to find an underlying nonsexist or nonheterosexist
vision in Scripture comes out of a political and religious situation in which
various forms of fundamentalism are on the rise all over the globe and
are attempting to tighten control over every area of women’s lives. In the
United States, the Christian Right has claimed the mantle of Christian
authenticity, equating authenticity with control of sexuality and women,
and the same dynamic is taking place within Judaism. As contemporary
Judaism has become increasingly diverse and fragmented, issues of sexual-
ity and women’s roles have become the battleground for arguments about
Jewish legitimacy. In a religious context in which the reactionary side of
an increasingly heated debate claims divine authority for its position, it is
tempting to argue that the essence or fundamental core of the tradition
supports a progressive stance. But this is finally to get into an irresolvable
shouting match in which each party claims God on its side. It also means
that feminists accept in principle the authority of texts that are at many
points antithetical to women’s power and agency, and that can be used
against the feminist cause as easily as for it.
Although the difference may be subtle, I see the claim to have discov-
ered the authentic meaning of a tradition as different from self-consciously
drawing on the dissident voices within it, while grounding oneself in
a community that is actively working to create a Jewish future in which
women are full Jews and full persons. For the purposes of resistance, it can
be strategically useful to point to the contradictions or moments of self-
criticism within normative texts, showing how opposing positions can
be justified on the basis of the same sources. Yet it is not useful to debate
about which position is finally more authentic. From the perspective of the
texts, the question of authenticity has no meaning; the texts encompass
genuine disagreements. The argument over texts is in reality an argument
over competing social visions. Whose version of the future will hold sway?
Who will have the right to determine the distribution of society’s goods
and resources, to say whether a given social or religious system meets basic
human needs? Precisely because this is the real issue in question, however,
it is important to highlight the dissident strands within a sacred text in
order to crack open or challenge dominant religious and social perspec-
tives and thus enlarge the space for change. From this point of view, it is
useful to notice that women’s subordination is conjoined with heterosexu-
ality in the context of punishment for sin, not because this renders invalid
two thousand years of sexist and heterosexist readings, but because it helps
us to imagine an alternative future.
A second way to mobilize resources for resistance and change is to look
at Jewish sources with an eye to the historical possibilities that they simul-
taneously conceal and reveal, so that one can make visible the existence
of “forbidden” sexual practices or transgressive gender relations.23 Thus,
for example, the same rabbinic passages that can be read as denying the
possibility of sexual activity between women can also be seen as acknowl-
edging the existence of such activity, but regarding it as inconsequential.
When the rabbis discussed the question of whether a woman who “rubs”
with another woman is permitted to marry a priest, they may have been
aware of the female homoeroticism amply attested in Roman sources but
seen it as not worth punishing.24 From this perspective, the relative silence
of Jewish tradition regarding both female and male homoerotic behavior
may be construed as a form of permission. To take this view is not to deny
the importance of heterosexuality as an ideology and an institution, but
it is to suggest that behavior that did not threaten heterosexual marriage
may not have been regarded with much seriousness.25 Reading Jewish texts
in light of what we know of cultural attitudes and practices at the time
they were written begins to uncover the complex historical reality masked
by an exclusive focus on official prohibitions. It also broadens the sense of
historical possibilities on which feminists can draw in seeking to transform
the tradition in the present.
23 This theme of concealment and revelation kept coming up in our Good Sex con-
versations, in relation to recovering women’s history and experiences in many traditions.
24 Alpert, Like Bread on the Seder Plate, 29–34; Bernadette Brooten, Love Between
Women: Early Christian Responses to Female Homoeroticism (Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press, 1996).
25 Alpert, Like Bread on the Seder Plate, 33.
Still a third strategy of resistance and transformation that is especially

important in dealing with issues of sexuality involves broadening the con-
text of teachings on sexuality by looking at them through the lens of atti-
tudes toward social justice. Rabbi Lisa Edwards, in a sermon on the Torah
portions that contain Leviticus 18 and 20, argued as follows:
We are your gay and lesbian children: “ ‘You must not seek vengeance, nor
bear a grudge against the children of your people’ (Lev. 19:18); we are your
lesbian mothers and gay fathers: ‘Revere your mother and your father, each of
you’ (19:3) . . . ; we are the stranger: ‘You must not oppress the stranger. You
shall love the stranger as yourself for you were strangers in the land of Egypt’
(19:34).”26
In reading the prohibitions against male/male sex in the context of sur-
rounding injunctions about just social relations, Edwards risks getting
drawn into arguments about which is the more fundamental or essen-
tial dimension of the tradition. But by focusing on broader social justice
themes, she also makes the critical point that any choice of sources in a
debate about the meaning and intent of tradition always involves selecting
from conflicting perspectives. Moreover, she places the biblical passages on
homosexuality in the context of the gay and lesbian community of resis-
tance, focusing on the interconnections between sexual ideologies and
social injustice, rather than on private sexual behavior.
Resistance and Transformation
I began this chapter by raising issues of authority and tradition, and the
authority of tradition in thinking about good sex. To what extent can we
ground ourselves in the positive resources in our traditions in thinking
about good sex? How do I justify the choices that I make as I lift up cer-
tain strands within Jewish tradition and repudiate others? I have argued
that the authority for singling out the self-critical and dissident elements in
our textual traditions comes not from the traditions themselves, but rather
from the new possibilities envisioned and created by the particular com-
munities of solidarity and resistance in which we participate. As I reflect
on the Good Sex group itself as one such community, I am struck by the
extent to which our initial work together provides us with methodologi-
cal clues for approaching our common project. Brought together to think
26 Lisa A. Edwards, “A Simple Matter of Justice” (sermon, April 29, 1993).

constructively about good sex from our perspectives as women, we found

ourselves focusing again and again on the ideologies and institutions that
stand in the way of good sex in our different cultures. We began, in other
words, from a stance of resistance, realizing that the first task in creating
a space for good sex is addressing the many injustices that make good sex
unimaginable for many of the women in the world. We also, however, spoke
of resources in our own experiences, in our cultures, and, occasionally, in
our religious traditions that provide us with glimpses of a sexuality and sen-
suality that we would like to make more possible, both in our own lives and
the lives of others. We repeatedly return to these glimpses to authorize our-
selves as we seek to find our way between what is most women’s sexual real-
ity, and what we want it to be. Struggling with this gulf, both in our social
institutions and our religious traditions, we look for energy and insight not
only, and not primarily, in the positive strands of our religious traditions,
but in our communities of resistance and transformation.
anti-judaisim in feminist christian interpretation
Judith Plaskow
In 1885, Elizabeth cady stanton presented a series of resolutions to

the Annual Convention of the National Woman Suffrage Association criti-
cizing Christian theology for its teachings about women. Finding her word-
ing too strong and pointed, the convention leadership substituted different
language—language that, as Stanton put it, “hand[ed] over to the Jews
what [she] had laid at the door of the Christians”:
WHEREAS, The dogmas incorporated in religious creeds derived from
Judaism . . . are contrary to the law of God (as revealed in nature), and to the
precepts of Christ. . . .
Resolved, That we call on the Christian ministry . . . to teach and enforce
the fundamental idea of creation, that man was made in the image of God
male and female. . . . And, furthermore, we ask their recognition of the scrip-
tural declaration that, in the Christian religion, there is neither male nor
female. . . .1
While it was the intent of the convention committee to make Stanton’s
resolutions less controversial so that they would pass without dissent,
some of the Jewish women at the meeting vigorously repudiated the criti-
cisms of their tradition, precipitating the debate the committee had hoped
to avoid.2
Whether or not this was the first time Christian feminists “hand[ed]
over to the Jews” faults that could equally well be attributed to Christianity,
the incident indicates that feminist anti-Judaism has a long history. The
impulse to vindicate Christianity by laying its patriarchal elements at the
feet of Judaism seems to have emerged along with Christian feminist inter-
pretation and to have been given new currency and direction with the sec-
ond wave of feminism. The hundredth anniversary of The Woman’s Bible
provides an excellent opportunity to examine the continuing failure of
feminist thought to deal with the enduring legacy of Christian anti-Judaism.
* “Anti-Judaism in Feminist Christian Interpretations,” in Searching the Scriptures, vol. 1,

ed. Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza (New York, Crossroad, 1993), 117–30.
1 Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Eighty Years and More: Reminiscences 1815–1897 (1898; reprint,
New York: Schocken Books, 1971), 381 (emphasis mine).
2 Ibid., 280–82.
84 ANTI-JUDAISM IN FEMINIST CHRISTIAN INTERPRETATION
Feminism and Christian Anti-Judaism
Anti-Judaism in feminist interpretation signifies both a failure of feminism

to include all women within its vision and an often unconscious appro-
priation of anti-Jewish themes and strategies that are as old as the New
Testament itself. In Beyond God the Father, Mary Daly characterized the
patriarchal ethic as the “failure to lay claim to that part of the psyche that is
then projected onto ‘the Other.’ ”3 Defining women’s oppression as the old-
est and most fundamental form of oppression, Daly assumed that the lib-
eration of women from male projections would lead to the disappearance
of all other forms of domination. Recent studies of racism and nativism in
the woman suffrage movement and recent critiques of feminist theory by
racial/ethnic feminists make clear, however, that a single-issue focus on sex-
ism and women’s experience does not automatically encompass or address
other forms of dominance.4 On the contrary, in the absence of an explicit
commitment to ending the multiple, interstructured forms of oppression
that shape women’s lives, feminist theory and institutions continue to sup-
port dominant racial, religious, class, and sexual perspectives.
Feminists are certainly not the first Christians to make use of anti-Jewish
arguments in order to forward a particular agenda. Rather, feminist inter-
pretation adds a new complication to a mode of projective discourse thor-
oughly embedded in Christian thought. The ancient, deeply rooted, and
tenacious character of anti-Jewish themes in Christian writing has been
extensively documented.5 In fact, these themes enter into feminist thought
largely through the mediation of popular works in Protestant biblical inter-
pretation, works that communicate the inferiority of Judaism through vari-
ous subtle and not-so-subtle strategies.6
Anti-Jewish motifs in Christian discourse can be schematized and
understood in a variety of ways. Katharina von Kellenbach, in her disserta-
tion “Anti-Judaism in Christian-Rooted Feminist Writings,” offers a typology
3 Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973), 10.
4 Two examples from a much larger literature are: Barbara Hilkert Andolsen, “Daugh
ters of Jefferson, Daughters of Blackboots”: Racism and American Feminism (Macon, GA:
Mercer University Press, 1986); and bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center
(Boston: South End Press, 1984).
5 For one important example, see Rosemary Radford Ruether’s Faith and Fratricide:
The Theological Roots of Anti-Semitism (New York: Seabury, 1974).
6 Charlotte Klein, Anti-Judaism in Christian Theology, trans. Edward Quinn (Philadel-
phia: Fortress, 1975).
ANTI-JUDAISM IN FEMINIST CHRISTIAN INTERPRETATION 85
that is especially useful for analyzing anti-Judaism in feminist interpreta-

tion. Von Kellenbach suggests that “three rules of formation of the anti-
Jewish myth define the Christian representation of Judaism.”7 (1) The rule of
formation as antithesis sets up a set of dualistic oppositions and identifies
Judaism with the negative side, Christianity with the positive side of each
dualism. Oppositions such as letter versus spirit, works versus faith, and
particularism versus universalism are deeply ingrained in Christian lan-
guage and remain fundamental to Christian writing and preaching about
Judaism, including New Testament scholarship. (2) The rule of formation as
scapegoat builds on these antitheses to blame Jews for the evil in the world.
The idea that the Jews are responsible for a long trail of crimes culminat-
ing in the death of Jesus has its roots in the Gospels and remains central to
many contemporary accounts of Jesus’ trial and crucifixion. (3) The rule
of formation as prologue identifies Judaism with the religion of the “Old
Testament” and thus with Christian prehistory. Insofar as Judaism contin-
ues to exist, it is only an empty relic, because God’s promises to Israel have
been transferred to the church as the new elect. Scholarly use of the phrase
“late Judaism” to refer to Judaism in the first century is a good example of
the persistence of this theme.8
Von Kellenbach points out that while these rules of formation have def-
inite theological content in traditional Christian discourse, they are also
remarkably flexible, adapting themselves to the “specific needs of particu-
lar countries, classes, and ideologies.” In the last two centuries, for example,
both right- and left-wing political movements have made use of anti-
Jewish myths in order to gain adherents.9 It is thus possible for Christian
feminists to use the same classical anti-Jewish framework to set up a new
antithesis: Judaism equals sexism, while Christianity equals feminism.
Moreover, while discussion of post-Christian feminism is beyond the scope
of this chapter, post-Christian feminists also have drawn on this tradition
to replace the traditional charge of deicide with the new charge that Jews
killed the Goddess.10

7 Katharina von Kellenbach, “Anti-Judaism in Christian-Rooted Feminist Writing: An
Analysis of Major U.S. American and West German Feminist Theologians” (Dissertation,
Temple University Graduate School, 1990), 57.

