Women S Minyan

"Naomi Ragen's first play premiered in 2002 at Israel's National Theater, Habimah, and had its American premiere at Duke University in North Carolina in 2005. It is based on a true story: a Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) woman, wife of a rabbi, mother of twelve, leaves her family for unspecified reasons. The woman is punished; the community's "modesty squad" prevents her from seeing her children, and the friend she is staying with is physically attacked. Desperate to regain access to her children, she determines that the women of her community must stand in judgement, hoping that once they hear the truth of why she left, they will allow her to be reunited with her children."--BOOK JACKET.

How has a legal tradition determined by men affected the lives of women? What are the traditional Jewish views of marriage, divorce, sexuality, contraception, abortion? Women and Jewish Law gives contemporary readers access to the central texts of the Jewish religious tradition on issues of special concern to women. Combining a historical overview with a thoughtful feminist critique, this pathbreaking study points the way for “informed change” in the status of women in Jewish life.

Women's prayer groups have recently become a subject of controversy. These services, organized and attended by women who wish to become more actively involved in communal prayer while remaining faithful to Halakhah, are increasing in number and have come under attack from several points of view. In a source-filled and closely reasoned discussion of the obligations of women in regard to private and public prayer. Torah study, and aliyot, Rabbi Weiss analyzes the relevant passages in the Talmud and Rishonim. He concludes that there are no halakhic impediments to the functioning of such prayer groups. The expanded edition includes a section on the reading of the Megillah for women.

This volume of essays grew out of a symposium organized by Judith Hoch-Smith and Anita Spring for the 1974 American Anthropological Association meetings in Mexico City. The two-part symposium was enti tled "Women in Ritual and Symbolic Systems: I. Midwives, Madonnas, and Mediums; ll. Prostitutes, Witches, and Androgynes. " The sym posium participants were asked to explore theological, ritual, and sym bolic aspects-both positive and negative-of the feminine cultural do main, using ethnographic materials with which they were familiar. The resulting papers have been revised, edited, and gathered together in Women in Ritual and Symbolic Roles. The theoretical importance of these papers for the study of women's participation in culture and society rests on the assumption that reli gious ideas are paramount forces in social life, that relationships be tween the sexes, the nature of female sexuality, and the social and cul tural roles of women are in large part defined by religious ideas. That this proposition remains valid long after religion itself has ceased to be a living truth in the lives of many people can be seen from the tenacious ness of Judeo-Christian ideas about women in the contemporary West ern world. Both the expansion of life options for women and the creation of more positive cultural images of the female are intimately related to changes in the my tho-symbolic portraits that people carry around in their heads. These portraits are almost exclusively constructed from mythological and religious conceptions inherent in all facets of culture.

The rise of Jewish feminism, a branch of both second-wave feminism and the American counterculture, in the late 1960s had an extraordinary impact on the leadership, practice, and beliefs of American Jews. Women Remaking American Judaism is the first book to fully examine the changes in American Judaism as women fought to practice their religion fully and to ensure that its rituals, texts, and liturgies reflected their lives. In addition to identifying the changes that took place, this volume aims to understand the process of change in ritual, theology, and clergy across the denominations. The essays in Women Remaking American Judaism offer a paradoxical understanding of Jewish feminism as both radical, in the transformational sense, and accomodationist, in the sense that it was thoroughly compatible with liberal Judaism. Essays in the first section, Reenvisioning Judaism, investigate the feminist challenges to traditional understanding of Jewish law, texts, and theology. In Redefining Judaism, the second section, contributors recognize that the changes in American Judaism were ultimately put into place by each denomination, their law committees, seminaries, rabbinic courts, rabbis, and synagogues, and examine the distinct evolution of women's issues in the Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, and Reconstructionist movements. Finally, in the third section, Re-Framing Judaism, essays address feminist innovations that, in some cases, took place outside of the synagogue. An introduction by Riv-Ellen Prell situates the essays in both American and modern Jewish history and offers an analysis of why Jewish feminism was revolutionary. Women Remaking American Judaism raises provocative questions about the changes to Judaism following the feminist movement, at every turn asking what change means in Judaism and other American religions and how the fight for equality between men and women parallels and differs from other changes in Judaism. Women Remaking American Judaism will be of interest to both scholars of Jewish history and women's studies.

Published in Association with the Solomon B. Freehof Institute of Progressive Halakhah General Editor: Walter Jacob+

Rabbi Moshe Meiselman addresses the attitude of Jewish law to women and how the Jewish tradition views the contemporary challenge of feminism. He discusses in detail such current issues as creative ritual, women in a minyan, aliyot for women, talit and tefillin. The question of agunah is also given lengthy consideration. The author mixes current issues with scholarly ones and gives full treatment to other issues such as learning Torah by women, women position in court both as witnesses and as litigants, the marriage ceremony & marital life. — Amazon.com.

In October of 2014, 12-year-old Sasha Lutt read from a tiny Torah scroll as a part of her bat mitzvah in the Women's section of the plaza at the Western Wall, Judaism's holiest prayer site. Surrounded by members of the multi-denominational organization, the Women of the Wall, one of whom had smuggled the scroll into the plaza, Sasha became the first woman to read from the Torah at the site. For more than twenty five years, the Women of the Wall have been waging a campaign to gain the Israeli government's permission to pray at the Western Wall. Despite widespread media coverage, this is the first comprehensive study of their struggle. Yuval Jobani and Nahshon Perez offer an in-depth analysis of the Women of the Wall's attempts to modify Jewish-orthodox mainstream religious practice from within and invest it with a new, egalitarian content. They present a comprehensive survey of the numerous legal rulings about the case and consider the broader political and social significance of the Women of the Wall's activism. In this way, Jobani and Perez are able to address broader issues of religion-state relations: How should governments manage religious plurality within their borders? How should governments respond to the requests of minorities that conflict with ostensibly mainstream interpretations of a given tradition? How should governments manage disputed sacred sites and spaces located in the public sphere? Women of the Wall: Navigating Religion in Sacred Sites offers a critical new look at theories of religion-state relations and a fresh examination of religious conflicts over sacred sites and public spaces.