Judaism, Gender Roles and

Any discussion of Judaism and gender must consider the relatively recent changes in gender roles—changes that have transformed Judaism. From the 1970s on, Jewish women succeeded in altering gender roles within the Reform, Reconstructionist, and Conservative branches of American Judaism. The most significant of these transformations was the ordination of women within all branches of American Judaism, except orthodoxy. Jewish feminism flourished in the early 1970s, particularly in America, in part as a result of the confidence women were gaining from the wider feminist struggle in society. Many Jewish women born in the postwar period had rejected Judaism as a result of a childhood realization that women and girls were treated unequally. However, Jewish feminism began to make a once-unpalatable Judaism more compelling to Jewish women. European Jewish women argued for greater rights for women within Judaism at this time. In Britain, for example, Jewish women demanded that the Liberal and Reform branches make women equal to their male contemporaries in the synagogue.

The struggle for greater female recognition centered on allowing women to become ordained as rabbis, to be counted in the minyan (the quorum necessary to cite certain prayers, consisting of 10 adult Jewish men), and to read from the Torah in services. In 1971, Rachel Adler published her seminal article, “The Jew Who Wasn't There,” now considered the founding document of Jewish feminist theology. Adler was one of the first to state that it was possible to integrate feminist ideas into the interpretation of Jewish texts and laws. Adler argued that Halacha (Jewish religious law) must be interpreted in new ways to allow Jewish women to participate fully in Jewish religious life.

Halacha, which is based on the Torah, Mishnah, and the Talmud, had long been used as a reason that women could not be ordained or read from the Torah. Orthodox Judaism views Halacha as divinely ordained and thus cannot be challenged. Reform, Reconstructionist, and Conservative Jews typically see Halacha as open to interpretation. However, according to feminists of the 1970s such as Adler, there was an exception to this view when the “woman question” was on the agenda.

Susannah Heschel's edited anthology, On Being a Jewish Feminist, was one of the first book-length texts to explore gender inequalities within Judaism. Heschel produced the collection to give voice to the myriad of emerging Jewish feminist voices and to illustrate that women's religious and social needs have been neglected and misrepresented by the central texts of Judaism. The text highlighted the fact that Jewish feminists disagreed about whether women's inequality within Judaism was as a result of custom and practice or whether it was embedded in the Torah itself.

In 1972, Sally Preisand was ordained in the Reform synagogue of America. In 1974, Reconstructionist Judaism sanctioned female ordination, and Sandy Eisenberg Sasso became their first female rabbi. In 1983, after many internal struggles, the theological seminary of Conservative Judaism voted to allow women to undertake the rabbinate training. In 1985, Amy Eilberg became the first female Conservative rabbi. Orthodox Judaism continues to reject the ordination of women.

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