The One: God's Unity and Genderless Divinity in Judaism

This course will examine aspects of gender in the Jewish tradition. Students are expected to develop a sense of the historical evolution of Judaism, and hence an understanding of its plurality. The first half of the course will focus on the canonical sources of ancient Judaism, namely the Hebrew Bible and rabbinic literature. Themes will include the constructions of gender through narrative, metaphor, and law, as well as the problem of the gender of God. The second half of the course will explore topics i Jewish mysticism and asceticism, and finally the challenges of modernity, especially as they relate to egalitarian worship, feminist theologies, and Judaism as it is constructed as part of an ethno-national identity, in Israel and the United States. In addition to developing an historical understanding of Judaism (in contrast to an essentialist dogmatic understanding of it), students will also reflect on the construction of gender identities as a social-political product. The diversity of readings will suggest that both Judaism and gender are not stable unified essences, found in a person by virtue of their birth, but rather a complex set of performative choices, resulting in the identity including what a person chooses to make of it. Students will be invited to question the validity of any specific example or claim found in a text, and to consider its relevance to present-day discourse in their own lives.

The New Jewish Canon, 2020

A feminist critique of Judaism as a patriarchal tradition and an exploration of the increasing involvement of women in naming and shaping Jewish tradition.

Melilah: Manchester Journal of Jewish Studies (1759-1953)

Jewish feminists have been criticizing and reformulating their tradition's theological language, concepts and ethics since the 1970s. With principal reference to the work of Judith Plaskow, Rachel Adler, Tamar Ross, and Melissa Raphael, this article outlines some key aspects of the Jewish feminist theological project. The article goes on to suggest that while Orthodox Jewish feminism might attend more closely to a revision of the gendered theology that informs its halakhic observance, the prophetic momentum of liberal Jewish feminist theology might be greater were it to profess a more personalist, realist account of the exercise of the divine redemptive will in history.

Description of the Assignment: Discuss the question of what we can say about women and their roles in early Judaism. Compare the role of women in Jewish communities with that in Christian and emerging Muslim communities. Base your discussion on the course readings, both the literature given in the syllabus and the literature for the fixed exam. Bio‐anatomy vs The Individual…and The Twist From a methodological point of view, the topic at hand is hugely difficult because it touches on every skein of human relations. The question arises immediately, therefore, as to which characteristics are common to all the threads of all the skeins that touch on the topic. I chose the title " Bio‐anatomy vs. The Individual… and The Twist " because I see those three concepts as the protagonists every time I struggle to comprehend the source of the problematics that has plagued relations between men and women seemingly since day one. Let us make use of a bit of dialectics and horistics, then. I would like to define Individual as it is used in this paper: Individual is the sum of mental, moral, and cultural characteristics that make up the personality. Since men and women are surely more similar than different, perhaps it is best to start looking at the differences first.

Gender Forum: Gender and Jewish Culture, 2008

"Concentrating on the foundations of monotheistic religions, Magda Romanska’s contribution “Performing the Covenant: Akedah and the Origins of Masculinity” re-evaluates the covenant between Abraham and God from a gender perspective. Drawing on Derrida and Kierkegaard, she analyses the male ethics of self-sacrifice as well as the gendered connection between death and wisdom. In an analysis of Sarah’s part in the story she then describes the systematic exclusion of women from the covenant with God, and hence from the possibility of becoming an ethical subject within this logic. The mechanisms through which this exclusion is achieved are shown to be manifold – the ritual of circumcision, binding men to each other and collectively to God, is elaborated on alongside the narrative silencing of Sarah and Abrahams privilege of being able to hear the voice of God. Sarah’s death, in this context, operates on a very different level than the sacrifice requested of Abraham and reveals that the only path to the divine open for women is to become the subject-object of sacrifice." - Editorial, Gender Forum: Gender and Jewish Culture, 2008

2018

Can women be Jews? When the Jewish Theological Seminary, the seat of Conservative Judaism, decided to ordain women as rabbis, it faced a dilemma: all students (until then, all men) were expected to observe Jewish religious law, observing the Sabbath and holidays strictly, praying three times a day, wearing a head covering, and so forth. Should the new women students follow the Jewish laws incumbent upon men, but from which women are exempt? For example, men are required to put on phylacteries for weekday morning prayers, whereas women are not only exempt, but, according to some authorities, forbidden to wear phylacteries. Men are expected to wear a head covering (yarmulke), whereas women are not (though married women, in Orthodox custom, wear a scarf, hat, or even a wig). Men wear ritual fringes under their clothes every day, donning a prayer shawl with fringes for morning prayer, whereas women, again, are exempt or forbidden.