Meneket Rivkah

A book of ethics by one of the first female Jewish writers

The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Approaches to the Hebrew Bible brings together 37 essential essays written by leading international scholars, examining crucial points of analysis within the field of feminist Hebrew Bible studies. Organized into four major areas - globalization, neoliberalism, media, and intersectionality - the essays collectively provide vibrant, relevant, and innovative contributions to the field. The topics of analysis focus heavily on gender and queer identity, with essays touching on African, Korean, and European feminist hermeneutics, womanist and interreligious readings, ecofeminist and animal biblical studies, migration biblical studies, the role of gender binary voices in evangelical-egalitarian approaches, and the examination of scripture in light of trans women's voices. The volume also includes essays examining the Old Testament as recited in music, literature, film, and video games. The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Approaches to the Hebrew Bible charts a culturally, hermeneutically, and exegetically cutting-edge path for the ongoing development of biblical studies grounded in feminist, womanist, gender, and queer perspectives.

The Unknown History of Jewish Women—On Learning and Illiteracy: On Slavery and Liberty is a comprehensive study on the history of Jewish women, which discusses their absence from the Jewish Hebrew library of the "People of the Book" and interprets their social condition in relation to their imposed ignorance and exclusion from public literacy. The book begins with a chapter on communal education for Jewish boys, which was compulsory and free of charge for the first ten years in all traditional Jewish communities. The discussion continues with the striking absence of any communal Jewish education for girls until the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and the implications of this fact for twentieth-century immigration to Israel (1949-1959) The following chapters discuss the social, cultural and legal contexts of this reality of female illiteracy in the Jewish community—a community that placed a supreme value on male education. The discussion focuses on the patriarchal order and the postulations, rules, norms, sanctions and mythologies that, in antiquity and the Middle Ages, laid the religious foundations of this discriminatory reality.

This edited collection focuses on migrant women and their families, aiming to study their migration patterns in a historical and gendered perspective from early modernity to contemporary times, and to reassess the role and the nature of their commitment in migration dynamics. It develops an incisive dialogue between migration studies and gender studies. Migrant women, men and their families are studied through three different but interconnected and overlapping standpoints that have been identified as crucial for a gender approach: institutions and law, labour and the household economy, and social networks. The book also promotes the potential of an inclusive approach, tackling various types of migration (domestic and temporary movements, long-distance and international migration, temporary/seasonal mobility) and arguing that different migration phenomena can be observed and understood by posing common questions to different contexts. Migration patterns are shown to be multifaceted and stratified phenomena, resulting from a range of entangled economic, cultural and social factors. This book will be of interest to academics and students of economic history, as well as those working in gender studies and migration studies.

The encounter of Jews with the Enlightenment movement has so far been considered almost entirely from a masculine perspective. This highly original study, based on analysis of the correspondence and literary works of a group of educated Jewish women, demonstrates their intellectual proclivities, feminine awareness, and social activities, as well as their attitudes to marriage, traditional family frameworks, and religion. In doing so it makes a significant contribution to German Jewish history as well as to gender studies.

Zeev Gries’s analysis of what books were being published and where shows the importance of the printed book in disseminating religious and secular ideas, creating a new class of Jewish intellectuals, and making knowledge of the world available to women. This unique perspective on Jewish intellectual history in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries through the history of book-publishing throws light on many of the key Jewish cultural issues of the time.

This is an indispensable resource about the role of Jewish women from post-biblical times to the twentieth century. Unique in its approach, it is structured so that each chapter, which is divided into three parts, covers a specific period and geographical area. The first section of the book contains an overview, explaining how historical events affected Jews in general and Jewish women in particular. This is followed by a section of biographical entries of women of the period whose lives are set in their economic, familial, and cultural backgrounds. The third and last part of each chapter, "The World of Jewish Women," is organized by topic and covers women's activities and interests and how Jewish laws concerning women developed and changed. This comprehensive work is an easy-to-use sourcebook, synopsizing rich and diverse resources. By examining history and analyzing the dynamics of Jewish law and custom, it illuminates the circumstances of Jewish women's lives and traces the changes that have occurred throughout the centuries. It casts a new and clear light on Jewish women as individuals and sets women firmly within the context of their own cultural and historical periods. The book contains illustrations, boxed text, extensive endnotes, and indices that list each woman by name. It is ideal for women's groups and study groups as well as students and scholars.

In Biblical Women and Jewish Daily Life in the Middle Ages, Elisheva Baumgarten examines how medieval Jewish engagement with the Bible--especially in the tellings, retellings, and illustrations of stories of women--offers a window onto aspects of the daily lives and cultural mentalités of Ashkenazic Jews in the High Middle Ages.