8 Ibid., chap. 2; Klein, Anti-Judaism, chaps. 5 and 2.

9 Von Kellenbach, “Anti-Judaism,” 58.
10 Ibid., chap. 4; Annette Daum, “Blaming Jews for the Death of the Goddess,” Lilith 7
(1980) 12–13; and Susannah Heschel, “Anti-Judaism in Christian Feminist Theology,” Tikkun
5:3 (May/June 1990): 26–27.
Jesus as Feminist and Judaism as Antithesis
While each “rule of formation” discussed by von Kellenbach finds its way
into Christian discourse,11 the rule of antithesis is most characteristic
of feminist New Testament interpretation. Indeed, feminist interpreters
who want to prove the feminist credentials of Jesus or Paul or the nonsex-
ist nature of the Christian vision are dependent on the rule of antithesis
for the cogency of their position. The claim that “Jesus was a feminist”—
a claim first articulated by Leonard Swidler and then taken up by numer-
ous feminist interpreters—can be argued persuasively only on the basis
of a negative view of Judaism.12 This is so because, while no sexist saying
is attributed to Jesus, while women were present among his disciples, and
while he appeals to women’s experience in some of his parables, the New
Testament provides no evidence that Jesus was a champion of women’s
rights in the contemporary sense. He is never portrayed as arguing for
women’s prerogatives, demanding changes in particular restrictive laws
that affect women, or debating the Pharisees on the subject of gender.13 The
argument that Jesus was a feminist, then—rather than simply a Jewish man
who treated women like people—rests on “the rule of antithesis,” on con-
trasting his behavior with his supposed Jewish background. Indeed, Swidler
says quite clearly, “there are two factors which raise this negative result [i.e.,
the fact that Jesus does not treat women as “inferior beings”] exponentially
in its significance: the status of women in Palestine at the time of Jesus, and
the nature of the Gospels.”14
In order to depict Jesus as a man who stood over against his Jewish
upbringing and environment, Christian interpreters select from Jewish
sources the most negative and restrictive statements about women and
present these as the reality of Jewish women’s lives in the first century.
As one feminist scholar puts it, “At the historical moment when Jesus was
born into the world, the status of Jewish women had never been lower.”15
The composite portrait of Jesus’ religious background that emerges from a
number of feminist texts includes the following elements: Jewish women
were exempt from fixed prayer and “grossly restricted” in public prayer.
11 Von Kellenbach’s thesis thoroughly documents the use of each of these rules in femi-
nist scholarship.
12 Leonard Swidler, “Jesus Was a Feminist,” Catholic World 212 (January 1971): 177–83.
13 Von Kellenbach, “Anti-Judaism,” 85, 88.
14 Swidler, “Jesus Was a Feminist,” 177–78 (emphasis mine).
15 Virginia Ramey Mollenkott, Women, Men and the Bible (Nashville: Abingdon, 1977), 10.
They were not allowed to study scripture. Men were forbidden to converse
with women in public. Polygamy was legal in the time of Jesus, although
probably not widely practiced. Men could divorce their wives easily by giv-
ing them a writ of divorce, but women were not allowed to divorce their
husbands. Women were limited to the private sphere, where they were
under the domination of fathers or husbands. Women were unclean dur-
ing menstruation and after childbirth. Women were viewed by the rabbis
as light-minded, dirty, greedy, and gossipy, and girl children were seen as a
bane to their parents.16
This portrait of Jewish women’s situation is then contrasted with Jesus’
attitudes toward women in such a way as to make his statements and ges-
tures appear deliberately rebellious. While Jewish men did not normally
speak even to their wives in public, Jesus spoke to a Samaritan woman
stranger. While men avoided contact with women who were ritually
unclean, Jesus healed the woman with a twelve-year flow of blood. While
women were not permitted to study Torah, Jesus praised Mary over Martha
for choosing “the good portion.” While adulterous women were supposed
to be stoned, Jesus refused to stone the woman brought before him without
her male partner. And so on.
The issue of divorce provides a particularly nice illustration of this
method of antithesis, for, using this method, feminist interpreters are able
to take a problematic ruling and depict it as largely positive. On the sur-
face, Jesus’ prohibition of divorce would seem at best ambiguous for femi-
nists. In a social context in which patriarchal marriage is the expectation
and norm, it is hardly in women’s undivided interest to have no possibility
of exit from it. Yet when Jesus’ teaching on divorce is set over against the
supposed Jewish position, it suddenly appears as liberating for women.17
This argument from opposition is implicit already in The Woman’s Bible
and is more fully developed by a number of contemporary writers.18 Thus
16 Swidler, “Jesus Was a Feminist,” 178–79 (quotation from p. 178); Mollenkott, Women,
10–12; Constance Parvey, “The Theology and Leadership of Women in the New Testa-
ment,” in Religion and Sexism: Images of Women in the Jewish and Christian Traditions, ed.
Rosemary Radford Ruether (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1974), 120; Elisabeth Moltmann-
Wendel, Liberty, Equality, Sisterhood (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1977), 12–21. These sources are
examples, not an exhaustive list.
17 Bernadette Brooten discusses this issue in “Early Christian Women and Their Cul-
tural Context: Issues of Method in Historical Reconstruction,” in Feminist Perspectives on
Biblical-Scholarship, ed. Adela Yarbro Collins (SBL Centennial Publications 10; Chico, CA:
Scholars Press, 1985), 73–74.
18 See Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the Revising Committee, The Woman’s Bible, 2 vols.
in one (Seattle: Coalition Task Force on Women and Religion, 1974), 2:130.
Rosemary Ruether, after warning that Jesus’ iconoclasm toward women’s

subordination should not be used as the basis of a new anti-Judaism, con-
tinues as follows:
Even Jesus’ pronouncements on divorce should be seen in the context of a
society where a woman, who had no means of support, could be cast out by
her husband on the slightest pretext. The stricter attitude toward divorce in
Jesus’ time had the purpose of providing women with greater respect and
security in marriage. . . .19
Evelyn and Frank Stagg, discussing Jesus’ equation of remarriage with adul-
tery, comment, “Whatever the harshness here, at least there is no double
standard for husbands and wives.”20 Leonard Swidler paints the opposition
between Jesus and Jewish practice in sharp terms:
[Jesus’ position on marriage] presupposed a feminist view of women; they
had rights and responsibilities equal to men’s. . . . It was quite possible in
Jewish law for men to have more than one wife. . . . Divorce, of course, also
was a simple matter, to be initiated only by the man. In both situations,
women were basically chattel. . . . Jesus rejected both customs by insisting on
monogamy and the elimination of divorce.21
There are a number of problems with this overall approach to Judaism in
the time of Jesus, and with the example of divorce in particular. First of all,
the approach assumes that rabbinic literature is the product of the time of
Jesus, when in fact the rabbis came to power only after the destruction of
the Temple (in 70 c.e.), and the Mishnah and Talmud were redacted centu-
ries after Jesus’ death (200 and 500 c.e. respectively). Second, this approach
selects from rabbinic materials precisely those customs and sayings that
tend to support the uniqueness of Jesus, neglecting both positive sayings
and legal rulings that seek to protect women’s rights. Thus in presenting
the position of women in Jewish marriage, Christian feminists never dis-
cuss the commandment of onah—a law that protects the sexual rights of
women in marriage by defining the marital dues a husband owes his wife. In
discussing divorce, they assume rabbinic attitudes as normative but do not
19 Rosemary Radford Ruether, New Woman, New Earth: Sexist Ideologies and Human Lib-
eration (New York: Seabury, 1975), 64–65.
20 Evelyn and Frank Stagg, Woman in the World of Jesus (Philadelphia: Westminster,
1978), 135.
21 Leonard Swidler, Biblical Affirmations of Woman (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1979), 174
(emphasis in the original).
mention the ketubah, or marriage contract, an important rabbinic innova-

tion that had as its purpose the protection of women against hasty divorce.22
Third, the statements and gestures of an itinerant preacher are compared
to a prescriptive literature formulated in the rarefied atmosphere of rab-
binic academies. It is simply assumed that this literature corresponds
to the total reality of Jewish women’s lives, when, as I will discuss more
fully below, there is significant evidence that it does not. Fourth, part of
the evidence for Jewish women’s complex status and roles comes from the
New Testament itself. For the purposes of the “rule of antithesis,” however,
Jesus’ attitudes toward women are seen as evidence of his distance from
his “Jewish background” rather than as evidence of Jewish attitudes and
practices.
At the same time that Jesus’ positive attitudes toward women are
depicted as un-Jewish, Paul’s negative attitudes toward women are defined
as the product of his Judaism. Katharina von Kellenbach points out that
in Paul’s case, the rule of antithesis is developed as a division within
the apostle, so that Paul’s feminist/Christian side is presented as at war
with his sexist/Jewish upbringing.23 This strategy is already found in The
Woman’s Bible, which dismisses Paul’s injunction that women should cover
their heads when they pray (1 Cor 11:10), commenting that it lacks author-
ity because it is based on an absurd Hebrew legend. According to Louisa
Southworth of the revising committee, “Paul merely repeats this warning
[that women should cover their heads], which he must often have heard at
the feet of Gamaliel.”24 In other words, because it is the Jewish Paul and not
the Christian Paul who speaks in this passage, Christian women can simply
ignore it.
In the contemporary discussion, the dichotomy between a Jewish and
a Christian Paul is developed more fully and used to elucidate the many
contradictions that plague Paul’s work. Robin Scroggs, in his “Paul and the
Eschatological Woman,” describes the social context of Pauline thought
about women in terms of a spectrum of Jewish attitudes. Palestinian
Judaism constituted one end of the spectrum, he suggests, with women
being accorded few privileges outside the family. While Jewish women’s
situation was more varied in the diaspora, Scroggs feels Paul’s views are
22 For a Jewish feminist discussion of onah and ketubah, see Rachel Biale, Women and
Jewish Law: An Exploration of Women’s issues in Halakhic Sources (New York: Schocken
Books, 1984), chapters 3 and 5.
23 Von Kellenbach, “Anti-Judaism,” 89–92.
24 The Woman’s Bible, 2:158–59.
probably closer to those of Philo, Josephus, and Palestinian Judaism than to

those of freer communities like Elephantine.
The remarkable contrast between Paul’s mature Christian views towards
women and his probable early ideals says something important about the
continuing tension in which he must have lived and worked, as well as about
the transforming power on his own life of the gospel he preached.25
Paul Jewett develops the tension between the two Pauls into an opposition
that can scarcely be contained in one person:
To understand [Paul’s] thought about the relation of the woman to the man,
one must appreciate that he was both a Jew and a Christian. . . . So far as he
thought in terms of his Jewish background, he thought of the woman as sub-
ordinate to the man. . . . But so far as he thought in terms of the new insight he
had gained through the revelation of God in Christ, he thought of the woman
as equal to the man in all things. . . .
Because these two perspectives—the Jewish and the Christian—are
incompatible, there is no satisfying way to harmonize the Pauline argument
for female subordination with the larger Christian vision of which the great
apostle to the Gentile was himself the primary architect.26
To criticize this perspective is not to deny the apparent contradictions in
Paul’s attitudes toward women, contradictions that need to be explained.
But the division between a Jewish and a Christian Paul purifies Christianity
from the charge of sexism by coding all arguments for women’s subordi-
nation as “Jewish” and then dismissing them as no longer authoritative.
As The Woman’s Bible puts it a bit naïvely, “We congratulate ourselves that
we may shift some of these Biblical arguments that have such a sinister
effect from their firm foundation.”27 This position elevates Christianity at
Judaism’s expense in two ways: it makes it difficult to see the “good, i.e. non-
sexist Paul” as learning anything from Judaism—even though, as Virginia
Mollenkott points out, Paul’s famous parenthetical remark in 1 Corinthians
11 (v. 11) exactly parallels a passage from Genesis Rabbah.28 And it makes
it unnecessary to look at those aspects of the Christian tradition that are
compatible with or foster sexism.
25 Robin Scroggs, “Paul and the Eschatological Woman,” Journal of the American Acad-
emy of Religion 40 (1972): 290. See also Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (New York: Ran-
dom House, 1979), 61–63.
26 Paul Jewett, Man as Male and Female: A Study in Sexual Relationships from a Theologi-
cal Point of View (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1975), 112–13; cf. von Kellenbach, “Anti-Judaism,”
89–90.
27 The Woman’s Bible, 2:158.
28 Mollenkott, Women, 98; The Woman’s Bible, 2:158.
The creation of a division between a Jewish and a Christian Paul brings

the theological agenda of much feminist anti-Judaism clearly into view. It
is not the direct intention of feminist interpreters to prove the superior-
ity of Christianity to Judaism. Indeed, while some Jewish feminists have
objected to the use of the locution “anti-Judaism” as simply a polite version
of anti-Semitism,29 one value of the distinction between the two terms is
that it allows for the fact that feminists who are not social or racial anti-
Semites still make use of anti-Jewish literary and theological motifs. Where
this happens, the negative depiction of Judaism is not the result of deliber-
ate hostility but of a political liberalism yoked to a theological conservatism
that sees the New Testament as a source of role models for contemporary
Christian behavior. If Jesus and/or Paul was a feminist, then surely the
church must repent of its sexism and bring its policies and structures into
line with their example. This mode of interpretation assumes, in Krister
Stendahl’s phrase, that contemporary Christians are called on to “play ‘First
Century Bible-Land’” and to do as Jesus and Paul did, however their teach-
ings are understood.30 Since, in fact, however, Paul was deeply ambivalent
about women’s status, and Jesus acted respectfully toward women with-
out ever explicitly defending their cause, the two men can be turned into
unambiguous feminist role models only if first-century Judaism is depicted
as unrelievedly misogynist. Deeply embedded patterns of Christian anti-
Judaism are thus uncritically appropriated to aid the feminist program.
There are other ways too in which the “Jesus was a feminist” argument
adopts conservative theological or interpretive principles for a liberal social
purpose. Though this argument does not depend on explicit claims about
Jesus’ unique ontological status, such claims are often quietly presupposed
in order to give feminism religious legitimacy. Thus after six pages of his-
torical argumentation for Jesus’ feminism, Leonard Swidler concludes his
original article with the words, “Jesus was a feminist, and a very radical one.
Can his followers attempt to be anything less—De Imitatione Christi?”31 In
another vein, Christians who contrast Jesus with his Jewish background to
bolster his feminist credentials simultaneously acknowledge and negate
the fact that Jesus was a Jew. He was sufficiently Jewish that his supposed
difference from other Jews is significant and noteworthy, yet he was not
a Jew if that means his behavior should count as evidence for the nature
29 For example, Asphodel Long, “Anti-Judaism in Britain,” Journal of Feminist Studies in

Religion 7 (1991): 126.
30 Krister Stendahl, The Bible and the Role of Women (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1966), 40.
31 Swidler, “Jesus Was a Feminist,” 183.
of first-century Judaism. Clearly the dilemma for feminist interpreters is

that acknowledging the Jesus movement as a movement within Judaism
would undercut claims about Jesus’ Christian uniqueness. If he was simply
a Jew, his attitudes toward women would represent not a victory over early
Judaism but a possibility within it.
Toward a More Critical Feminist Hermeneutic
Anti-Jewish themes in Christian writing are deep-rooted and tenacious, but

there are ways in which feminists can address, rather than reproduce, this
sorry aspect of Christian self-understanding. With prodding from women of
color, feminists are beginning to grapple with the idea that racism and clas-
sism are dimensions of texts and social structures that must be confronted
if feminism is to become a movement committed to the liberation of all
women. Given the continuing presence of anti-Semitism as a structural
element in Christian culture, this insight must also be extended to anti-
Judaism in a thoroughgoing way.
1. The first step in eradicating anti-Judaism is becoming aware of its
existence, and this means becoming educated about the dimensions of the
problem. Fortunately, there are a number of good general histories of anti-
Semitism, and also narrower studies of anti-Judaism in Christian history,
thought, and practice. The critical discussion of anti-Judaism taking place
in the feminist community has antecedents in many Christian scholarly
works. The bibliography at the end of this chapter recommends a number
of relevant sources, each of which contains other bibliographic suggestions.
2. Once Christian feminists recognize anti-Jewish patterns, it is essen-
tial that they begin systematically to problematize anti-Judaism in the
Christian tradition as part of a feminist analysis of Christian texts. Again,
just as womanist scholars have taught white feminists that looking at rac-
ism and race relationships between women is a feminist task, so feminists
must analyze “women’s relational history” in terms of anti-Judaism and
religious difference.32 This means that it is not enough for feminist inter-
preters to avoid allying themselves with the anti-Judaism in Christian
sources or even to raise in general terms the problem of anti-Judaism in
32 The term “women’s relational history” is Delores Williams’s (“Women’s Oppression

and Lifeline Politics in Black Women’s Religious Narratives,” Journal of Feminist Studies in
Religion 1 [Fall 1985]: 69; see also Clarice Martin, Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 6
[1990]: 41–43).
feminist interpretation. Rather, it is necessary to signal the existence of

