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Twenty-five years ago, a group known as Ezrat Nashim challenged the Conservative movement to provide women with equal access to the religious and educational institutions of Conservative Judaism. While most of the demands made by Ezrat Nashim have now been met, the Conservative movement has by no means achieved the full integration of women into religious life. Moreover, it is unclear how Conservative Judaism has responded to feminism; has the Movement become "engendered" or has it merely allowed women to do those things previously restricted to men? This article explores the impact of feminism on Conservative Judaism from the personal perspective of the author, a graduate of the Jewish Theological Seminary and an active Conservative Jew.

Front Matter -- Half Title Page -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Dedication Page -- Table of Contents -- Preface -- Acknowledgments -- Content -- Beginnings -- Beginning Again -- The Necessity of Poetry in My Life -- Report from the Trenches -- Passion -- Yizkor -- Israel -- Repairing the World: The Work of Tikkun Olam -- Daily Prayer -- We All Stood Together -- Brigadoon, A Place for Dreams to Grow -- Readers' and Writers' Guide -- Back Matter -- Glossary -- Index of Poems -- Literary Sources -- About the Author -- Back Cover.

Between 1391 and the end of the 15th century, many Spanish Jews were forced to convert to Christianity, though many maintained clandestine ties to Judaism. This study demonstrates the role played by the crypto-Jewish women of Castile in the perpetuation of crypto-Jewish traditions and culture

This paper examines the role of ritual purification in the lives of female descendants of the Spanish crypto-Jews. For some descendants, the discovery of crypto-Jewish heritage has led to a desire to reclaim the Sephardic faith of their ancestors. At the heart of this reclamation process is the adoption and practice of Jewish rituals and customs. Among the rituals that have become especially important for female descendants is the act of ritual immersion. Through an ethnographic study of crypto-Jewish culture in the Americas, this research analyzes the role of mikveh in the lives of women who have chosen ritual immersion as a symbolic act of return to Judaism.

The immigration of anusim or crypto-Jews to New Spain took place from 1492 to 1700. The first to arrive came from Spain with the conquerors and colonizers; Portuguese anusim started to arrive in 1580. Hostility and secrecy played an important role in the adaptation of anusim to life in America because they had to keep their religion in secret. Mexico offered a familiar culture and the possibility of contact with the mother country. Family structure was centered upon the mother. The role women played in the preservation of Judaism was very important, since they were responsible for the way in which the religion was passed on through several centuries even when they were isolated from centers of worship.

AbstractIn the biblical book of Leviticus, the whole life of the Hebrew people is codified under the aspect of purity and impurity, and the reintegration into purity. When read in the light of gender, these prescriptions show that women are twice as impure as men, while their monetary value is half. Using the semiotic approach developed by A. J. Greimas, this study shows that, beneath the religious discourse obscuring this valuation, is an equally gendered ideology. The source of this valuation is not the foundational events which engender mosaic law, but its roots are to be found in deeper mythical ground. For the condition of women to change, the issue of their impurity—inferiority must be treated at this level. A striking example illustrating this argument is the persistence of purification rites related to the menstrual cycle in modern Orthodox Judaism. Over the course of centuries, the code that contains them has become obsolete. Nevertheless, they remain in place through successive reinterpretations, which do not address the real reason for their existence.

Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Table of Contents -- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS -- INTRODUCTION -- ABBREVIATIONS -- 1 German Jews between Fulfillment & Disillusion The Individual and the Community -- 2 Gemeinschaft within Gemeinde Religious Ferment in Weimar Liberal Judaism -- 3 Gemeindeorthodoxie in Weimar Germany The Approaches of Nehemiah Anton Nobel and Isak Unna -- 4 Turning Inward Jewish Youth in Weimar Germany -- 5 Between Deutschtum & Judentum Ideological Controversies within the Centralverein -- 6 "Verjudung des Judentums" Was There a Zionist Subculture in Weimar Germany? -- 7 Written Out of History Bundists in Vienna and the Varieties of Jewish Experience in the Austrian First Republic -- 8 Jewish Ethnicity in a New Nation-State The Crisis of Identity in the Austrian Republic -- 9 Gender, Identity, & Community Jewish University Women in Germany and Austria -- 10 The Crisis of the Jewish Family in Weimar Germany Social Conditions and Cultural Representations -- 11 "Youth in Need" Correctional Education and Family Breakdown in German Jewish Families -- 12 Decline & Survival of Rural Jewish Communities -- CONTRIBUTORS -- INDEX

