Product Description: Feminist theories maintain that gender issues are a ubiquitous component of our lives, intersecting with every aspect of the society in which we live and interact. Because the feminist debate has included questions important to Jewish discourse, including religion, antisemitism, Zionism, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it is not surprising that such matters should also be of concern to Jewish women, many of whom have played an active role in feminist movements...read more

The rule that exempts women from rituals that need to be performed at specific times (so-called timebound, positive commandments) has served for centuries to stabilize Jewish gender. It has provided a rationale for women's centrality at home and their absence from the synagogue. Departing from dominant popular and scholarly views, Elizabeth Shanks Alexander argues that the rule was not conceived to structure women's religious lives, but rather became a tool for social engineering only after it underwent shifts in meaning during its transmission. Alexander narrates the rule's complicated history, establishing the purposes for which it was initially formulated and the shifts in interpretation that led to its being perceived as a key marker of Jewish gender. At the end of her study, Alexander points to women's exemption from particular rituals (Shema, tefillin, and Torah study), which, she argues, are better places to look for insight into rabbinic gender.

Product Description: An international collection of ecumenical, gender-sensitive interpretations The latest volume in the Bible and Women series seeks to provide an ecumenical, gender-sensitive interpretation and reception history of the Writings and later wisdom traditions including Ben Sira and the Wisdom of Solomon...read more

Product Description: Jewish and Islamic histories have long been interrelated. Both traditions emerged from ancient cultures born in the Middle East and both are rooted in texts and traditions that have often excluded women. At the same time, both groups have recently seen a resurgence in religious orthodoxy among women, as well as growing feminist movements that challenge traditional religious structures...read more

Product Description: Adora's mahogany hair and violet eyes captivated young Prince Murad the moment he saw her in a convent garden, and their love flowered like the peach blossoms surrounding them. But Orkahm, Grand Turk of an empire, claimed Adora for his bride, tearing her from her young love as she wept bitter tears...read more

Product Description: This book offers a fresh perspective on classical Jewish literature by providing a gender-based, feminist reading of rabbinical anecdotes and legends. Viewing rabbinical legends as sources that generate perceptions about women and gender, Inbar Raveh provides answers to questions such as how the Sages viewed women; how they formed and molded their characterization of them; how they constructed the ancient discourse on femininity; and what the status of women was in their society...read more

Product Description: Most ancient societies were patriarchal in outlook, but not all patriarchies are equally condescending toward women. Impelled by the gnawing question of whether the inferiority of women is integral to the Torah's vision, Sassoon sets out to determine where the Bible, the Talmud, and related literature, especially the Dead Sea Scrolls, sit on this continuum of patriarchal condescension...read more

Product Description: Chapters of the Heart: Jewish Women Sharing the Torah of Our Lives invites readers into the lives of twenty women for whom Jewish language and texts provide a lens for understanding their experiences. The authors don't just use religious words (texts, theologies, or liturgies) like a cookbook...read more

Product Description: This book is dedicated to the study of the halakhic status of women in the synagogue and in public life. Rabbi Golinkin deals with the tension which exists between Jewish Law and modernity, striving to bridge the gap between tradition and change...read more

Product Description: This work is of importance to anyone with an interest in whether women, especially Jewish Ashkenazic women, had a Renaissance. Many Pious Women is an annotated translation with extensive introductory essays of a unique 16th-century manuscript from Italy in Western Yiddish...read more

Product Description: This monograph is the unique and ultimate critical examination of historical and conceptual Second-Wave Jewish feminism and its fledgling theological project. For the first time in one volume the Jewish feminist corpus, its methods, forms, sacral reflections, its diverse God-language, its rich and varied theological discursive, and the foundational, personal-spiritual, and elaborated expositions of its scholars Judith Plaskow, Rachel Adler, Marcia Falk, Rebecca Alpert, Lynn Gottlieb, Rita Gross (now Buddhist), Naomi Janowitz, Maggie Wenig, Ellen Umansky, Jill Hammer (among many others) are critically examined within an analytical framework that asks: 1...read more

Product Description: Debbie Shapiro is a writer who knows how to listen - and she knows how to find interesting, unusual, and inspiring women to listen to. In thirty-four wide-ranging interviews, Debbie speaks with women of all ages and backgrounds, including a convert from the Philippines, a woman hidden as a child in Bergen-Belsen, a Bais Yaakov principal creating a school in the desert, a woman who grew up in the Mirrer Yeshiva, and a religious woman who drives a "for-women-only" taxi...read more

Product Description: Adora! Her beauty was legend. And in the dying days of the great Byzantine Empire that last vestige of what had once been Imperial Rome her value as the emperor's daughter was priceless. Three men claimed her as wife. Orkhan, the powerful Ottoman sultan; the dashing pirate Alexander, lord of Mesembria; and Prince Murad, to whom Adora's heart truly belonged...read more

Product Description: Are abortion and birth control permitted in Jewish law? Does Judaism require women to marry? May women be called to the Torah? Why are women excused from certain commandments in the Torah, and are they permitted to fulfill those from which they are exempt? How does Judaism view Torah study for girls? What is the status of women in Jewish religious, civil, and criminal law? In The Woman in Jewish Law and Tradition, Michael Kaufman explores these and other issues in order to dispel the myths and misunderstandings that have distorted the popular conception of women in Judaism and been propagated for generations...read more