anti-Judaism in Christian texts wherever it appears so that the problem of
traditional Christian anti-Judaism becomes a dimension of feminist con-
sciousness, and feminists begin to examine the dynamics of the relation-
ship between sexism and anti-Judaism in Christian sources.
Explicit discussion of anti-Judaism is a task for feminist writers, but
it is also important in the context of the classroom. Feminist teachers of
New Testament can raise questions about the anti-Jewish story line of the
Gospels, just as they would raise questions about the roles and status of
women in those texts. They can help students to reflect on the anti-Jewish
“rules of formation” present in Christian historical materials, and their con-
tinuing impact on Christian self-understanding. Sometimes with a class
that is resistant to feminist issues, it is tempting to gain student attention
by claiming that “Jesus was a feminist” or was especially open to women.
Teachers’ attempts to avoid negative comparisons with Judaism in this
context, however, cannot prevent students from appropriating such mate-
rial in the framework of an anti-Jewish heritage. That is why, in discussing
women in the early Christian movement or Jesus’ attitudes toward women,
it is essential to raise the problem of anti-Judaism explicitly and to examine
its strategies and effects.
3. Addressing the anti-Judaism in Christian sources, because it is
consciousness-raising for all parties, is probably the most important next
step Christian feminists can take in dealing with the problem of feminist
anti-Jewish interpretation. But sensitivity to anti-Judaism cannot of itself
effect a transformation of anti-Jewish attitudes. The long history of anti-
Judaism will finally be transcended only on the basis of an appreciation of
Judaism as an autonomous, changing, and diverse tradition. In the specific
context of feminist New Testament interpretation, this means it is impos-
sible fully to discuss or evaluate the Jesus movement in relation to women
without knowledge of feminist approaches to first-century Judaism.
Feminist exploration of Jewish women’s history is a very new field.
Just as feminist scholars have moved from addressing the sexism in Chris
tian sources to recovering the complex reality of women’s lives within
Christian history, so they have begun to reconstruct the history of women
within Judaism. While it is impossible to discuss here all the methodological
issues the new feminist scholarship raises for Christian interpretation, prob-
ably its most important finding is that rabbinic literature is not an accurate
reflection of the diversity of women’s roles within first-century Judaism. To
cite just two examples: the “Jesus-was-a-feminist” argument maintains that
women played no role in the ancient synagogue, contrasting this exclusion
with women’s discipleship in the Jesus movement. But inscriptions from

diaspora synagogues referring to women as elders, leaders, and synagogue
presidents suggest that women could have played liturgical or administra-
tive roles in the synagogues of Jesus’ time. This inscriptional evidence is
particularly significant when combined with the absence of any ancient
literary or archaeological evidence for special women’s sections or galleries
in the synagogues of this period.33 Second, the assumption that only men
could initiate divorce in Judaism is challenged by a number of documents
from the first centuries c.e. that depict individual women as divorcing
their husbands or reserving the right of divorce in their marriage contracts.
These documents suggest that there were two strands of thought and prac-
tice concerning divorce in ancient Judaism. One—which became norma-
tive Jewish practice—accorded only men the right of divorce, but the other
also allowed women to initiate divorce.34
4. Two pieces of evidence for this second strand of Jewish practice are
Mark 10:11–12 and 1 Cor 7:10–11. This fact points to another important strat-
egy in overcoming anti-Judaism in feminist New Testament interpretation:
reading the New Testament not as the antithesis or refutation of “Judaism,”
but as an important source for Jewish women’s history.35 If the Gospels are
seen as reflecting part of the continuum of first-century Jewish practice
with regard to women, they tell a very different story about Jewish women’s
lives than if they are read oppositionally. The absence of any overt chal-
lenge to Jesus’ treatment of or teachings about women suggests that his
relation to women and gender norms might not have been so different from
the relations of his contemporaries. Perhaps Jewish women sometimes
divorced their husbands, moved freely in the streets and conversed with
strangers, were visible in the synagogue and temple, and paid visits and
received visitors.36 Such a reconstruction may not provide a simple war-
rant for contemporary Christians to become feminists, but it both avoids
perpetuating Christian anti-Judaism and yields a more nuanced and inter-
esting picture of women’s religious lives in the ancient world.
33 Bernadette Brooten, Women Leaders in the Ancient Synagogue: Inscriptional Evidence

and Background Issues (Brown Judaic Studies 36; Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1982); Brooten,
“Early Christian Women,” 89.
34 Bernadette Brooten, “Could Women Initiate Divorce in Ancient Judaism? The impli-
cations for Mark 10:11–12 and I Corinthians 7:10–11” (The Ernest Cadwell Coleman Lecture,
School of Theology at Claremont, April 14, 1981); and Brooten, “Early Christian Women,” 73.
35 Brooten, “Could Women Initiate Divorce in Ancient Judaism?” esp. 9–12.
36 Von Kellenbach, “Anti-Judaism,” 87–89.
5. Finally, it is important to mention an institutional dimension to the

persistence of anti-Judaism in Christian feminist interpretation. While
feminists often celebrate the ways in which women’s criticism and recon-
struction of religion have opened up new areas of interreligious dialogue,
the reality is that much Christian feminist work takes place in isolation
from the Jewish feminist agenda. Christian institutes, workshops, panel dis-
cussions, and other projects deal with key feminist issues, either without
including Jewish feminists working on the same questions or inviting Jewish
participation on Christian terms. Whatever the rationale for this institu-
tional isolation, it would seem to reflect and perpetuate a lack of awareness
of the Jewish “Other” that necessarily makes it more difficult to recognize
and grapple with anti-Judaism in a scholarly context. Appreciation of
Judaism as an independent tradition must include an openness to Jewish
feminist concerns—concerns that in their similarities and differences from
Christian feminism challenge Christian feminists to develop a more critical
perspective on a hegemonic tradition.
Recommended Readings
Brooten, Bernadette J. “Early Christian Women and Their Cultural Context: Issues of
Method in Historical Reconstruction.” In Feminist Perspectives on Biblical Scholarship,
edited by Adela Yarbro Collins, 65–69. SBL Centennial Publications 10. Chico, CA: Schol-
ars Press, 1985.
——. “Jewish Women’s History in the Roman Period: A Task for Christian Theology.” In
Christians Among Jews and Gentiles: Essays in Honor of Krister Stendahl on His Sixty-
Fifth Birthday, edited by George W.E. Nickelsburg with George W. MacRae, S.J., 22–30.
Philadelphia: Fortress, 1986.
Heschel, Susannah. “Anti-Judaism in Christian Feminist Theology.” Tikkun 5/3 (May/June
1990): 25ff.
Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 7/2 (Fall 1991). “Special Section on Christian Feminist
Anti-Judaism,” 95–133.
Klein, Charlotte. Anti-Judaism in Christian Theology. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1975.
Plaskow, Judith. “Christian Feminism and Anti-Judaism.” Cross-Currents 33 (Fall 1978):
306–9.
Ruether, Rosemary Radford. Faith and Fratricide: The Theological Roots of Anti-Semitism.
New York: Seabury, 1974.
von Kellenbach, Katharina. “Anti-Judaism in Christian-Rooted Feminist Writing: An Analy-
sis of Major U.S. American and West German Feminist Theologians.” Dissertation, Tem-
ple University Graduate School, 1990.
Interview with Judith plaskow
June 24, 2012
Judith, you are probably the most important Jewish feminist today.
Thank you.
You introduced gender as the category through which we should

understand Judaism, insisting that we interpret the Jewish tradition
through that particular lens. Before we explore what it means to be a
Jewish feminist, please tell us about your intellectual trajectory. How did
you come to the realization that Judaism needs to be reconceptualized
from the particular perspective of gender?
I became a feminist in the fall of 1969 when I was a graduate student at

Yale. That was the year that Yale admitted women to the undergraduate
college and prepared for women’s education by installing full-length mir-
rors in the bathrooms and hiring a gynecologist in the health center. Three
graduate women in the social sciences responded by calling a meeting to
discuss how it was that there had been women graduate students at Yale
for eighty years and no one had noticed. I was a graduate student in reli-
gious studies at the time and did not consider myself a feminist, but I went
to the meeting because I was interested and curious. We started meeting
weekly for both consciousness raising and activism, and over the course
of that year I became a feminist. One of the other women involved in the
group was Carol P. Christ, with whom I would collaborate throughout my
academic career. We started asking questions about our studies. Why was it
that we had never read a single book or article written by a woman? Until
we became feminists, we hadn’t noticed that lacuna.
My feminist awareness also had a profound impact on my Jewish life.
In the summer of 1969, I married Robert Goldenberg, who was a gradu-
ate of the Jewish Theological Seminary and a Conservative rabbi (though
also an academic). I grew up a Reform Jew, but I began to take on more
serious Jewish practice when I married. So I became a feminist at exactly
98 interview with judith plaskow
the moment that I was sitting in the back of the Orthodox men’s minyan
in Yale Chapel. One Shabbat morning, my husband and I were standing
outside chatting with a friend and one of the undergraduates came out
and asked him to come in to make the minyan. That was a very important
“click” moment for me. I realized that, although I had been attending ser-
vices for a year and a half, and my husband had just started, because I was a
woman, I was completely irrelevant to the purpose for which we were gath-
ered. I said to myself: “Never again! I’m never walking into a congregation
that doesn’t count women.” That was the point at which I started to raise
questions about Judaism, examining it from a feminist perspective.
What was the importance of the fact that you became a feminist at
Yale Divinity School? How did the Divinity School and Yale University
in general affect your approach to gender issues?
I’ve often asked myself that question. On the one hand, I regret having gone
to Yale because it was an awful experience. It was a deeply, deeply sexist
institution. On the other hand, part of me wonders whether I would have
become a feminist when I did had I not been at Yale. The number of women
in the program was very small (10 percent at our peak), and we were sub-
jected to constant surveillance: were we going to make it academically?
That question was on everyone’s minds, and we had the feeling that we
were being watched in a different way from the male students. Here’s an
anecdote that illustrates our status. In one of my courses, we were read-
ing Schubert Ogden’s The Reality of God. It was my first exposure to liberal
theology, and I was both upset by the book and intrigued by it and really
struggled with its arguments. In the course of the discussion, a male stu-
dent patted me on the head and said, “Don’t worry your little head about
it.” That was the kind of constant paternalism that we were subjected to.
And when Carol and I became feminists, it became even worse, because
we were more aware of the condescending treatment and the men became
more uncomfortable with our criticism. For example, every time we came
to a door, the men would ask: should we open the door for them? Are they
going to be angry at us? As you recall, the custom was for men to open the
door for women, but feminism had challenged that social convention in
the name of equality. So I think that being at Yale, an old bastion of (male)
privilege, actually made me a stauncher feminist. Being a graduate student
in religious studies meant that I was bringing my feminist questions to the
field of religious studies and eventually to Judaism.
interview with judith plaskow 99
Who were some of the thinkers (theologians and/or philosophers) that

got you on the path?
Kate Millet was the feminist thinker who had the first and most profound
influence on me. I found her book Sexual Politics (1969) completely lib-
erating and mind-blowing. Two early feminist anthologies exerted deep
influence on me: Women in Sexist Society: Studies in Power and Powerless
ness (1970) edited by Vivian Gornick and Sisterhood is Powerful by Robin
Morgan (1970). The pioneering work of Mary Daly and Rosemary Radford
Ruether, the towering feminist thinkers in the field of religion, also shaped
my understanding of the sexism of religion. Carol Christ brought Rosemary
Ruether to Yale and arranged for her to speak to the graduate students. That
was a very exciting event. She delivered her paper, “Mother Earth and the
Mega-Machine,” which laid out a lot of the central themes of her thought
which had enormous impact on religion in America. So these early feminist
thinkers were important influences in the field of religious studies and in
my own emergence as a feminist.
Besides the feminist thinkers were there other theologians who inspired
you? Were there other theologians or interpreters of religious thought
whom you considered as role models?
Yes. At Yale I was studying Protestant theology. Let me explain. When I

decided that I wanted to be a theologian, there was no place in the country
to study Jewish theology at that time.
Can you say more about that? Why could you not become a Jewish
theologian elsewhere?
It was 1968 and all the major graduate programs in religious studies came
out of and were associated with Protestant divinity schools. At that time
there just wasn’t anyone teaching Jewish theology at a university level. I
was admitted to Yale and Judah Goldin was the one person teaching Jewish
studies there. I asked permission to enroll in his seminar and told him
that I wanted to be a theologian. In response he said, “There are no Jewish
theologians.”
What about Jewish rabbinic seminaries such as the Jewish Theological

Seminary and the Hebrew Union College? Could you have studied
theology in these non-Orthodox rabbinic seminaries?
No, not really. Even those institutions did not teach theology.
In 1969 the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Seminary also opened and it

admitted women. So why not enroll there if you wanted to become a
non-Orthodox Jewish theologian?
These three institutions existed, but nobody was teaching systematic the-
ology, because it was not considered a Jewish way of thinking. The Jewish
Theological Seminary hired Neal Gillman who started writing and teaching
Jewish theology, but that was many years after I finished my graduate train-
ing. And at Hebrew Union College, Eugene Borowitz did teach theology,
but he himself received his training in the Columbia/Union Seminary pro-
gram. The same can be said of Richard Rubenstein who got his Ph.D. from
Harvard before he articulated post-Holocaust Jewish theology. That was the
avenue for Jews who were interested in theology.
So what were the non-Orthodox rabbinic seminaries doing if they did

not teach theology? Were they simply focusing on exegetical work?
Yes, absolutely! Seminaries were engaged in the study of Bible and Midrash
but not systematic or constructive theology.
In the late 1960s the liberal Jewish seminaries were not really teaching
Jewish philosophy either. So, when you entered graduate school nobody
was doing either Jewish philosophy or Jewish theology?
I can’t answer that question. The status of Jewish philosophy was more
complicated. Had I wanted to specialize in Jewish philosophy I probably
could have found someone teaching pre-modern Jewish philosophy some-
where, but I wasn’t looking in philosophy departments. As far as I know,
there were no professors of Jewish philosophy who taught in philosophy
departments and to the extent that they existed, I was not interested in
what they had to offer. So, I’m not sure.
What about the likes of Harry Wolfson at Harvard or Alexander Altmann

at Brandeis University?
Altmann was mainly a scholar of Kabbalah and even though he was the
leading interpreter of Moses Mendelssohn, I did not consider Altmann a
constructive theologian; he was rather an intellectual historian. But the
truth is that I was not looking at Jewish studies programs.
The issue of institutional setting for the study of either Jewish philosophy
or Jewish theology is interesting because philosophy departments in
America in the late 1960s and early 1970s were strictly analytical and
had no room for either Jewish philosophy or Jewish theology.
That’s right. In the late 1960s if one wanted to become a Jewish theologian,
that is, to think systematically about Judaism, one had to go to a Christian
seminary or a Divinity School.
As a Jew in a Christian institution I had an interesting experience. Every
issue I studied in Protestant theology I tried to connect to Judaism. For
example, when I took a course on Kierkegaard and we talked about “the
teleological suspension of the ethical,” I immediately looked at midrashim
on the Binding of Isaac to compare them to Kierkegaard’s interpretation of
the biblical text. I was constantly trying to make connections between what
I studied in Christian theology and what I brought with me as a Jew. With
my friend Carol Christ I also organized a student-led class on modern Jewish
thought. We studied Mordecai Kaplan, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Franz
Rosenzweig, and Martin Buber as examples of Jewish theologians. Keep in
mind that the English translation of Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption was
published only when I was in the third year of my graduate training. In fact,
William Hallo, the translator, was teaching at Yale and he gave me the gal-
leys of his translation. So I was privileged to be one of the first readers of
The Star of Redemption in English. It was both an incredibly exciting and
incredibly frustrating experience, because there was no one with whom I
could talk about it, since no one had yet read the book in English! To this
day, I have a very clear image of myself sitting in the Assyriology Museum at
Yale reading the galleys of Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption.
This must have been a very challenging intellectual experience indeed,

since Part I of the Star is almost unfathomable, but you must understand
it in order to make sense of Part II and Part III. So one could just imagine
how you must have felt encountering the Star, yet having no one to
consult with about its meaning and significance for Jewish theology.
Hans Frei, a theologian who was on my dissertation committee, had read

the Star in German about thirty years earlier, and had some vague memo-
ries of it. But I could not really share my tremendous excitement with him.
So who was I going to talk to?
The reception of Rosenzweig is a very interesting issue. Hallo’s

