In Search of Identity and Spirituality in the Fiction of American Jewish Female Authors at the Turn of the 21st Century. Dorota Mihulka
in harmony with their general willingness to experiment with ritual, liturgy, and style of worship. Since the 1980s, a variety of new rituals have emerged to celebrate turning points in women’s lives. While this effort has by no means been restricted to Jewish Renewal groups, their members have been very active in this area, creating rituals to mark such important events as Rosh Hodesh (the beginning of the new Jewish month), women’s Passover Seders (focusing on the role of women in the Exodus story), the onset of menstruation or menopause, retirement, and so forth. Moreover, many of the gender-conscious liturgical innovations developed by Jewish women in Renewal communities, for example the use of descriptive or neutral language to address the Divine instead of the masculine forms of the word God, have been compiled in siddurim (prayer books) and published by ALEPH as a resource to assist communities in their spiritual explorations. Finally, the most striking features of Jewish Renewal services in comparison with other Jewish denominations are their egalitarianism, high level of participation, spiritual intensity, and incorporation of a variety of creative ‘New Age’ techniques to enhance the experience. As Reena Sigman Friedman explains, “[the] emphasis on ‘praying with the heart and not only the head,’ as well as the tremendous support for the arts in Renewal circles, has provided women, especially those with artistic bents, with opportunities for self-expression,” adding that “Renewal has given women an equal place in Judaism that can speak to their hearts, bodies and minds” (2006: 802).
To conclude, Jewish Renewal is clearly having an impact on the broader Jewish community, which is manifested not only in the incorporation of various radical practices by the mainstream denominations, but also in a resurgence of Jewish spirituality in the last decades of the twentieth century.29 This new spirituality has ←60 | 61→led to increased Jewish observance, including thousands of ba’alei teshuvah returning to Orthodoxy. Jewish Renewal is also conducive to an active participation of women on all levels of Jewish religious and communal life. Women generally feel empowered in Renewal settings and are convinced that their ideas, feelings, and contributions are respected and appreciated by all members of the movement (Friedman, 2006: 804).
On the other hand, it must be remembered that Jewish Renewal also struggles with critical issues, the most salient ones being the problem of constructing Jewish identity (“How does one construct a Jewish identity that is rooted in tradition and yet trumpets creativity (often radical) and individualism?”) and the authenticity of the movement (“How can a movement be authentically Jewish and yet be influenced by a plethora of non-Jewish intellectual and theological streams?”). The future will demonstrate whether Jewish Renewal will prove to be fertile enough to attract significant numbers of American Jews who are in search of greater spiritual fulfillment in their lives, thus becoming the fifth movement within American Jewry (Salkin, 2011: 342).
1.3 Impact of Jewish Feminism on the American Jewish Community
Jewish feminist movement, considerably influenced by the second-wave of twentieth-century American feminism, was established to provide radically modern forms to struggle for equal rights and gender equality in the American Jewish community. Similarly to Zionism, Jewish feminism had its roots in secular Western culture and was highly influenced by Enlightenment and its concept of the fundamental equality of all human beings, as noted by both Paula Hyman (“Jewish Feminism,” 1998: 695) and Riv-Ellen Prell (2007: 5). Like Zionists, Jewish feminists asserted from the very beginning of their public activity in the early 1970s that the demands of Jewish feminism were in accordance with Jewish experience in the modern era, and with Jewish self-understanding. Unlike Zionists, however, Jewish feminists were also concerned with the inferior status of Jewish women in religious and communal life, and emphasized a struggle for gender equality, an issue ←61 | 62→that was overlooked in Zionism which gave priority to the longing for the restoration of Zion expressed in the male-created classical Jewish texts.30
Although Jewish feminism developed under the influence of the American women’s movement, it gradually diverged from it essentially because the latter did not perceive Jewish women’s specific concerns to be of interest to the general movement. Jewish feminist movement, however, gathered a momentum of its own particularly throughout the 1980s and 1990s when it emerged as a religious, political, and intellectual force, uniting secular and religious Jewish women. Its adherents were aware of general feminist issues that transcended ethnic and religious lines, but their feminism was suffused by Jewish communal concerns. In these decades, Jewish women gained a distinct identity within secular feminist groups, while at the same time the work of Jewish feminists transformed the American Jewish communal and religious life in innumerable ways. Nowadays, as Sylvia Barack Fishman remarks, these “profound transformations have already become so mainstream as to appear unremarkable” (2001: 131). Indeed, many of the notable changes made possible by Jewish feminism are now experienced as norms in Jewish life and are clearly visible in areas such as synagogue worship, with egalitarianism common practice in the vast majority of American congregations, with the integration of female-centered rituals into Jewish life, as well as within the organized American Jewish community (cf. Antler, “American Feminism,” 1998: 414–415; Hyman, 2003: 308–309; Bronznick, Goldenhar, and Samuels, 2010: 515–516).
The sections below explore the impact of the Jewish feminist movement on American Jewry. First, I provide a brief outline of the Jewish feminist movement which emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s, focusing on the relations and distinctions between specifically Jewish feminism and the general American women’s movement. Then I move on to discuss the feminist critique of Judaism and gender relations in Judaism drawing on feminist theology as put forward by prominent American Jewish theologians and feminists. The final section is devoted to the presentation and discussion of the achievements made by Jewish feminism in contemporary American Jewish denominational life, paying special attention to the changes affecting the lives of Jewish women. Moreover, a profound impact of Jewish feminism on the broader American Jewish community, including the changes in the American Jewish family and women’s communal organizations, as well as a backlash from Orthodoxy, are also analyzed.
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1.3.1 Jewish Feminist Movement versus American Feminism
During the 1960s and 1970s, the American Jewish community was influenced by the larger American culture, particularly by the Civil Rights movement, the American counter-culture, and the women’s movement. The second wave of American feminism,31 often dated from the publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique in 1963, asserted that ‘personal is political’ leading to the development of numerous consciousness-raising groups whose active members became women. Women joined those groups with the aim of examining and challenging the existent structure of the family and the workplace, and demanded equal pay for equal work, and equal opportunity for professional advancement. Moreover, those groups familiarized women with feminist literature, such as Simone de Beauvoir’s classic The Second Sex (1949), and more radical works by younger American authors, for example Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics (1970) and Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (1970). According to historian Hester Eisenstein, in its early stages, American feminism concentrated on “the socially constructed differences between the sexes” regarded as the “chief source of female oppression. In the main, feminist theory concentrated on establishing the distinction between sex and gender, and developed an analysis of sex roles as a mode of social control” (1984: xi). Thus, emancipation required that the connection between gender and social function should be severed, opening up in this way societal roles to all citizens, regardless of gender.
Starting in the 1970s and continuing through the next several decades, the Jewish feminist movement,32 for which American feminism provided the ideological and social framework, became a public phenomenon and a considerable force for social change in the American Jewish community. It attracted both religious and secular Jewish women, the daughters and granddaughters of women union activists and volunteer leaders as well as women from the Jewish counter-culture ←63 | 64→and independent havurah community. Distinct from American feminism, the Jewish feminist movement, as Paula Hyman notices, “[d];id not consist of the totality of women of Jewish