In spite of a common assumption that most major sources of immigration to Israel have dwindled, it seems there are always new waves of Jews, sometimes from the most unexpected places, ready to return from their diaspora to their "homeland." The discovery and the dramatic exodus of Ethiopian Jews, for example, was completely unforeseen by the founders of the state. So too was the influx of Jews from the crumbling Soviet Union, whose prospects of immigration and even of survival as Jews seemed most unlikely only a few years ago. Some Jewish romantics are still looking for the "ten lost tribes" hidden in distant, exotic lands. No doubt, one can always discover, away from home, some rituals and traditions reminiscent of Judaism. I remember my own youthful fascination with the fate of the lost Israelites banished from their land, who ended up beyond the mythical Sambation river. No less enchanting were the stories of the Jewish kingdoms headed by heroic warriors and queens. Those mythical Jews seemed far more appealing than many of the men and women I met in my neighborhood.

Reading a text is an ethical activity for Emmanuel Levinas. His moral philosophy considers written texts to be natural places to discover relations of responsibility in Western philosophical systems which are marked by extreme violence and totalizing hatred. While ethics is understood to mean a relationship with the other and reading is the appropriation of the other to the self, readings according to Levinas naturally entail relationships with the other. Levinas's own writings are often frought with the struggle between his own maleness, the concerns of feminism, and the Judaism that marks his contributions to the debates of the Talmud. This book uses male feminism as its perspective in presenting the applications of Levinas's ethical vision to texts whose readings have presented moral dilemmas for women readers. Levinas's philosophical theories can provide keys to unlock the difficulties of these texts whose readings will provide models of reading as ethical acts beginning with the ethical contract in Song of Songs where the assumption of a woman writer begins the elaboration of issues that sets a male reader as her other. From the reader's vantage point of seeing the self as other, other issues of male feminism become increasingly poignant, ranging from the solicitude of listening to Céline (Chapter 2), the responsibility for noise in Nizan (Chapter 3), the asymmetrical pattern of face-to-face relationships in Maupassant (Chapter 4), the sovereignty of laughter in Bataille and Zola (Chapter 5), the call of the other in Italo Svevo (Chapter 6), the Woman as Other in Breton (Chapter 7), the ethical self in Drieu la Rochelle (Chapter 8), the response to Hannah Arendt (Chapter 9), and the vulnerability of Bernard-Henri Lévy (Chapter 10). The male feminist reader is thus the incarnation of the struggle at the core of the issues outlined by Levinas for the act of reading as an ethical endeavor

Civil law in the United States rarely helps to enforce religious standards or demands that people perform actions whose significance relates to religious obligations. Yet, some American states do have such involvement with certain observances of Orthodox and Conservative Judaism. Many states enforce kosher requirements, to which Orthodox and some Conservative Jews adhere. The laws, which penalize fraud in the labeling of products as kosher, serve the secular interest in preventing deception of consumers. However, the laws also force the state to decide when religious regulations have been violated. Orthodox and Conservative Jewish divorces raise a second kind of involvement. The law pressures people to perform an act whose significance connects with a sense of religious obligation. Jewish law does not permit a woman who is divorced under civil law to remarry unless her husband grants her a get. Thus, a husband may obtain a civil divorce which effectively blocks his wife's remarriage. New York has adopted statutes that aim to force divorcing husbands to grant gittin to their wives, and judicial decisions in other states have a similar effect. These laws and rulings contribute to civil equality of men and women, and they give practical substance to the civil right to remarry. The cost is the state's interference with what is, in a sense, a religious matter. The wife is already free under the civil law to remarry after the civil divorce. Should the state not leave religious performance and ideas of religious obligation to the private realm? These issues raise deep questions of constitutionality and wisdom. I concentrate on constitutionality, but matters of legislative and judicial wisdom lie in the background. The aspiration of this Article is not to provide a comprehensive approach to the religion clauses, using kosher and get laws as illustrations. Rather, my positions on how courts should treat these laws highlight im portant aspects of establishment and free exercise inquiry. The analysis reveals a number of ...