translation, which you were the first to read, made possible the
renaissance of Rosenzweig in the second half of the twentieth century,
but it is fascinating to ponder why Rosenzweig has been so influential
and how he has been interpreted by scholars of Jewish philosophy since
the translation was made.
Right. Prior to the English translation of the Star there was very little avail-
able of Rosenzweig’s thought in English. There was the essay “The Builders,”
which was part of the edited volume of Nahum Glatzer’s On Jewish Learning
and the exchange between Buber and Rosenzweig on the nature of law
and commandment.
You mentioned Hans Frei earlier. How did he fit into your intellectual
development, or, to put it differently, did he have an influence on you?
I did study with him. I took a course on theological hermeneutics with him
at Yale. But I’m not sure I knew any more about what theological herme-
neutics was when it was over than I did at the beginning! He definitely tried
to be supportive of women but he wasn’t an important mentor.
Nonetheless, he exposed you to reading the Bible differently.
Yes, although he was not a Bible scholar.
So for you the Bible became a theological text at Yale Divinity School.
This is important because other Jewish scholars at the time approached
the Bible either exegetically, philologically, or historically, whereas for
you the Bible was first and foremost a book of theology.
Right.
Do you also consider the Bible a philosophical text?
I’m not sure what a philosophical text is. I’d be interested in your take
because when Judah Goldin said to me, there’s no such thing as Jewish
theology and I said, “What do you mean? What about Buber? What about
Rosenzweig?” he replied, “They are philosophers.” So, here is a conundrum
for you: Are Buber and Rosenzweig Jewish philosophers or Jewish theolo
gians? What is the difference between a philosopher and a theologian?
I have a clear sense that there is one. But, I am fully aware that one could
define each figure in different ways.
If you put the adjective “Jewish” in front of theology and philosophy,

there’s almost no difference between these two projects, because you’re
always arguing from a particular perspective, the Jewish perspective.
Isn’t this so?
Yes, that’s right. I agree that a lot of the same people (e.g., Buber, Rosenzweig,
Levinas) get claimed by each of these fields.
In terms of academic training, however, isn’t there a difference between

philosophical training and theological training?
Yes, yes.
There are two ways to understand the relationship between philosophy

and theology. According to the first approach philosophical training
involves a certain type of reasoning, a certain type of analytical skills,
and a certain type of theoretical questions. And those questions are
not determined by the text, but are external to the text. In contrast to
the philosopher, the theologian always starts with the received text;
the tradition sets the point of departure for theological questioning.
This is a Thomistic approach to the difference between philosophy and
theology. The second approach is to see both philosophy and theology
as engaging in eisegesis: they are both taking questions to the text and
trying to mine the text for answers. In this approach there is no formal
distinction between philosophy and theology. The Jewish philosopher
has maybe a little bit more training in Aristotle or Kant than a Jewish
theologian, but ultimately the questions they are asking are Jewish
questions and there is always that struggle with the Jewish tradition.
So, Judith, how do you frame the difference between philosophy and
theology?
It seems to me what you’re talking about is historical theology or history

of philosophy. Constructive theology and philosophy are doing some-
thing quite different, precisely because they are constructive endeavors.
Sometimes I joke that my main task is to sit at the computer and make
things up! By that I mean that I raise hypothetical issues, I imagine situa-
tions, and I envision social worlds that do not in fact exist. That is my work
as a constructive theologian. As a theologian I’m always in conversation
with the text, but my starting point is not the text; I do not see myself as a
text person, that is, I am not an exegete, nor am I a philologist.
Even if you are not engaged in textual analysis, aren’t you teasing out
the religious meaning of the text and its application to the meaning of
life outside the text?
That’s right.
But teasing out the meaning of texts is precisely what the philosopher
does. Right?
Not necessarily. I think that what the philosopher does, unless you do
applied philosophy, is to clarify what we mean when we say such and such.
Analytical philosophy is not constructive, I don’t think, whereas theology is
a constructive, interpretative enterprise.
A different understanding of philosophy, however, is offered by

Continental philosophy, whose dominant strand is hermeneutics,
which is all about interpretation of texts.
In other words, whether one is viewed as a theologian or a philosopher

depends on a certain framing.
So you’re saying: “I’m not a philosopher, I’m a theologian, and I am very

happy with this distinction.” As a theologian, what are the questions
that engage you most?
Most of my work has focused on feminist questions, or has begun from

feminist questions. I’ve asked, “Where are women’s voices in this text, in
this tradition?” “What does it mean that they are often absent?” “How does
that absence shape the tradition?” “If we were to include women’s voices
and perspectives, how might the tradition look different?” “How might we
rethink central categories of Jewish tradition from a feminist perspective?”
Those have been some of the main questions that I’ve raised. And then in
the 1990s my work was more about sexuality and I was asking very similar
questions from a gay/lesbian perspective.
Another set of questions that is important to me revolves around what
we do with those aspects of tradition that are problematic and that, in fact,
seem immoral from a contemporary perspective. For example, what does
it mean to sit in a synagogue that views as sacred text last week’s Torah
portion that gives a husband a right to annul his wife’s vows?
The Jewish tradition is undoubtedly problematic from a feminist

perspective. So, how does one remain within a tradition which is, in a
sense, irredeemable from a feminist perspective?
Right.
You can’t get around the fact that Judaism is a sexist tradition, and yet
you want to remain Jewish. Many, many Jewish women, say, “Well, I
can’t handle this tradition, so I’d rather be out of it.” So, how do we
remain in and out at the same time?
That’s the central question that I’ve struggled with as a Jewish feminist.
My friend Carol Christ, who I mentioned before, was a Christian when we
were studying together at Yale Graduate School and then, because of her
feminist convictions, she became a Goddess thealogian. Carol introduced
me to Starhawk, who is a leading voice in the Goddess movement and in
ecofeminism. She was born a Jew and still considers herself an ethnic Jew,
even though she is at the same time a major figure in the Goddess religion.
The trajectory from Judaism to Goddess religion was a real option for me,
and I could have made that choice. But my Jewish identity was too strong.
I didn’t want to sunder myself.
You still wanted to “stand at Sinai,” to use the title of your own famous
book.
Exactly.
Why didn’t you say “Goodbye, Sinai” Or “Goodbye, Judaism,” as so many

other Jewish women who are feminists have done?
There were too many things about Judaism that I loved and I did not see
why I should relinquish my Jewish religious identity.
Which aspects of the traditions were so dear to your heart that you
couldn’t let go of them?
I grew up in a classical Reform congregation on Long Island. The congrega-

tion had a very strong social justice bent, and from a young age I learned
that Judaism was ethical monotheism. That was deeply meaningful to me.
The centrality of ethics and the connection between belief and action were
very important to me. I loved the fact that as a Jew you could argue with
God. That is one of the aspects of tradition that I have always valued most.
So when I became a feminist, I felt that I could be angry at the tradition
and that was okay. Wrestling with anger was one way of being a Jew; it
didn’t exclude me. As a Reform Jew, I also learned that freedom to think or
freedom to believe was a very important aspect of the tradition. The Jewish
calendar, with its weekly day of rest and the seasonal holidays, was yet
another very important dimension which I could not give up.
Do you mean the rhythm of life?
Yes, the rhythm of Jewish life was very much part of my identity.
To some extent arguing, or wrestling, with God, is easy. It’s the argument
with humans that gets us into trouble. It is the political dimension of
the philosophical or theological work that brings about backlash.
Right. Absolutely.
What would you say to those who claim that feminism is the most
important issue right now because it is the cause of the current division
within Judaism? According to this view, feminism could bring about a
schism in the Jewish world, especially in Orthodoxy. Would you agree
with that assessment?
I do. It strikes me that in all the major religious traditions right now, there
is a big cleavage between the liberals who endorse feminism and the tradi-
tionalists who oppose it. There is a deeper divide between ultra-Orthodox
and liberal Jews than there is between liberal Jews and liberal Christians.
The rise of fundamentalisms worldwide speaks to the notion of there being
two completely different kinds of religion in the world.
Sometimes I think that the fundamentalists of all faiths should go off
together. I mean, they are increasingly bedfellows on a range of socially
contested issues. For example, on the abortion issue, some Jews support
antiabortion laws even when they’re in contravention of halakha, thereby
becoming bedfellows with right-wing Christians. It’s astounding to me. So,
I do think that fundamentalist and non-fundamentalist Judaism are two
different religions.
There is definitely a rise in a certain kind of religious militancy on the

religious right, but we also see a rise of secular, atheist militancy.
Yes, that is absolutely true.
But before we explore secularism, let’s continue to discuss some of the

theological and philosophical conundrums. What is the relationship
between systematic theology and exegesis in your feminist reinterpre
tation of Judaism? Do you engage in exegesis in order to tease the theo
logical meaning out of Jewish texts, or does your preconceived theology
tell you how to read the received text?
My work is not primarily exegetical; that is not how I approach theology.

In this regard I am very different from Rachel Adler, whose feminist inter-
pretation of Judaism is based on exegesis of halakha and aggada. Her proj-
ect of constructive Jewish theology emerges through engagement with the
canonic texts. Unlike her, I don’t do close reading of texts. Usually I’m using
texts more to make a point rather than asking what it is that the text says.
Doesn’t that methodology make you vulnerable to the charge that you
impose your theological notions on the sacred text? To some extent, you
actually don’t need the text in order to make your theological claims.
Yes. I am aware of that danger and that criticism, but I don’t really see how
to avoid it. It seems to me that the Jewish tradition is rich and conflicted
and filled with different voices from which we have to choose. And I do
listen to the tradition; my criteria for listening to this rather than that voice
itself emerged in conversation with the tradition. There was a point in my
intellectual development at which I asked myself, “Am I not just imposing
non-Jewish categories on the text?” And then I realized the extent to which
my thinking comes out of my engagement with Judaism through my whole
life. So I think there’s a circular relationship here: we engage the tradition
critically by using categories outside the tradition, but our critique of the
tradition itself comes from standing within the tradition. Nonetheless, I am
aware of the criticism and the danger inherent in my methodology. How
often do I allow the text to correct and critique me?
Could you clarify your methodology?
In all candor, I had no training in methodology in graduate school, which

is really quite shocking, and I still feel that I cannot articulate my meth-
odology systematically. I’m also very aware of Mary Daly’s warning against
“methodolatry”—letting method dictate the questions we can ask. So I
tend to see methodology as emerging from the questions that I’m asking
rather than beginning with methodology and bringing it to the questions.
So I’ll have a theoretical question, and that question or puzzle will dictate
how I approach the sources. For example, I would begin with the question
“Where do we see women’s voices in the text?” or “Where do we not see
women’s voices in the text”? And then, I improvise as I deem necessary to
answer those questions.
Engaging the tradition in this manner makes it very open-ended. As an

interpreter, you engage the tradition, be it the biblical or the rabbinic
text, as you see fit rather than as the tradition demands it is to be
understood or interpreted. Right?
Absolutely.
Since this method applies to all texts, including philosophical texts,

where does one stop as far as non-Jewish sources are concerned? Is there
any boundary to your Jewish theological engagement? For example,
the Jewish theologian could engage the New Testament, medieval
philosophy (be it Jewish, Muslim, or Christian), and modern Christian
theology, such as the theology of Paul Tillich. Are all of these sources
part of the scope of your Jewish theology?
It is true that I began as an interpreter of the theology of Paul Tillich, since

my Ph.D. dissertation was about him. However, as someone who chooses
to remain within the Jewish tradition and to do Jewish theology, I choose
to engage primarily with those texts that Jews would recognize as Jewish. I
probably do cite Christian thinkers more frequently than most other Jewish
theologians, because those were my intellectual interlocutors; you could
say that Christian theologians were the people I grew up with theologically,
so to speak.
As I grow older and as I spend more time thinking within Judaism, my
conversation partners have become the Jewish texts. As a feminist, I try to
expand the range of texts that I consider by using Jewish women’s poetry or
novels or rituals, so I cite a broad range of texts, but still within the realm
of Judaism.
Given the wide array of texts you consult in the construction of feminist
theology, do you differentiate between sacred and non-sacred texts?
Is there a difference between a text written by a feminist author, a
text written by a female author who is not necessarily feminist, and
a biblical text or rabbinic text which the tradition takes to be sacred
texts? Do you privilege certain texts over others given your open-ended
methodology?
I definitely feel a need to engage with the sacred texts of the Jewish tradi-
tion because of their central role in the Jewish community. The fact that
Torah and Haftarah are read as sacred texts week after week means that I
need to grapple with those texts in a different way—more critically—than
I would with a poem. But your question is a good one in that I think part of
the feminist project is to expand the realm of sacred texts. So I would like to
see the day when a text will be read as Haftarah that isn’t from the prophets
but is a contemporary text.
Do you mean that the contemporary text will be read as a Haftarah?
Yes, indeed. Contemporary texts will, I hope, eventually be read as Haftarah.
That’s very interesting, because it opens up the canonic text in an

utterly new way, while conferring authority on contemporary texts. If
I understand you correctly, that will mean that Judaism is not just a
received tradition of authoritative texts believed to be divinely revealed,
but a tradition that continues to grow through progressive revelation.
Is that correct?
Yes. That is correct.
Let’s apply this notion to feminism. I am sure you would agree that
feminism is not just theory; it is about changing our way of life or
changing the way we exist in the world, including our rituals. So
feminism also redefines the so-called realm of the “sacred.”
Right. We need to ask: “What is it that mediates the presence of God today?”
Since the God of the Jewish tradition, at least in the texts as we have
them, is communicated through a male prism, and the God-language
of the text is male-dominated and male-centered, what are the options
available for the Jewish feminist? Can a feminist Jew continue to accept
the texts of the Jewish tradition as “sacred texts” if they so deeply
conflict with her values? How do you, as a feminist, stand vis-à-vis a
tradition that is so androcentric and so unacceptable to feminism?
This is precisely the challenge that faces all feminists who wish to remain
loyal to their respective religious traditions. I have written a lot about the
androcentrism (i.e., the male-centeredness) of Judaism in general and God
language in particular. There is no doubt that the metaphors Jews use to
talk about God are male centered. God is imaged as a male deity, and all
language about God is grammatically male, because Hebrew is a gendered
language. Secondly the images that are used to describe God are over-
whelmingly drawn from male experience. And I have argued, and I firmly
believe, that there is a close relationship or connection between that fact
and the subordination of women within the Jewish tradition. So what can
we do about it?
Well, we can broaden our language about God. As Maimonides argued,

all our language about God is metaphorical. It’s very interesting that despite
his elaborate deconstruction of anthropomorphic language at the beginning
of the Guide of the Perplexed, Maimonides never deconstructs the pronoun
“He,” but continues to assume that God is a “He.” But there’s no reason
not to deconstruct the “He” so we can broaden our images of God and begin
to think about God as “She.” This is why one of the first things that Jewish
feminists tried to do in the 1970s was to use female language to refer to God.
And that was pretty disturbing and uncomfortable for many Jews.
For me, the mere change of gender from “He” to “She” is not sufficient
because it leaves the same old God in place. So in my book Standing Again
at Sinai, I advocate using female language and imagery that goes far beyond
pronoun change. I think using female language is important as a temporary
strategy to get people to confront their images of God. I advocate using all
different kinds of images of God, gendered and non-gendered. For the past
twenty years, since I published Standing Again at Sinai, I put aside the issue
of God-language to focus on other issues, but now I find myself coming
back to it. And now I’m much more interested in rethinking the notion of
God altogether, because my concept of God is utterly nonpersonal.
Why do you think the change of gendered language to talk about God
did not succeed? Jews simply didn’t endorse it, and even feminists
didn’t really continue to promote the new feminine God-language. It
was very jarring in the beginning, but it did not go anywhere. How are
we going to rethink the concept of God and who is going to listen to
this rethinking?
Indeed, that is the challenge that faces feminists and perhaps anyone who
wishes to articulate a new theology.
Who’s going to be open to this new theology? For example, Carol

