Uncovered: Women's Roles, Mitzvot and Sexuality in Jewish Law

Nechama Goldman Barash Uncovered: Women's Roles, Mitzvot and Sexuality in Jewish Law Jerusalem: Urim, 2024. 392 pp.

As a young woman in the late 1980s, I discovered Orthodoxy and feminism at the same time. In a whirlwind, I devoured every book on the topic (it didn't take long to read all four). Since then, a significant corpus has emerged, examining the place of women in Judaism from halakhic, philosophical, theological, historical perspectives and much more. Even so, as a book that is scholarly, erudite, feminist, Orthodox and written by a female scholar, Ncchama Goldman Barash's Uncovered: Women's Roles, Mitzvot, and Sexuality in Jewish Law marks an important new stage in women's halakhic literature.

Goldman Barash herself is a product of the blooming opportunities for women's Torah learning. As a product of the MaTaN and Nishmat women's Torah learning institutes (midrashof) and of Stern College and Bar Ilan University, she belongs to the first generation of advanced women's scholarship, first in Talmud and then in halakhah (Jewish law). These women have now come of age as mature scholars. The Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem, where Goldman Barash and I both teach, has distinguished itself as a leader in producing Jewish women's scholarship, and Goldman Barash's book complements the contributions of her colleagues there: Judy Klitsner's Subversive Sequels in the Bible (Maggid, 2019), a close literary reading of Torah from a feminist perspective; Rahel Berkovits's two volumes of Hilkhot Nashim (Maggid, 2018 and 2022), halakhic source guides to women's participation in Jewish ritual life; and Gila Fine's The Madwoman in the Rabbi's Attic: Rereading the Women of the Talmud (Maggid, 2024). At the same time, Goldman Barash's work is also representative of and an honor to the more normative Orthodox institutions of which she is a part: Midreshet Torah v'Avodah, MaTaN and the Beit Hillel Modern Orthodox rabbinic organization.

Written for the Modern Orthodox woman who is committed to both liberal values and halakhah, Goldman Barash's book is one that could not have been written by a man. Her straight, frank talk about sensitive topics, with women as subject rather than object, is unique in our time. Goldman Barash honors and respects tradition and is deeply faithful to the halakhic tradition, but she does not...