Search

Catalogue of an exhibition held at the Nottingham Castle Museum.

Libby Kimmelman is overwhelmed. As the admissions director at an exclusive Manhattan private school, she’s awash in bribes from parents desperate to get their offspring into the school. Her apartment is going co-op, and she can’t afford it without financial help from her obnoxious ex-husband. Her thirteen-year-old daughter has discovered boys, music, and rule-breaking. Her sister-in-law is determined to set her up with a boring guy from the local synagogue. And then there’s Vermont transplant Ned Donovan, whose smart, scrappy son longs to attend Libby’s school. Ned’s a widower, a carpenter, sexy as sin—and wild about the fireplace in Libby’s living room. Ned wants to fix up her apartment. Libby believes he could fix up her life…if only she could be sure that his love isn’t simply the biggest, most dangerous bribe she’s ever received. Winner of the RT Reviewers Choice Award for best contemporary romance of the year.

In this unique volume Judith Abrams, author of the highly regarded series The Talmud for Beginners, examines the episodes recorded in rabbinic literature that suggest the actions of the women of those times.

Exploring the place of women in the socioeconomic system formulated in the Mishnah, a book of legal rules compiled by Jewish sages in second-century Palestine, this study reveals a fundamental ambiguity in women's role. In certain aspects men's property, in others their partners, women sometimes possessed no rights while at other times were judged fit to own property, conduct business, and manage their own affairs in the private domain of mishnaic culture. But, they were systematically excluded from the life of mind and spirit that flourished in the public domain of synagogue and study house. Wegner spells out in detail these variations in status, analyzes them, and relates her findings to recent developments in feminist analysis of the status of women in patriarchy.

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

Since it was first awarded in 1901, only twelve women have won the Nobel Prize for Peace. They hail from all over the world, including the United States, Europe, Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Central America. Engaged and inspiring, these women clearly demonstrate that there is something each of us can do to advance a just, positive peace. Whether they began by insisting on garbage collection or simply by planting a tree, each understood that peace must be global in order to be sustained. All learned that peace is not always popular, but believed they must persevere. All are truly champions for peace.

Fully acknowledging that Judaism, as described in both the Bible and the Talmud, was patriarchal, Judith Hauptman demonstrates that the rabbis of the Talmud made significant changes in key areas of Jewish law in order to benefit women. Reading the texts with feminist sensibilities—recognizing that they were written by men and for men and that they endorse a set of social relations in which men control women—the author shows that patriarchy was not always and everywhere the same. Although the rabbis whose rulings are recorded in the Talmud did not achieve equality for women—or even seek it—they should be credited with giving women higher status and more rights. For example, during the course of several hundred years, they converted marriage from the purchase by a man of a woman from her father into a negotiated relationship between prospective husband and wife. They designated a bride's dowry to be one-tenth of her father's net worth, thereby ending her Torah-mandated disenfranchisement with respect to inheritance. They left the ability to grant a divorce in male hands but gave women the possibility of petitioning the courts to force a divorce. Although some of these developments may have originated in the surrounding Greco-Roman culture, the rabbis freely chose to incorporate them into Jewish law.Rereading the Rabbis: A Woman's Voice also breaks new ground methodologically. Rather than plucking passages from a variety of different rabbinical works and then sewing them together to produce a single, unified rabbinical point of view, Hauptman reads sources in their own literary and legal context and then considers them in relationship to a rich array of associated synchronic and diachronic materials.

This first collection of Judith Plaskow's essays and short writings traces her scholarly and personal journey from her early days as a graduate student through her pioneering contributions to both feminist theology and Jewish feminism to her recent work in sexual ethics. Accessibly organized into four sections, the collection begins with several of Plaskow's foundational essays on feminist theology, including one previously unavailable in English. Section II addresses her nuanced understanding of oppression and includes her important work on anti-Judaism in Christian feminism. Section III contains a variety of short and highly readable pieces that make clear Plaskow's central role in the creation of Jewish feminism, including the essential "Beyond Egalitarianism." Finally, section IV presents her writings on the significance of sexual ethics to the larger project of transforming Judaism. Intelligently edited with the help of Rabbi Donna Berman, and including pieces never before published, The Coming of Lilith is indispensable for religious studies students, fans of Plaskow's work, and those pursuing a Jewish education.