Christ, as you know better than I do, has articulated a new post-
Christian, Goddess theology (or as she called it thealogy) and she has
done so by utilizing process philosophy and process theology. But in
general, process philosophy and/or theology has made little impact on
contemporary Jewish thought. So if we are going to reconceptualize
God, what are our theoretical options?
Right. This is a serious challenge. Carol and I together are writing a book
about God tentatively titled Goddess and God in Light of Feminism. When
we began, we couldn’t figure out how to get into the project, so we decided
to begin by writing autobiographical essays about our changing notions of
God. When we started the project, it was not clear to me that we would use
these reflections as part of the book. I thought to myself that they might
provide a way of clarifying our thinking preliminary to describing it in more
theological and systematic terms. But then I realized that what we were in
fact doing was narrative theology and that it is much more interesting than
systematic theology. For example, if I tell you that I imagine God as the
creative energy underlying and animating the universe, it is a boring state-
ment that could be spelled out in a paragraph. But perhaps if I talk about
how I dethroned the patriarchal God and how the process of wrestling with
God shaped my life, or how I experience the presence of God as creative
energy, that might have more traction with people. So I wonder if this nar-
rative theology is actually the way I’m moving into doing theology.
How do you anticipate the reception of your new book with Carol
Christ? Are Jews going to accept Carol’s theology, or more precisely,
thealogy? Can Jews accept a belief in female deity, especially in terms
of synagogue ritual? Can Jews pray to a female deity?
This is a question that interests me tremendously. Jews don’t talk about

God a lot. I mean, Jews can be quite observant and pray regularly but not
really believe in the God they’re praying to; for many Jews, the words of the
daily prayer are a kind of mantra. In fact, there’s very little conversation in
the Jewish community about God. For example, for years I have noticed
that among Christian clergy, a lot of people talk about being “called” to the
ministry. By contrast, a rabbi would never say “I was called to become a
rabbi,” even if she or he felt that.
I am very puzzled by this reluctance and I’m trying to figure out what
it’s about. But I think that the fact that Jews are reluctant to talk about God
makes it even more difficult to change God-language because what’s the
opening to that conversation? If talking about God is not of concern to
Jews, how can you ask Jews to change their God-talk?
As you indicate, Jews today are not really excited about theological
questions, which is true even for Jews who attend synagogue regularly.
Their point of departure is not theological but a matter of praxis. Is it
correct to say that the very emphasis on praxis explains why we Jews
are theologically stuck, so to speak, and not just in regard to feminism?
Yes. And yet, if you think about the huge numbers of Jews who are unin-
terested in Judaism, who are turned off by whatever Jewish education they
had, who find the practices and the propositions boring and unbelievable
or untenable, in a sense they’re the ones who are ripe for a new Jewish the-
ology that will express an intelligent Judaism.
Let me tell you a personal story. Just last night I was having dinner with
an old, close friend who went to Sunday school with me for twelve years.
She certainly considers herself a Jew. She has a Passover Seder and lights
Chanukah candles. But she is uninterested in Judaism because she never
found it to be intellectually interesting or challenging. There are many Jews
like that: unaffiliated and unengaged Jews, and these people are precisely
the audience for a new egalitarian, feminist Judaism. That’s where I think
we have our chance. In the past two decades since I published Standing
Again at Sinai, a lot of people have said to me, “Your book brought me back
to Judaism.” So that has made me rather optimistic about the relevance of
my ideas to other Jews and my contribution to contemporary Judaism.
I know a lot of scholars of Jewish studies who are afraid of my work
because they think that my feminist criticism turns people off from
Judaism. But my critique of Judaism is not simply my own personal ques-
tions; many other people have these critical questions. They are grateful to
see that somebody is asking them and thus giving them permission to do
so. It makes it possible for them to be Jewish. The feminist critique need
not turn people away from Judaism, it can also enable Jews to remain in
Judaism and express themselves more fully as Jews.
Looking at feminism from a historical perspective, what would you

say have been the main accomplishments? What are the failures of
feminism? And what are the challenges to feminism?
I think that the accomplishments have been huge. First of all there are the
important practical changes involving women’s increased access to educa-
tional and leadership opportunities across the spectrum of contemporary
Judaism. Beyond this, I think that raising the whole question of women’s
voices and perspectives has led to the creation of new Jewish histories and
many new Torah commentaries. The new Reform women’s Torah commen-
tary, for example, is the culmination of decades of hard work by Jewish
feminists in developing their critiques and reinterpretations of Judaism.
So, I think there have been a lot of accomplishments, but I do agree that
things have stalled. As you said, the issue of female God-language has gone
nowhere, and the whole issue of examining our conception of God has
also really gone nowhere. This failure is of great interest to me. Why has
there been such resistance to feminine God-language and rethinking the
nature of God? I agree with you that it’s not just among the mainstream
Jewish community; many Jewish feminists (and feminists in general) are
not interested in the issue of God-language. However, we are only at the
beginning of a process of change. Now that women are rabbis, and even in
the Orthodox community they have a more elevated status as interpreters
of halakha, things might begin to change. Women today have many more
educational opportunities and access to leadership so it is reasonable to
hope that they will continue to transform Judaism.
The feminist revolution has accomplished a lot, but there are still a lot
of practical glass-ceiling issues that remain. In none of the Jewish denom-
inations are women properly represented. In the largest congregations,
the salaries of female rabbis are significantly lower than men’s salaries.
Within Jewish federations, the percentage of women in leadership posi-
tions is still shockingly low, even lower than in Fortune 500 companies!
So there are a lot of issues concerning equality between men and women
to which we still need to pay attention. In this regard, the feminist revolu-
tion is by no means complete. I think that the feeling or perception that
feminism is passé because we’ve accomplished everything has overtaken
the deeper philosophical and theological reconstruction questions. Today
this is the true challenge to feminism: how does one revive the theoretical
discourse?
Why do college students today feel reluctant to call themselves

“feminists,” even though they have all benefited from feminism? Why
is “feminism” viewed derogatorily?
My experience confirms that perception and I find it deeply disturbing.

Why has feminism come to be associated or equated with the hatred of
men? I don’t really know or understand how that happened. Perhaps we
need to reflect on that issue by comparison to similar events within the
African-American community. Here is a personal anecdote that might shed
some light on the matter.
My sister-in-law was at an event in Greensboro, North Carolina, at which
there was a panel marking one of the key events in the civil rights move-
ment: the Supreme Court decision in Brown vs. the Board of Education.
A number of people from the Black community reflected back on this rul-
ing and said that they made an enormous mistake strategically to have
thought that they didn’t need to bring the White community along first.
They simply assumed that once integration was mandated by law, social
integration and acceptance would necessarily follow.
When I heard this, I wondered whether feminists made a similar mistake.
I think we believed that if women changed—for example, if we refused to
behave in accord with certain expectations such as serving men or stay-
ing at home with the children—that would be enough. Men would have to
change without our doing anything else. We did not ask ourselves what it
would mean to bring men along.
And now, four decades into the feminist revolution, we can ponder: can
women really change in the absence of greater changes from men? I think
part of the skepticism about feminism is that our demands had unfore-
seen consequences in that young women feel that they have to be super-
women and they resent it. But creating superwomen was never our vision.
We imagined that social institutions would change in order to affect a new
relationship between men and women; we expected to have a daycare
center at every workplace, for example, but that did not happen. We also
imagined that there would be flextime or shared jobs, and none of that hap-
pened. And so, today we have a situation in which women are expected to
do everything: have a successful career outside the home as well as be a
perfect mother and wife at home. That has generated a lot of resentment
against feminists, who brought about the social changes in the relations
between men and women.
This is a real misapprehension of the initial goals of feminism. We, the
pioneering feminists, were asking for and demanding structural, insti-
tutional changes, but today nobody talks about these profound changes.
We weren’t talking about individuals making a life in which they could do
everything.
But feminists did make a very strong point that “the personal is
political,” which means that the relations between men and women in
the domestic sphere have political significance for relationships in the
public sphere. So feminism has politicized the personal sphere. Isn’t
that the case?
I understand “the personal is the political” in an opposite way. For me

and many other early feminists, that slogan meant that what we expe-
rience as our personal problems and issues is the result of or caused by
social structures and political relations. Therefore, we cannot change the
personal without changing the structure of social institutions and the polit-
ical sphere.
It is true that the feminist slogan can be interpreted from both sides, or
in both ways. To me the excitement of early feminism was realizing this
isn’t only my hang-up, but rather that something much larger (social, insti-
tutional, or political) is at stake. Women used to be socialized in a certain
manner so as to blame themselves. Feminism shifted the attention to social
institutions and asked, How do we change them?
Feminism during the 1970s had a lot of energy and it was very positive
energy because it liberated women to be much more than they thought
they could be. Isn’t the loss of that energy and hope sad?
Yes, I am saddened by that loss and by the negative perception of feminism

today.
Many people today regard feminism as a trivial, irrelevant, academic

discourse, and miss the social significance of the movement. So can
feminism rekindle the initial excitement? What should be done to
enable young women to feel good about feminism rather than feel
discomfort about the label?
Right. That is the challenge.
There is also an economic factor that needs to be taken into

consideration. A young woman may define herself as a feminist, but with
a young family and without proper daycare she cannot pursue a career.
Under these conditions, to finish a Ph.D. (even a Ph.D. in, say, women’s
studies) is very difficult. Without the necessary structural changes, it is
much harder for women today to be feminists. Is feminism responsible
for the fact that women today are overextended?
I see that very struggle in the life of my daughter-in-law. My son and

daughter-in-law just had a baby who’s seven months old. They’re both
attorneys and they’re trying to put a life together and balance career and
family but it is by no means easy or simple.
In Israel this problem has been somewhat resolved by making the

grandparents, especially the grandmothers, deeply involved in the life of
the young couple. But that arrangement too has its problems because it
tells older women that they have to be readily available for babysitting.
Yes, when my partner and I were living in Spain the year before last, we
experienced the same thing—grandmothers walking down the street with
their grandchildren. In Spain this is doable because most people stay in the
city in which they were born. They live near their parents, and the grand-
parents can be actively involved in child rearing.
From a feminist perspective, isn’t that situation problematic? Again the

woman acts as the caregiver, the facilitator, and enabler, except now
she is doing it for her own daughter. This is not the independent woman
that feminism envisioned.
Correct. Feminism as a social revolution has hardly begun and the absence
of broader social changes is very disturbing because, to me, feminism is a
social movement; it’s not a personal lifestyle. But the sense of feminism as a
social movement that seeks to change institutional structures and relations
has vanished.
Interestingly, this has happened while feminist theory has become

more and more refined and less and less relevant. So could it be that the
success of women in gender studies within the context of the university
has made the gender issue irrelevant to the society at large? There is
an interesting and disturbing similarity between women’s studies and
Jewish studies. Once Jewish studies became a department, one could
argue that there is no need to teach Jewish studies courses anywhere
else.
I don’t know what’s the cause and what’s the effect. In other words, did
women’s studies become more arcane and insular because the movement
wasn’t as powerful, or rather, did the feminist movement become less pow-
erful because of academic women’s studies? Or has the backlash against
feminism affected both spheres independently? I tend to think the last is
the case.
Feminist issues are social issues, and as such they will not go away. Each
and every woman and each and every family have to struggle with these
issues and find their own solution. Right?
Yes, I agree.
Is it fair to say that the feminist academic discourse has become some
what irrelevant to what really matters to women?
Yes. The challenge is to bring theory and practice back together as they
were in the beginning of the movement.
What do you say to those who see feminism largely as a rhetorical

strategy as opposed to a social movement? According to this view, to
be a feminist pertains to how you read a text, rather than how you live
your life. Feminist is thus about holding an intellectual posture. Do you
accept this view?
No, I do not. I’m struck by the number of younger Jewish feminists who’ve
deconstructed me or aspects of my work. And although this is certainly
okay, I often wonder why they don’t have something more substantive to
talk about. I was certainly not trying to write the definitive work, I was try-
ing to open a conversation. So I would say to young feminist authors, “Take
that conversation forward. Write about some real issue that you care about.
Who cares if I contradicted myself in this or that paragraph?” I want to chal-
lenge them to do something more relevant to women and to Jewish women.
The future of feminism is in the hands of young feminists today; that is
their responsibility. In the American Academy of Religion (AAR) I’m chair
of the Committee of the Status of Women in the Profession. I was on that
very committee when it was formed originally, twenty-some odd years ago,
and now I am serving on it again. When I was on it the first time, women’s
needs in the academy were very clear. We were still a small percentage of
people in the discipline of religious studies and in this professional associa-
tion. There were very few women in leadership in the AAR or in the acad-
emy at large. Today, two decades after the committee was established, we
see within the AAR the same transformation that has taken place within
liberal Judaism: women, including women of color, are half the presidents.
So what is our committee supposed to be doing now? It seems that the
goals of equality and inclusion have been achieved, although in fact, a great
deal remains to be done.
I already mentioned that I grew up in a Reform congregation. Although
Reform Judaism ostensibly believed in equality, women did not take part in
services, they were not on the bimah reading Torah except on Sisterhood
Sabbath; the only ritual assigned to women was lighting the Sabbath can-
dles. At that point it was totally clear what we needed to be fighting for.
It is a lot less clear what we need to fight for today. I think ultimately, it’s
the young people who need to carry things forward; they have to define
the goals of feminism and they need to identify the challenges of the future.
In your writings and public activities you have demonstrated the link
between theory and practice, a link that is in fact confirmed by Reform
Judaism where the God-idea, or Ethical Monotheism, was translated
into social activity. How should the link between theory and praxis be
established today? Does activism require theorizing?
I think that there is an important link between activism and theory. Once
you begin to question the subordination of women you in fact engage in
theory. For example, “What are the different factors at work in creating that
subordination”? “How does the notion of God feed into this subordination
of women?” “How does the structure of the liturgy further enhance the
subordination of women?” These are all theoretical questions that require
thinking through before we begin to effect social change. Put differently, in
order to understand and to create change at more than just a surface level,
you need to understand the dynamics, the structures, and the ideas that
support the marginalization of women.
In terms of the subordination of women in Judaism, how do you respond

to an Orthodox person who might say, “Well, you misunderstand
Judaism when you claim that the women are subordinate to men. In
fact, in traditional Jewish families exactly the opposite is the case.”
Going further, your hypothetical critic might insist that traditional
Judaism has elevated the position of the woman in the domestic sphere
and in society, so that the perception of subordination is only in the
mind of the beholder, namely the contemporary feminist, and not in
the practice of the tradition. How would you respond?
You asked me about methodology before. A very central question in my

work has been the question of authority: Who is speaking? Who decides?
Who has the power to decide? Who’s included in the conversation? Who
is being addressed? So I think that the question I would ask someone who
makes these claims is, “Who decided that the glory of women is inside”?
Who decided that men and women complement each other and this is
who men are and this is who women are? Have women been part of that
three-thousand-year conversation through which those roles have been
defined? So my retort would be to raise fundamental questions of power

