Skip to main content

Voices of Powerful (Jewish) Women: Recommended Reading

As part of my journey to correct the tragic deficit in women’s voices on my bookshelf I asked people for the authors & books that most enriched their Jewish learning and living. These were their recommendations:

Rachel Adler’s Engendering Judaism
Judith Antonelli's In the Image of God
Ada Rapoport Albert's Hasidic Studies: Essays in History and Gender
Sue Elwell & Nancy Fuchs Kreimer's (Eds.) Chapters of the Heart: Jewish Women Sharing the Torah of Our Lives
Rabbi Jill Hammer and Holly Shere's Siddur HaKohanot
Marcia Falk’s The Book of Blessings: New Jewish Prayers for Daily Life, the Sabbath, and the New Moon Festival
Rabbi Emily H. Feigenson's Beginning the Journey: Toward a Women's Commentary on Torah
Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb's She Who Dwells Within
Rachel Beth Gross' Beyond the Synagogue
Aliza Lavie's (Ed.) A Jewish Woman’s Prayer Book
Naomi Levy's Talking to God
Simi Peters's Learning to Read Midrash
Renee Levine Melammed's Heretics or Daughters of Israel?: The Crypto-Jewish Women of Castile
Rabbi Marcia Prager’s The Path of Blessing
Sylvia Rothschild & Sybil Sheridan's (Eds.) Up the Timbrel: The Challenge of Creating Ritual for Jewish Women Today
Sheila Shulman's Watching for the Morning: Selected Sermons
Rabbi Kari H. Tuling's Thinking About God: Jewish Views

People also suggested I check out the following voices:
Danya Ruttenberg, Tamar Ross, Judith Hauptmann, Catherine Heszer, Christine Hayes, Mara Benjamin, Sarah Stroumsa, Charlotte Elisheva Fontibert, Christine Elizabeth Hayes, Judith Hauptman, Ruth Kara-Ivanov Kaniel, Judy Klitsner, Wiskind-Elper, Diana Lobel, Tikva Frymer-Kensky z”l, Ruth Calderon, Marra B. Gad Dara Horn, Chanda Precod-Weinstein, Sarah Hurwitz, Bari Weiss, Rachel Kadish, Nechama Leibowitz, Erica Brown, Yael Ziegler, Lindsey Taylor-Guthartz, Sally Berkovic, Yael Unterman & Aviva Zornberg.
---
The Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance's Research Library was also recommended - See https://www.jofa.org/research-library


Thank you to everyone who shared!


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

My Ordination Address

I received my rabbinical ordination (s'micha) on Sunday, 3 July 2022 / 4 Tamuz 5782. My Presenters were Rabbi Jeremy Gordon & Rabbi Debbie Young-Somers. I was ordained by Rabbi Dr Charles Middleburgh. This was my address. --- I was raised by loving parents in a small shtetl called Hendon.  My childhood home was a beacon of Jewish practice and my formative years bathed in the glow of the richness of Jewish ritual and theology.  However, around the time of my Bar Mitzvah - my Jewish coming of age - I began to find the former cumbersome and the latter archaic and dogmatic.  I might never have re-immersed myself in Jewish life had it not been for one other vitally important thing ever present in my life - chesed .  Sometimes English speaking Jews translate chesed as kindness, but this does not do justice to our tradition.  The Hebrew root for chesed -  ח-ס-ד - appears in the Tanakh (The Jewish Bible) around 250 times and these can be translated in almost ...

Jews In Jewish Spaces

The other day I attended a meeting of cross-communal Jewish organisations. At the table were people who held a range of beliefs and practices. One of the challenges of such umbrella groups is how they accommodate such a diverse range of deeply-held religious ideologies. The inherent tensions of this debate were highlighted during an impromptu discussion as to whether a key feature of a website should remain active on Shabbat or if they should be turned off for all users during this 25 hour period. Though the thing itself may seem trivial the issues surrounding it do have wide-reaching implications. I believe people on both sides of the debate are driven primarily by this simple question; "How can my religious practices and beliefs be accommodated and respected by other people?" The key words here is other for it refers, not to the general non-Jewish population, but to other self-identifying Jews. This type of other often prompts a very different kind of conversation; partic...

Being Safe Online: Reviewing NOS's Online Safety Course

The other day I was invited by my children's school to take an Online Safety Course for Parents & Carers . The course, created by the National Online Safety (NOS), is made up of 23, three-six minute, videos. Each video focuses on a different area of online safety such as 'online bullying', 'pornography' and 'screen addition'. The course will likely take you somewhere between two-three hours depending on your attention span and how many cups of tea you require to sit through all the videos. Overall I found the course extremely useful with the vast majority of videos able to clearly distill the challenges of being online into steps that a parent or carer might wish to take to address them. I was particularly impressed with the non-judgemental tone of each video and each of the presenters will put you, the viewer, at ease. As a parent, and educator who works with school-age children, I found that many of the videos offered a useful reminder that children,...