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It has been twenty-eight years since the publication of Blu Greenberg's On Women and Judaism: A View from Tradition.1 Greenberg's book is a story of the author's own journey toward interweaving Judaism and feminism, as well as a programmatic laying out of an ambitious agenda for exploration and confrontation. Greenberg's discussion includes such topics as a theoretical basis for women's equality, a call for women's obligation to adhere to fixed liturgical prayer, a reevaluation of the menstrual laws, a careful look at abortion, and a demand for change in divorce law. While at times approaching caricature of the feminist movement, Greenberg's book nevertheless still startles with the radical nature of many of its proposals.
Like Greenberg's, Tova Hartman's latest book, Feminism Encounters Traditional Judaism: Resistance and Accommodation, stems from the author's own journey within her Orthodox community. As feminism is not only, or even primarily, a theoretical construct but an ideology that emerges from lived experience, it is fitting that Hartman's experiences within her community drove her to write this book and to examine more closely the dual claims of feminism and Orthodox Judaism. Committed to both realms, she explores the ways in which feminism offers a powerful critique of traditional religion and the ways in which traditional religion offers a textured life that feminism has yet to achieve. Unlike Greenberg's journey, and telling of the years since the publication of On Women and Judaism, Hartman's quest led her to found a synagogue, Shira Hadasha, a community that has redefined the boundaries of women's public ritual expression within the modern Orthodox world.
Hartman describes her book as following a similar experimental model to that of her synagogue, an exploration of what can be learned when two compelling forms of knowledge are put into sympathetic dialogue with...