and authority.
The category of power, however, is a two-edged sword: it is the awareness

of power that makes subordination intolerable, but that very awareness
also calls the powerless to begin to use power and thus risk the injustice
of power. Is it in principle possible to have human relations devoid of
the dialectics of power?
Probably not, but there are different kinds of power, and there are relation-
ships in which the power dynamics shift. Let’s take the institution of mar-
riage, for example. I think that a marriage in which the power dynamics are
rigid because one person always has more power than the other is very dif-
ferent from a marriage in which people have different spheres of power and
in which they can renegotiate those power relations. So I don’t necessar-
ily disagree with the claim that all human relations involve power to some
extent, but I do think that a power imbalance can be more or less extreme
and more or less rigid and inflexible—and more or less socially sanctioned.
What about the claim that within the traditional family, especially
the Ashkenazi family, the really powerful partner is the female: she ran
the household, very often she was the breadwinner, and she shaped the
education of her young children, while the husband devoted his time
and energy to Torah study? In the traditional family there was a certain
division of labor that enabled men and women to coexist. Are Jewish
families today better off because of feminism, or do they experience
more strains and stresses that the traditional Jewish family did not have
to cope with? What do you say to this critique of feminism?
Because of feminism the range of women’s choices has been vastly expanded
and that has benefited not only women, but the Jewish community at
large, including men. The Jewish community prior to the rise of feminism
was much diminished because half the population of Jews was excluded
from religious leadership and halakhic decision-making. The exclusion of
women from the creation of Jewish culture has made the community cul-
turally poorer. So the fact that today there are women who engage in the
interpretation of Jewish texts and write wonderful commentaries enriches
the whole community. Making Judaism more egalitarian is a matter of jus-
tice, but it also benefits the community as a whole.
In terms of justice, what are the other domains in which there is patent
injustice that needs to be addressed and corrected?
I’m very disturbed by the many, many passages in the Torah that call for the
destruction of indigenous traditions. I am interested not only in injustice
to women but also in injustice toward other groups viewed as the Other.
I’m interested not just in women as the excluded and marginalized Other,
but the broader question of how and why human beings constantly create
Others that they then treat unjustly. I think that we see that othering very
clearly in the Torah with regard to the struggle against “idolatry,” but the
issue is much broader. So I’m really interested in the human tendency to
create Otherness that then is used to justify maltreatment.
That tendency exists also among feminists. As you know, I have noted
that Christian feminists blame Jews for the creation of patriarchy, a charge
that keeps emerging again and again in feminist literature, contributing to
the othering of Jews and indirectly perpetuating traditional anti-Judaism
and anti-Semitism.
As a Jewish feminist, I have been on both sides of that line, constantly
looking at myself and my own thinking to examine how I participate in the
creating of Otherness or the dismantling of Otherness.
Postmodern thinkers, most notably Michel Foucault, have really made

us very aware of the question of Otherness. But, is it possible to forge
identity (personal or collective) without othering? For example, the
emergence of Israel as a nation roughly about 1200 BCE took place
when a group of people separated itself from their neighbors and
constructed a narrative to justify and perpetuate the difference between
“us” and “them.” That separation was not just perceptual, it involved
real physical struggles against the “enemies” of Israel.
Right.
If so, is it possible to tell the story of the Jewish nation without the
excluded Other? If we let go of those passages in the Bible, or excise
the memory of wars from our tradition, what will happen to our collec
tive identity? Can we continue to be Jewish without those memories?
To me the question is how we use that memory and how we interpret those
texts. When we read those texts, we can move from simply recalling past
events to raising questions about them and their meaning for the present.
How do we create Others and how and why is the practice of othering going
on now? What are our responsibilities to the Other? I mean, to me what’s
valuable about difficult texts is that they hold up a mirror to our world.
Those ancient processes are still going on and we can use the texts as a way
to look at ourselves and to reflect on and decide who we want to be in the
world, and how we want to act now. Thus the text becomes an opening for
moral action in the present; we don’t have to imitate the ancient texts in
order to tease out their deep moral significance.
In that sense, then, the sacred text is always a contemporary text, even
though it’s also a historical text. For example, one could apply the
biblical text to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and see the Palestinian
case as an illustration of the destruction of indigenous culture.
Exactly right. Indeed, I have been quite critical of the policies of the State of
Israel toward the Palestinians for that very reason.
Your political critique has placed you on the left of the political
spectrum. What do you say to those who criticize the political Jewish
Left for not caring about being Jewish or for empathizing with the
Palestinians at the expense of Jews and/or Israelis?
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict raises profound moral questions because the

claims of the two sides clash. If you care about justice, you have no choice
other than to step into that struggle, trying to hear the justice on both sides
but needing to make choices. The same applies to the internal Jewish strug-
gle about authenticity (i.e., “Who is a Jew?” or “What does it mean to be
Jewish?”) These debates and conflicts are not going to be resolved, because
you can’t say one type of Jew is more authentic than the other, or one strain
within the tradition is more Jewish than another strain. The Jewish tradi-
tion contains conflicting commands: we have the command to kill every-
body who is engaged in idolatry as well as the command to pursue justice.
So the challenge is how to define “justice” and how to apply the ideal of
justice to particular circumstances, and both are highly controversial.
Right. But, so what? What is the choice other than to enter into that debate?
Well, the debate is problematic because it always involves the use of

power.
Is it power that is always at issue or fundamentally conflicting world-

views? For example, can you have conversation between fundamentalists
and non-fundamentalists? I’m not sure. I’m struck and saddened by the
fact that there aren’t even that many places for conversation between
modern Orthodox and non-Orthodox Jews. I always attend the meetings
of Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance (JOFA), where I’ve engaged with
modern Orthodox feminists. Despite our differences, I’ve found that
conversation to be very fruitful and exciting.
Unfortunately, such conversations don’t happen that often, but whereas
I have enough in common with Orthodox women in JOFA to have a mean-
ingful conversation, I don’t know what space could accommodate both me
and the people who stone an eight-year-old girl for not being dressed mod-
estly. In this regard, the conflicting viewpoints cannot be bridged, and there
is very little common ground.
Do you see the dichotomy between Orthodox and non-Orthodox Jews

growing deeper? Is there a growing schism between these forms of
contemporary Judaism?
Yes. The schism may be unbridgeable and all of us will be worse off because
of it.
Is it the case that the people who stone the eight-year-old girl are com
pletely intolerant, or is it that both sides in the conflict regard the other
as completely intolerant?
As I see it, those who stoned the eight-year-old girl see her, her family, and
all other Jews who support the girl as “non-Jews.” This is an example of the
othering about which I spoke earlier and which I strongly criticize.
The pursuit of justice is clearly a principle that motivates your thinking

and your social activism. Is there any other principle besides justice
that guides you or inspires you?
That’s an interesting question. Undoubtedly, justice is the major value that

guides my work.
What about equality?
Well, I was going to say that equality is another guiding principle, but then
I was thinking, is equality really different from justice? Isn’t equality a prod-
uct of justice or a concrete example of how to attain justice? There is defi-
nitely a close connection between justice and equality. Of course, when we
talk about equality we need to explain what we mean by it. Does equality
mean 50 percent of rabbis should be women? Or does the ideal of equality
point us toward a deeper shift in power relations and in social structures?
Equality is not just about parity or about symmetry.
Both justice and equality are ideals, but (in principle) can these ideals
be actualized in human social reality?
I don’t believe we can actualize them fully, but we certainly can move closer
to them. But again, what is equality? Does it mean sameness? That’s a huge
issue that has generated intense debate among feminist theorists. In the
workplace, for example, does one achieve equality by treating men and
women the same way, or by acknowledging that women’s reproductive
system, for example, is more sensitive to certain kinds of poisons in the
workplace so that true equality for women may involve their being treated
differently from men?
This example suggests that it is not just about equality and not just
about justice, but rather about equality and difference, namely the
desire of women to be equal and different at the same time.
I would agree, but add that it’s not as if women don’t want to be differ-
ent from each other, too. The issue of equality and difference is maintained
among women as well and not only in the debate between men and women.
It is not the case that there’s a homogenous femaleness that’s different from
maleness, because there are many groups of women whose collective iden-
tity is distinct from that of others.
But if we recognize different groups of women, each with their own

distinctive identity, we in fact have reintroduced the notion of othering
back into the feminist discourse.
Isn’t it possible to have difference without Otherness in the sense I have

been using it?
Some African-American women don’t feel that they have much in

common with women who are Jewish or white. Isn’t that so?
Right.
So let me repeat the question: Is it possible for humans to live without

othering, without differentiation, without hierarchy?
We may not be able to avoid the human tendency to other, but it is pos-
sible to recognize that hierarchies are always going to merge into systems
of injustice. We need to work against this tendency and have as our goal
to overcome or soften our social systems so that they do not become rigid.
Some people could say that rigid hierarchies are necessary for business
because competition presupposes clear boundaries. These assumptions
result in a “masculine” style that characterizes corporate America, which
increasingly applies to academic administration. What can women do
about it? If women want to be leaders, don’t they have to learn how to
function within the masculine style?
One would hope that when enough women get into business or into admin-
istration, the administrative style might change.
In retrospect of four decades did the entry of women to the public sphere
actually change the style of business or the academy? Did the entry of
women mean more attention to justice within social hierarchies such
as universities?
Unfortunately, the entry of women into the academy in larger numbers has
coincided with the corporatization of the university, which is in turn the
product of larger social forces. I think women’s greater presence has put
certain issues on the table that were not there before, but has the university
been transformed in a positive way? No.
Some people are claiming that feminism has generated political cor
rectness that has become dogmatic and unjust, especially toward white
men. According to this view, once women ceased to be victims, assumed
power, and hold positions of power, they have become the victimizers.
How to use power justly is a challenge that everyone needs to be aware of.
But it seems to me that the accusation of political correctness is often made
to silence certain voices that people don’t want to hear.
The debate about the meaning and boundaries of tradition, exclusion,

and injustice, and the problem of silencing or othering now revolves
around the place of gays and lesbians within the Jewish community.
The recent decision to admit gays and lesbians to the rabbinate in
Conservative Judaism has led some to charge that the traditional
Jewish view is now being suppressed by a very vocal advocacy of gays
and lesbians. Is this an example of how a group that has been othered
before now engages in othering in the name of political correctness?
So, what is the just thing to do in negotiating conflicting notions of
“correct” human sexuality?
We’re seeing similar claims emerging in the general culture with regard to
the debate about birth control. Catholic institutions claim that their having
to pay for birth control is taking away their freedom of religion and many
religious traditionalists feel put upon or even victimized by a secular cul-
ture that is insensitive to their understanding of human sexuality.
How are we going to negotiate conflicting claims about human sexuality?

What do you say to those who resist the admission of gays and lesbians
to rabbinic seminaries?
That’s where the issue of authority becomes so important. I would ask,

“What is the authority for the claims and counterclaims?” How are people
reading the biblical texts that prohibit homosexuality? I would ask those
people who say they cannot possibly in good conscience allow for ordina-
tion of gays on the basis of Leviticus chapter 18 and a handful of other pas-
sages, “Are you reading the entire biblical text?” “Do you always have that
kind of allegiance to the plain meaning of the text?” “What about all the
other injunctions within the same biblical text (other activities that are
defined as ‘abomination’) to which you pay no attention?” Underlying these
issues is a larger theoretical question: “Can adversaries have conversation
about the meaning of canonic texts?”
That question emerged for the Reform movement as it debated the
issue of gay marriage. A committee of the Central Conference of American
Rabbis (CCAR) came out against gay marriage. But the committee report
also acknowledged that the fundamental assumptions of people on dif-
ferent sides of this issue were so different, that they could not even agree
on what they were talking about. The disputing sides were just completely
talking past each other.
It does seem to me that in these contentious debates, philosophers and
theologians have an important role to play. They can make clear what’s at
stake in these arguments and lay out the different fundamental assump-
tions and commitments that are motivating each side. Before we can ask,
“Can we bridge our differences? Can we talk to each other?” we need to
know what our starting points are. But sometimes, I think that the move
from one position to another is more like conversion than being persuaded
through argument.
It is very possible that in relation to these issues people are persuaded
more by real life circumstances than by arguments. For example, think of a
person who is against gay marriage, but that person has a child who comes
out as gay. Would the parent’s opposition to gay marriage remain the same?
Probably not. When the gay child says, “I want to marry this person that I
love,” what will the parent do? So the reality of people loving each other
(rather than abstract arguments) has created a shift in the attitude and per-
ception of gay people. This is precisely what happened in American society.
Public opinion is changing in this country as more and more people know
that they know someone who is gay or lesbian.
In other parts of the world (e.g., Canada and Europe), it’s not simply
about the face-to-face encounter with a gay person that is responsible
for attitudes and perception; rather, it’s a legal issue. You can’t deny
certain people their legal rights. The insistence on equality before
the law has led to a greater acceptance of gays and lesbians as equals
in Canadian society, although some people (for example, Canadian
Catholics) have a hard time with it.
In the United States there’s always a question as to whose human rights get
recognized. Who’s recognized as fully human? It’s not until the rights are
given to an excluded or marginalized group that people begin to see the
full implications of the absence of those rights. It’s complicated, because
you have to first decide who is worthy of moral consideration. Who has the
right to be recognized on moral grounds?
In your work you have shown how to extend moral consideration to

excluded groups, first women and then gays, lesbians, bisexuals, or
transgender people. Do you extend moral consideration to nonhumans,
namely, to animals or to nature as a whole? Do you see a connection
between feminism and environmentalism?
Actually, as you were talking about moral consideration what came into
my mind was an article I taught for many years in a course on Native
American Religion which argued for granting trees some of the rights of
people. So, clearly the debate about who deserves moral consideration or
who has moral standing definitely extends to the environment. Today as
species face extinction, we have to discuss the moral rights of nonhumans,
and indeed the moral right of our planet. So, yes, I do agree with feminists
such as Rosemary Ruether who hold that the logic of feminism needs to be
extended to the environment and that we must protect nature from human
abuse.
The issues we have covered so far (i.e., feminism, sexual ethics, human
rights, and environmentalism) are all hot topics that come out of real-
life experience, but Jewish philosophy and Jewish theology are both
academic discourses that are carried out within academic institutions.
You have been the President of the American Academy of Religion
and you have taught for many years in Manhattan College, a Catholic
institution. From this vantage point, what is your assessment of Jewish
studies within the academy? What are the successes, achievements, and
failures of Jewish studies?
I think Jewish studies is fairly marginal in the American Academy of

Religion (AAR). The History of Judaism Section in the AAR has gone
through repeated collapses and reconstitutions. In part this is because
many scholars of Jewish studies put their energy into the Association
for Jewish Studies (AJS). The responsibility for the problematic status of
Judaism at the AAR falls on both the organization and on Jewish studies
scholars. I have largely stopped going to sessions on Judaism because they
are too insular and exclusive; participants in these sessions assume that
they talk only to other Jews, and they make no attempt to address their
presentations to scholars of religion more broadly.
For example, very often presenters in the sessions on Judaism use Hebrew
phrases without translating them; they talk in terms of “us” in a manner
that is rare elsewhere in the AAR. In this regard there is some similarity
between the Jewish and Muslim sections of the organization. In the emerg-
ing Islamic sessions we have presenters who quote the Quran in Arabic
without translating, as if all people present are expected to know the Quran.
This practice expresses the perception that sessions at the AAR (which is a
nondenominational professional institution) are “our space to do our busi-
ness.” This is just one side of the problem. As a past President of the AAR, I
am also aware that non-Jewish members of the AAR rarely attend the Jewish
studies sessions. Occasionally when we try to cross religious boundaries, for
example, when we had a session on Jewish Multiculturalism sponsored by
the Women and Religion Section, fifteen people attended and maybe two of
them weren’t Jews. In other words, the blame falls on both sides, and I don’t
know which comes first in terms of cause and effect. Is the problem caused
by the fact that Jews see the sessions on Judaism as the business of Jews,
and thus exclude non-Jews, or is it that the Jews with the strongest commit-
ment to Jewish studies simply avoid going to the AAR and prefer instead
to present their scholarship at the Association for Jewish Studies, or that
most non-Jews aren’t interested in Judaism? This problem is less acute in
the Society for Biblical Literature where the conversation between Jewish
and Christian scholars about the Bible is much more robust.
Is it right to say that success of Jewish studies since the 1970s has also
brought about its current marginalization? We now have enough
Jewish studies scholars within the academy who can carry out an
academic conversation among themselves, so scholars of Judaism talk
to themselves as they did before Jewish studies was integrated into the
academy.
But were we ever part of a large academic conversation? Did Jewish stud-
ies ever succeed in becoming an integral part of the discipline of religious
studies? In the fields of biblical studies or rabbinics, for example, there’s
more cross-conversation between Jewish and non-Jewish scholars. In other
fields of the AAR it is less so.
One could say that the religious roots of the AAR are still very much
intact. It is a very theological organization comprised of numerous
religious individuals studying their own texts using the purported
language of universalism. Perhaps the organization needs to be
reorganized so as to avoid the trap of either theology or particularism.

