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and deprives young women from feeling pride in and solidarity with those who made it possible for women to become full participants in contemporary life, including academic life. Likewise, Jewish students are shortchanged by Laura’s “longing for change.” Suppose Laura’s vision of Jewish Studies prevails. What would be the results? The answer, in my view, is very problematic. Laura’s methodology makes it difficult for students (Jewish or not) to treat Judaism respectfully, let alone feel at home in it. On the basis of Laura’s analysis of rabbinic sources, a student cannot but feel outrage, disappointment, and even contempt toward the tradition. The actual, lived experience of Jews through the ages will become, at best, texts to be deconstructed with the exclusive lens of feminist norms rather than external realities to be understood on their own terms. While I agree that feminism is essential to the growth of Jewish Studies, I have serious reservations about Laura’s methodology and its implications. I see Jewish Studies as a perpetual pursuit of truth that I take to be a religious activity informed by contemporary science and philosophy Such scientific inquiry is necessarily self-criticaland ever evolving,but it presupposesthat reality is not merely a hurnan construct. In accord with the messianic impulse of Judaism, I live in the awareness of the ”not yet”: the world is unredeemedbut not unredeemable. This is a hopeful stance toward life that recognizes the created nature of humans and their existential dependence on God. As Jews, scholars of JewishStudies, and feminists, we could contribute to the process of redemption if we remember where we come from and to whom we are ultimately accountable. Hava Tirosh-Samuelsonis an Associate Professor of Hist o y at Arizona State University.She is the author of the award winning book, Between Worlds: The Life and Work of Rabbi David ben Judah Messer Leon, and numerous articles on Jewish intellectual histoy in the Middle Ages and the early modern period. Engendering Judaism: An Inclusive Theology and Ethics Rachel Adler (The Jewish Publication Society, 1998. 269 pp. $24.95) Rereading the Rabbis: A Woman’s Voice Judith Hauptman (Westview PressJ998. 285 pp. $20.00) Spinning Fantasies: Rabbis, Gender, and History Miriam Peskowitz (University of California Press, 1997. 249 pp. $17.95) @ Jewish feminists -and also reveal some of the arguments and debates that currently enliven the field of Jewish feminist thought. In Rereading the Rabbis, Judith Hauptman offers a methodology for exploring the ways in which women, and their particular concerns, are handled in talmudic law. She stresses the importance of thinking about the rabbinic legal system as a whole and emphasizes the need to read individual passages both contextually and intertextually. Such a close and careful reading makes it obvious how a particular passage works in relation to associated rabbinic texts and how it functions as part of How does a feminist read rabbinic text? What questions does she bring to her reading? What resources does she draw on? What methods does she apply? Three recent publications - Rereading the Rabbis: A Woman’s Voice by Judith Hauptman; Spinning Fantasies: Rabbis, Gendel; and History by Miriam Peskowitz; and Engendering Judaism: An Inclusive Theology and Ethics by Rachel Adler - demonstrate a sampling of the different questions, concerns, and methodologies that Jewish feminists bring to the study of traditional text. Taken together, they provide examples of the breadth and diversity of the work of contemporary Sh‘ma January2000 @ http:/ /www.shma.com She claims that such a reading is necessaryfor the writing of a "credible" book on women and rabbinic material. Read together, the two authors provide insight into different ways that Jewish feminists can enter ongoing academic debates regarding the nature of scholarship and what it means to be objective. Rachel Adler provides a different twist on this debate: she is actively writing theology. While Peskowitz and Hauptman are working out methodologies for reading and thinking about rabbinic text, Adler's concern is to engender Judaism as a spiritual and ethical praxis. Given this concern, it is not surprising that Adler devotes a significant portion of her book to a considerationof halachah, Jewish law. She finds the sexism of classical halachah damaging to both women and men and argues that this is a problem that cannot be ignored, nor can it be "fixed" by well-intentioned tampering with the system. Yet Adler takes issue with those who would do away with halachah completely. She emphasizes the need for a system through which "the stories and values of Judaism can be embodied in communal practice" and wants to generate a new halachah that is both engendered and liberatory. Adler clearly differentiates between her work and that of "secular" scholarship. Careful readers will note the many ways in which all three of these books complement and challenge each other. They are all worth a serious read. the larger narrative in which it is embedded. Reading (or rereading)the rabbis in this way allows Hauptman to argue that although it is not possible to "depatriarchalize the Talmud, " it is possible to see the rabbis struggling to move the law in a direction that is sympathetic to women and responsive to their concerns. Hauptman takes pains to delineate the limits of her work. She differentiates between the study of the sociocultural history of the Jewish people - which she does not provide - and the examination of the dynamic construction of Jewish law - upon which she focuses. In this way, her book invites comparison to Miriam Peskowitz' work, since Spinning Fantasies comes to similar material with a very different approach. Rather than attempting to separate the law from its sociocultural context, Peskowitz argues that the rabbis' thinking about gender can only be understood in relation to the historical and cultural world of which they were a part. She cautions that ideas about gender are not always easy to tease out of history or text, as they tend to be taken for granted in everyday life. In this way, constructions of gender become "naturalized" into unremarkable givens, and it is the historian's task to call attention to this processand the assumptions it brings forth. Peskowitz pushes her readers - and herself - to consider the ways in which our own assumptions about gender play an active role in our reading of rabbinic text. She complicates the notion of scholarly objectivity by noting that we, too, are in the process of constructing gender as we read. Hauptman, on the other hand, argues forcefully for the possibility of an objective reading of text. Rabbi Deborah Glanzberg-Krainin is a doctoral student in religion at Temple University in Philadelphia, PA. A Spiritual Life: A Jewish Feminist Journey Merle Feld (SUNY Press, 1999,260pp, $24) The only thing wrong with this magnificent book is that it's too short. Rarely have I enjoyed the intellectual pleasure I experienced when reading Merle Feld'sA Spiritual Life. Her voice is warm and vivid, and as I read her words she seemed to become my best friend, or at least someone I wish would be my best friend. Her book is an autobiographyand a collection of poetry. It describes her own journey as a young, married housewife and the new opportunities and challenges offered by the feminist movement. While many such accounts have been written of American societal transformations during the crucial years of the 1 9 6 0 ~Merle's ~ is a remarkably thoughtful account of how feminism came to Judaism. Married to a university Hillel rabbi, she had the chance to watch the first stirrings of feminism among Sh'ma January2000 college students. In addition to changes in domestic arrangements, feminism brought a promise of a new identity on the spiritual level. Prayer, she writes, "is the articulation of something very particular a t the core of one's being, flung out into the universe. Perhaps it finds a mark, perhaps not. The essential thing is the articulation and the flinging." Her praying became feminist gradually, and her description of that transformation is both a fascinating documentary of a crucial era in Jewish history and an inspiration to all of us to take seriously the imperative that the spiritual and the ethical must be intertwined. Susannah Heschel is Eli Black Professor of Iewish Studies at Dartmouth College. @ http://www.shma.com