Of course, the problem is complicated because we cannot generalize
about “religion” but must take into consideration specific religions or
religious traditions that need to be understood on their own terms.
So the question is how do we negotiate the difference between the
particular and the universal?
We see the problem even in the Women and Religion Section. If there is
a session on Asian women’s theology, it will be poorly attended. A lot of
people who would come to a session on white Christian feminists don’t
come to a session on Asian women. So it’s a matter of self-selection which
perpetuates the marginalization of minority groups. In the case of Jewish
studies, when a session has all Jewish presenters, it is perceived as a
Jewish studies session and of less relevance to non-Jews. In short, it’s very
difficult to figure out how to create those cross-conversations.
These organizational issues are important to me because I’ve spent my
whole career being the Jew in a largely Christian professional context (the
AAR and Manhattan College). My entire academic career has been about
bringing Jewish issues into a larger non-Jewish context, and most of my
conversation partners have been non-Jews rather than Jews. That’s part of
my commitment to being a member of the AAR, as opposed to the AJS.
I wanted the Jewish perspective to matter to non-Jews and I wanted Jews
to become familiar with feminist perspectives.
As you look to the future what do you think or what do you see as the
most compelling or pertinent challenges, either philosophical, social, or
political for Jews in the twenty-first century?
I think massive lack of interest in Judaism on the part of Jews is a major

issue for the Jewish community. I agree with the mainstream community
sense that Jewish continuity is an issue. I just think they’re going about
addressing the issue in all the wrong ways.
A lot of the mainstream discourse today tries to purify Judaism. Hence
there is a growing rejection of intermarriage and a refusal to acknowledge
and accept gay/lesbian and transgender Jews as part of the Jewish commu-
nity. We’re trying to purify ourselves by excluding people, which is, it seems
to me, exactly counterproductive. Let’s take the example of intermarriage.
Some Jews who intermarry don’t care about Judaism, but others Jews who
intermarry are very concerned about living a Jewish life. The future of
Judaism depends on our ability to reach out to and engage anybody who’s
interested in Jewish life and Jewish issues and being part of the Jewish com-
munity rather than trying to purify ourselves.
I think philosophy and theology have a role to play in raising interesting,
challenging questions about Jewish life and exploring the answers within
Jewish discourse. What does it mean to live a full life? What does it mean to
live a Jewish life? What kind of world would I like to live in? How am I going
to be engaged in creating that world? Those are questions that people care
about. As Jewish philosophers we need to at least raise these questions,
even if we do not always have answers to them. The task of the philosopher
is to make it worthwhile for people to participate in the conversation and
encourage them to come up with their own answers and responses to these
perennial questions.
What would you say if a student raises the question: “Why should there
be a Jewish People?” or “Why should the Jewish People continue to
exist”?
I see the continued existence of the Jewish people in terms taken from the
environmental discourse about biodiversity and the protection of species
from extinction. The Jewish People is an ancient group with a rich culture
and tradition that has contributed to the world in many, many ways. It
would be a deep shame to lose all that should the Jewish People cease to
exist. Conversely, if the Jewish People continues to be vital and work toward
making the world more just, that is a marvelous contribution. The Jewish
People will fail that mission if the people who stone eight-year-old girls
become representative of Judaism. Should that happen, then I wouldn’t see
the value in the continuity of the Jewish People and its rich civilization.
Are you saying that the continuity of Judaism depends on its evolution?
How Judaism evolves to the next level will determine whether its
existence is justified.
I don’t believe that any group or species needs to justify its existence. At the
same time, a Judaism that stones eight-year-old girls is not a Judaism I want
to be part of.
What about those who say that the essence of Judaism is not subject
to evolution because it is unchangeable? You seem to be saying that
Judaism needs to change in order to adapt to changing social conditions.
Right. That is what I am saying.
Here we go back to the issue of authority, which was always raised

against those who wanted to change and reform Judaism. Those who
claim that Judaism has an unchangeable essence also challenge the
reformer’s knowledge about the tradition as well as about the direction
of desired change. If Judaism constantly evolves, how do we ensure
that the evolution takes place organically? At some point it’s going to
be so non-recognizable that people are going to say, “Well, that’s not a
Judaism that I can identify with or be part of.” What would you say to
these critics?
My answer is twofold. First, let me say that there are multiple Judaisms.
I think we have to accept that we’re not working towards a singular or
unified Judaism. In fact, part of the richness of the Jewish community is
the multiplicity of perspectives and practices, all of which, in my view need
to evolve. However, the evolution of Judaism could go in a variety of direc-
tions at the same time.
Second, we need to consider the way traditions evolve. I think that
the issue of female God-language is an interesting illustration of how
one can make certain suggestions for change and bring them to the atten-
tion of the community at large without trying to impose them. Some
things work and will be accepted by the community and some suggestions
don’t work and will be rejected. Jewish feminist experimentation with ritual,
liturgy, and Torah commentaries illustrates how that process can develop
without imposing unity. Some aspects of feminist creativity have excited
people and had staying power. For example, I belong to a small Jewish femi-
nist spirituality collective that has generated a lot of Jewish feminist music.
There are only thirty of us in the collective, but one of our songs, “As We
Bless the Source of Life,” has been picked up all over the country, and I’ve
even heard people singing it in Europe. This is an example of organic evolu-
tion without imposition or compulsion; people adopted the song because
they love it. There are other examples of feminist rituals, such as women’s
Seders, that have been picked up and used by the community at large.
However, other innovative feminist practices have gone by the wayside

and made little impact on contemporary Jewry. At the beginning of my
career people asked me all the time, “Aren’t you creating a new religion?”
But I don’t think we have the power to create a new religion. I think that cer-
tain things will work and seem Jewish to people, and they’ll be taken in and
absorbed, some more quickly than others. And those things that seem arti-
ficial and silly will fall by the wayside and disappear. There is no way to tell
in advance what will work and what will not, and no way to tell in retrospect
why something worked and another thing didn’t, or why some changes had
staying power. So I’m not worried about the evolution of Judaism, provided
we don’t have the fantasy that everybody is going to agree and we’re going
to have one Judaism. Diversity and plurality are the mark of a living tradi-
tion that continues to breath and whose future is open-ended.
You seem to have a rather optimistic view of the future of Judaism. Is

that so?
Yes, it is.
Any discussion of the future of Judaism has to consider ethical

questions. So far we have discussed the idea of justice. Do you see
yourself indebted to a particular tradition within philosophical ethics,
such as deontological ethics or virtue ethics?
No. My ethical reflection does not come out of a specific strand within eth-
ics. Rather, I always begin with specific issues as they are experienced in real
life; my point of departure is always praxis which I then subject to analysis
and questioning. My theoretical discourse is more like an improvisation.
This type of practice-driven theorizing has an organic quality because

it places you, the thinker, as part of your cultural environment. Like
all organisms, the interaction or exchange with the environment is
selective: some things are absorbed and others are rejected, but there
is no way to tell in advance how the process will take place. Is that
correct?
Right.
Your optimism is most interesting given the fact that we live in a post-
Holocaust era. Does the Holocaust figure in your thinking about Juda
ism, and, if so, how?
Any systematic reflection on the Holocaust is really an attempt to address

the problem of evil. In truth it was this problem that brought me into reli-
gious studies. I started reading about the Holocaust when I was twelve
and I became quite obsessed with it. I was deeply troubled by the issue of
God’s relation to the Holocaust as well as the human capacity to do evil;
how could human beings do such a thing? As a kid I also asked myself
“Could Jews have been Nazis?” “Was it simply historical accident that we,
Jews, were the victims?” “Was there something specific about the German
national character or German culture that made them the victimizers and
something about Jewish historical experience that made us victims?”
And in graduate school, I focused on the problem of evil and wrote three of
my four comprehensive exams on different aspects of the problem of evil.
Initially, I intended to write my doctoral dissertation on the Holocaust,
as a particular aspect of the problem of evil. Then I decided it would be
too difficult to immerse myself in such a painful subject for years. Instead,
I wrote a dissertation on the concept of sin in two Protestant theologians,
Tillich and Reinhold Niebuhr, and thereafter left aside reflection on the
problem of evil. When I finished the God chapter in Standing Again at Sinai
I was startled to discover that I hadn’t dealt with evil. It indicated to me that
my understanding of God had shifted in such a way that I was no longer
asking whether God could have intervened and prevented the Holocaust
or why God didn’t intervene in the last couple of years, however, I’ve real-
ized that I have to deal with evil as a feminist theologian. The fact that my
notion of God has changed so that theodicy as a formal project is no longer
of interest to me doesn’t mean I don’t have to deal with evil or that I do
not have more to say about the existence of evil. So, I find myself coming
back to the question of where evil fits into my current concept of God even
though I have a nonpersonal understanding of God. The problem of evil, of
which the Holocaust is a radical example, is a very central human question.
To some extent it parallels or is analogous to feminism. We can’t let go of
these issues, but we always come back to them in new ways.
Does the systematic reflection on evil enable you to actually confront

the existence of evil? Isn’t the existence of evil something that you have
to come to terms with rather than theorize?
Well, of course, but it is the very existence of evil that compels us to ask
ourselves what our responsibility is in relation to evil. Theorizing about evil
emerges out of the awareness that people can choose to do evil and that
there are evil institutions.
The praxis question, namely, the ethical question, is the most fundamen-
tal aspect of reflection about evil. This ethical dimension, in turn, is inter-
twined with our assumptions about God, a topic which I have debated with
Carol Christ for over three decades. It matters whether you think of God
as completely good, or not, because that assumption makes a difference
in your relationship with evil in the world including the evil that exists in
yourself. Evil is part of us and it will never go away.
The medieval philosophers saw evil as an aspect of materiality. Do you

see a connection between evil and matter?
No, I see matter as ethically neutral. Of course, if one sees it as fundamen-

tally evil, as opposed to neutral, it will have radical implications for one’s
understanding of the world. I do think that one’s attitudes towards evil
and evil in the world have implications for how we see and experience the
world, the body, ourselves, other people who we might define as evil. And at
the same time, this doesn’t address the more fundamental ethical question,
“What do I do”?
How do you define evil?
I would define evil as that which is destructive of or undermines human

flourishing and the flourishing of the biosphere. I find the traditional dis-
tinction between natural and moral evil both problematic and compelling.
Certain types of illness and natural disaster are destructive of human flour-
ishing but are different from evils that are willed. Of course, as we change
the environment more and more, the distinction between natural and
moral evil becomes less clear.
This answer, however, makes you very vulnerable to the critique of

traditionalists who say that homosexuality is evil because it undermines
human flourishing, since human flourishing depends on reproduction.
How would you address this challenge? Does theorizing about evil
really address the existence of evil? For example, poverty is an evil,
but what do we do about poverty in order to deal with this social evil?
It all depends how we frame evil (especially social or moral evil) in
relationship to other values (e.g., equality or justice).
Not every evil has to do with the question of social justice. For example,
illness is different from poverty, although some illnesses are related to pov-
erty. In some cases, evil is related to injustice, but not all evil pertains to
justice. On the other hand, many evils, such as racism, sexism, economic
inequality, homophobia, and so on are structural—they are built into the
institutions of our society. Addressing structural evil is the central chal-
lenge in creating a more just society.
How shall we deal with evil persons? One way is to explain it

psychologically by reference to traumatic experiences in early life or
more generally to the lack of love.
Right, right. I agree.
What if the propensity to inflict evil is the result of a chemical imbalance

in the brain that can be fixed with medication? In this regard an evil
person is a kind of pathology, which raises the question of responsibility.
Perhaps pathological persons are not responsible for their chemical
makeup, but they have a responsibility to take the pill that mitigates
their behavior toward others. Right?
Even if evil individuals are the result of chemical imbalance, it is still worth
philosophizing about evil. Furthermore, thinking about evil makes us more
aware of real social problems, bridging the gap between theory and praxis.
Theory and praxis should not be mutually exclusive. One can write a
book about the problem of evil that deepens one’s social activism or the
activism of others who are engaged on this issue.
This leads us back to the question of audience. To whom do you write

and what do you want to happen as a result of your writing?
I almost never write purely for an academic audience. I have written a few
essays for a strictly academic audience, but the few times I’ve done that
kind of writing, I’ve bored myself to death. So I’m writing for an intelligent,
lay audience, primarily Jewish but not exclusively Jewish. And my hope is
that my writing will lead people to act differently.
So for you, Jewish philosophy is ultimately about praxis, namely, about

changing the way we live and act? Is that correct?
My Jewish philosophy is certainly about praxis, but I don’t know that Jewish
philosophy is such for everybody else.
Do you see philosophizing, or theorizing, as a means to an end?
Yes. Theorizing about the problem of justice or injustice may lead one to act
in a certain way, and action, in turn, changes the way we theorize. The rela-
tionship between theory and praxis is not linear, but dialectical, because it
keeps going back and forth; there is a circular relationship between reflec-
tion and action, as Liberation theology has taught us.
An example is the status of women in Judaism. We have theorized that
the exclusion of women from the rabbinate is an injustice and we’ve acted
to ordain women as rabbis. But then we also realized that ordination of
women per se doesn’t really address the issue. There are other things that
go much deeper and you can’t always envision the next important issue
beyond a particular goal until you’ve achieved that goal and see what its
limits and its possibilities are. Thus the relationship between reflection
and action is dialectical and circular, a point recognized by the rabbinic
understanding of the relationship between reflection and action. The two
are complementary; they support each other. I’m a theologian because I’m
interested in theoretical questions of meaning and purpose, the existence
of God, and the existence of evil, but other people who are not theologians
are interested in changing Jewish practice.
Where does education fit into your vision and what is your view on
Jewish education as it exists today?
Well, my experience of Jewish education was not positive, and I hope

Jewish education has changed but fear it has not. My Jewish education was
very thin, it had no substance, it wasn’t interesting, it wasn’t challenging; on
the whole it was pathetic.
Was it characteristic of the Reform movement or of that particular

generation?
To some extent my education was characteristic of the Reform movement

in the 1950s and early 1960s but I have a feeling that a lot of Hebrew schools
share the same problem: the lack of intellectual challenge and substance.
Obviously, there’s a limit to what you can learn meeting once a week, but
you can engage kids in real questions and expose them to meaningful issues
even if you see them only once a week.
Do Jewish theologians, philosophers, and ethicists have a role to play in

this regard? Can they help improve Jewish education?
Yes. Jewish thinkers can get young Jews interested in Judaism as an intel-
lectual tradition and challenge them to be more reflective. The work of the
philosopher is ultimately an educational project.
Thank you so much for taking the time to converse with us. It was a
most enjoyable conversation that explored feminism, theology, justice,
social activism, and education.
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
Authored Books
1. Sex, Sin, and Grace: Women’s Experience and the Theologies of Reinhold
Niebuhr and Paul Tillich. Washington, D.C.: University Press of America,
1980.
2. Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism from a Feminist Perspective. San
Francisco: Harper & Row, 1990. German edition, 1992; Dutch edition,
1992.
3. The Coming of Lilith: Essays on Feminism, Judaism, and Sexual Ethics,
1972–2003. Boston: Beacon Press, 2005.
Edited Volumes
4. (With Joan Arnold Romero) Women and Religion: 1972. Missoula, MT:
American Academy of Religion, 1972. Revised edition, Missoula, MT:
AAR and the Scholars Press, 1974.
5. (With Carol P. Christ) Womanspirit Rising: A Feminist Reader in Religion.
San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1979. Japanese edition, 1982. Korean
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6. (With Carol P. Christ) Weaving the Visions: New Patterns in Feminist
Spirituality. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1989.
Essays
7. “The Coming of Lilith: Toward a Feminist Theology.” In Women Exploring

Theology at Grailville. Church Women United, 1972. Reprinted in
Womanspirit Rising, 198–209, and in Women in a Male Church (German),
edited by Bernadette Brooten and Norbert Greinacher, 245–58. Kaiser
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1973): 11–18. Reprinted in The Jewish Woman: New Perspectives, edited
by Elizabeth Koltun, 3–10. New York: Schocken Books, 1976. Also in
The Ethnic American Woman, edited by Edith Blicksilver, 190–95.
Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt, 1978.
140 select bibliography
9. “Carol Christ on Margaret Atwood: Some Theological Reflections.”

Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2 (Winter 1976): 331–39.
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Lilith 7 (1980): 11–12. Also in Nice Jewish Girls, edited by Evelyn Torton
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edited by Rita Gross, 23–33. Missoula, MT: The Scholars Press, 1978.
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of Feminism to Theology (Italian), edited by Mary Hunt and Rosino
Gibellini, 100–125. Querinina, 1980.
13. “Women as Body: Motherhood and Dualism.” Anima 8 (Winter
1981/1982): 56–67.
14. “Language, God, and Liturgy: A Feminist Perspective.” Response 44
(Spring 1983): 3–14.
15. “The Right Question Is Theological.” In On Being a Jewish Feminist:
A Reader, edited by Susannah Heschel, 223–33. New York: Schocken
Books, 1983. Preprinted as “God and Feminism” in Menorah: Sparks of
Jewish Renewal (February 1982): 1–2,6–8.
16. “Anti-Semitism: The Unacknowledged Racism.” In Women’s Spirit
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Pilgrim Press, 1984. Reprinted in slightly different form in Women’s
Consciousness, Women’s Conscience: A Reader in Feminist Ethics, edited
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select bibliography 141
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85.
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in the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 7 (Fall 1991): 99–108.
26. “Feminist Reflections on the State of Israel.” In Beyond Occupation:
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the Scriptures: A Feminist Introduction, edited by Elisabeth Schussler
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Sello Azul, 1994.
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34. “What’s in a Name? Exploring the Dimensions of What ‘Feminist
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A Reader, edited by Darlene Juschka, 405–10. London and New York:
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by Fernando Segovia, 487–97. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Press, 2003.
50. “Dealing with Difference Without and Within.” Journal of Feminist
Studies in Religion 19 (Spring 2003): 91–95.
51. “Judith Plaskow: Jewish Feminist Theologian.” In Transforming the
Faiths of Our Fathers: Women Who Changed American Religion, edited
by Ann Braude, 219–32. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.
52. “Womanist/Jewish Feminist Dialogue.” Union Seminary Quarterly

Review 58 (2004): 216–18.
53. “A Short History of the JFSR.” Journal of Feminism Studies in Religion 21,
no. 2 (Fall 2005): 103–6.
54. “Three Steps Forward, Two Steps Back.” Nashim: A Journal of Jewish
Women’s Studies and Gender Issues 9 (Spring 2005): 184–90.
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America, 3 vols., edited by Rosemary Skinner Keller and Rosemary
Radford Ruether, 3: 1220–29. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana
56. “The Coming of Lilith: A Response.” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion
23 (Spring 2007): 34–41.
57. “Dismantling the Gender Binary Within Judaism: The Challenge of
Transgender to Compulsory Heterosexuality.” In Heterosexism in
Contemporary World Religion: Problem and Prospect, edited by Marvin
Ellison and Judith Plaskow, 13–36. Cleveland: The Pilgrim Press, 2007.
Reprinted in Balancing on the Mechitza: Transgender in the Jewish
Community, edited by Noach Dzmura, 187–210. Berkeley: North Atlantic
Books, 2010.
58. “Feminist Theology” and “Spirituality in the United States.” In Jewish

Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia, edited by Paula
E. Hyman and Dalia Ofer. Jerusalem: Shalvi Publishing Ltd., 2007.
CD-ROM and http://jwa.org/encyclopedia.
59. “Gender Theory and Gendered Realities—An Exchange Between

Tamar Ross and Judith Plaskow.” Nashim: A Journal of Jewish Women’s
Studies and Gender Issues 13 (Spring 2007): 207–51.
60. (With Martha Ackelsberg) “Beyond Same-Sex Marriage: Social Justice
and Sexual Values in Judaism.” In Righteous Indignation: A Jewish Call
for Justice, edited by Or N. Rose, Jo Ellen Green Kaiser, and Margie
Klein, 195–205. Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights, 2008.
61. “Contemporary Reflection” on Vayeira, Yitro, Acharei Mot, and Ki Teitzei.
In The Torah: A Women’s Commentary, ed. Tamara Cohn Eskenazi and
Andrea L. Weiss, 107–8, 423–24, 696–97, 1187–88. New York: URJ Press,
2008.
62. “Embodiment, Elimination, and the Role of Toilets in Struggles for
Social Justice.” Crosscurrents 58 (Spring 2008): 51–64.
63. “Calling All Theologians.” In New Jewish Feminism: Probing the Past,
Forging the Future, edited by Rabbi Elyse Goldstein, 3–11. Woodstock,
VT: Jewish Lights, 2009.
64. (With Aysha Hidayatullah) “Beyond Sarah and Hagar: Muslim and
Jewish Reflections on Feminist Theology.” In Muslims and Jews in
America: Commonalities, Contentions, and Complexities, edited by Reza
Aslan and Aaron J. Hahn Tapper, 159–72. New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2011.
65. “The Bible on Homosexuality: A Problematic Question.” World Religions:
Belief, Culture, and Controversy. ABC-CLIO, November 2011. http://
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66. “An Accidental Dialoguer.” In My Neighbor’s Faith: Stories of Interreligious
Encounter, Growth, and Transformation, edited by Jennifer Howe Peace,
Or N. Rose, and Gregory Mobley, 56–61. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2012.
67. “Feminist Jewish Ethical Theories.” In The Oxford Handbook of Jewish
Ethics and Morality, edited by Elliot Dorff and Jonathan Crane, 272–86.
New York: Oxford University Press, 2013.
68. “Wrestling with God and Evil.” In Chapters of the Heart: Jewish Women
Sharing the Torah of Our Lives, edited by Sue Levi Elwell and Nancy
Fuchs Kreimer, 85–93. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2013.
Popular Articles
69. (With Carol P. Christ) “For the Advancement of My Career: A Form-

Critical Study in the Art of Acknowledgment.” Bulletin of the Council
on the Study of Religion 3 (1972): 10–14.
70. “The Coming of Lilith.” In Religion and Sexism: Images of Women
in the Jewish and Christian Traditions, edited by Rosemary Ruether,
341–43. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974. Reprinted in Womanguides:
Readings Toward a Feminist Theology, edited by Rosemary Ruether,
72–74. Boston: Beacon Press, 1985. Also in Four Centuries of Jewish
Women’s Spirituality, edited by Ellen Umansky and Dianne Ashton,
215–16. Boston: Beacon Press, 1992.
71. “Bringing a Daughter into the Covenant.” In Womanspirit Rising, 179–84.
72. “God: Some Feminist Questions.” Sh’ma 17 (January 9, 1987): 38–40.
73. “Beyond Egalitarianism.” Tikkun 5 (November/December 1990): 79–80.
Reprinted in The Jewish Philosophy Reader, edited by Daniel Frank,
Oliver Leaman, and Charles Manekin, 519–22. London and New York:
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Lerner. Oakland and Jerusalem: Tikkun Books, 1992.
74. “‘It is Not in Heaven’: Feminism and Religious Authority.” Tikkun 5
(March/April 1990): 39–40.
75. “Up against the Wall.” Tikkun 5 (July/August 1990): 25–26.
76. “Facing the Ambiguity of God.” Tikkun 6 (September/October 1991):
70, 96. Reprinted in The Jewish Philosophy Reader, 510–12.
77. “Jewish Anti‑Paganism.” Tikkun 6 (March/April 1991): 66–67.
78. “About Men.” Tikkun 7 (July/August 1992): 51, 76.
79. “Creating a Feminist Judaism.” Manna 37 (Autumn 1992), supplement.
80. “First Year Faculty” and “Promotion and Tenure.” Guide to the Perplexing:
A Survival Manual for Women in Religious Studies, 45–67. Atlanta:
Scholars Press, 1992.
81. “The Problem of Evil.” Reconstructionist 57 (Spring 1992): 17–19.
82. “What’s Wrong with Hierarchy?” Tikkun 7 (January/February 1992):
65–66.
83. “Burning in Hell Conservative Movement Style.” Tikkun 8 (May/June
1993): 49–50.
84. “The Year of the Agunah.” Tikkun 8 (September/October 1993): 52–53.
85. “Dealing with the Hard Stuff.” Tikkun 9 (September/October 1994):
57–58.
86. “Lesbian and Gay Rights: Asking the Right Questions.” Tikkun 9 (March/
April 1994): 31–32.
87. “Im and B’li: Women in the Conservative Movement.” Tikkun 10
(January/February 1995): 55–56.
88. “Sex and Yom Kippur.” Tikkun 10 (September/October 1995): 71–72.
89. “Spirituality and Politics: Lessons from B’not Esh.” Tikkun 10 (June/July
1995): 31–32, 85.
90. “Progressive Homophobia.” Tikkun 11 (March/April 1996): 65–67.
91. “Judith Plaskow’s Un‑Orthodox Take on the Feminism and Orthodoxy
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92. “Indulgences for the Millennium.” Springfield Union News, December
26, 1998.
93. “Innocent Victims.” Religious News Service (May 1998).
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95. “Expanding the Jewish Feminist Agenda.” Sh’ma 30, no. 568 (January
2000): 12.
96. “Breaking the Silence About Class” and “Remembering Jewish Feminist
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97. Comment on the Shema. In Pray Tell: A Hadassah Guide to Jewish
Prayer, edited by Rabbi Jules Harlow, et al., 58. Woodstock, VT: Jewish
Lights Publishing, 2003.
98. “The Continuing Value of Separatism.” In The Women’s Passover
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110. Review of Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism, by Mary
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1998): 21–22.

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Judith Plaskow

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/lcjp

Feminism, Theology, and Justice

Hava Tirosh-Samuelson and Aaron W. Hughes

The Contributors .............................................................................................. vii

Editors’ Introduction to Series ..................................................................... ix

Judith Plaskow: An Intellectual Portrait ................................................... 1

The Academy as Real Life: New Participants and Paradigms

Jewish Theology in Feminist Perspective ................................................. 45

Authority, Resistance, and Transformation: Jewish Feminist

Anti-Judaism in Feminist Christian Interpretation ............................... 83

Interview with Judith Plaskow .................................................................... 97

Select Bibliography .......................................................................................... 139

Hava Tirosh-Samuelson (Ph.D., Hebrew University, 1978) is Irving and

Aaron W. Hughes (Ph.D., Indiana University Bloomington, 2000) holds

It is customary to begin studies devoted to the topic of Jewish philoso-

1 Alexander Altmann once remarked:

“philosophy” and instead envisage themselves as working in a decidedly

more constructive. Many of the volumes that appear in the Library of

Jewish philosophy as an academic discourse is quite distinct from Jewish

The purpose of the Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophers is

simultaneously records Jewish philosophical activity and demonstrates its

The Feminist Vision: Methodology, Critique, and Reconstruction

Wishing to end millennia of male dominance which has been harmful to

1 Judith Plaskow, “Judith Plaskow: Jewish Feminist Theologian,” in Transforming the

her revolutionary vision and to whom she is intellectually indebted.

3 Judith Plaskow, “Intersections: An Introduction,” in The Coming of Lilith: Essays on

disembodied, value-neutral theorizing; rather, philosophizing begins with

4 The dynamics between “hermeneutics of suspicion” and “hermeneutics of remem-

Biography and Career

State of Israel, especially toward the Palestinians.20 A regular contributor to

Jewish Feminist Theology

Plaskow’s life work is governed by one overarching and purposeful vision:

20 Plaskow, Standing Again at Sinai, 107–19.

By “women’s experience” (a topic analyzed already in her doctoral dis-

recover what Yosef Haim Yerushalmi called “Jewish group memory.”29

30 Plaskow’s feminist appropriation of ancient Jewish midrashim on the female demon,

that the halakhic tradition must continue to respond to “the experience of

interpretation by Emmanuel Levinas, the philosopher who made Otherness

male-centered God-language and then the creation of a new God-language.

Justice and Sexual Ethics

Judaism, according to Plaskow, expresses deep anxiety and fear of women’s

35 The Coming of Lilith, 182–83.

The Chapters That Follow

Plaskow is a utopian thinker whose commitment to the pursuit of truth

argument for the inclusion of sexually marginalized and oppressed groups

46 Judith Plaskow, “Authority, Resistance, and Transformation: Jewish Feminist Reflec-

I find it impossible to speak here tonight at Disney World without taking

“others” near at hand (Neusner:1049). Judaism had particular interest to

As previously excluded groups have entered the AAR, we have brought

commit ourselves to the continuing processes of diversifying the AAR

Neglect of these issues has obviously been a product of privilege, but

generated by market capitalism between countries of the North and South,

I am simply urging that we give higher priority to a crucial issue that is

AAUP Committee G. 1992. “Report on the Status of Non-Tenure-Track Faculty.” Academe

Theology and the Academy

* “Jewish Theology in Feminist Perspective,” in Feminist Perspectives on Jewish Studies,

testable.1 Although this dichotomy has been repeatedly questioned, it still

Theology and Judaism

* “Jewish Theology in Feminist Perspective,” in Feminist Perspectives on Jewish Studies,

4 These sentiments are more often expressed orally—or even institutionally—than

at least closet theologians? The practices that are supposedly central to

Jewish feminists have considerable experience of the extent to which the