The Coming of Lilith: Essays on Feminism, Judaism, and Sexual Ethics, 1972-2003
Judith Plaskow
Language: English
Pages: 252
ISBN: 0807036234
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
This first collection of Judith Plaskow's essays and short writings traces her scholarly and personal journey from her early days as a graduate student through her pioneering contributions to both feminist theology and Jewish feminism to her recent work in sexual ethics.
Accessibly organized into four sections, the collection begins with several of Plaskow's foundational essays on feminist theology, including one previously unavailable in English. Section II addresses her nuanced understanding of oppression and includes her important work on anti-Judaism in Christian feminism. Section III contains a variety of short and highly readable pieces that make clear Plaskow's central role in the creation of Jewish feminism, including the essential "Beyond Egalitarianism." Finally, section IV presents her writings on the significance of sexual ethics to the larger project of transforming Judaism.
Intelligently edited with the help of Rabbi Donna Berman, and including pieces never before published, The Coming of Lilith is indispensable for religious studies students, fans of Plaskow's work, and those pursuing a Jewish education.
Movement as a Religious Experience Throughout our discussion of the women’s movement, we found ourselves both repeatedly seeing our experiences in the movement as religious experiences and repeatedly questioning the value of doing so. (See question 5 at the end of the essay.) While the words grace, illumination, mission, and conversion kept cropping up in our conversation, we recognized that women who do not think in religious categories, who would in fact reject them, share the experiences we
ourselves be defined as Jewish women in ways in which we cannot allow ourselves to be defined as women. This creates a conflict not just and not primarily because the women’s movement is a secular movement whose principles we are attempting to apply to an ancient religious tradition, but because the women’s movement is a different community around which we might center our lives. The conflict between communities is the first level on which I experience the conflict between being a woman and being
How much more difficult to change something that is the will of God! In sanctifying and divinely authorizing current male/female relations, theology not only accepts but powerfully reinforces the social subordination of women. Barth takes this reinforcement one step further when he demands that women accept subordination even when men abuse their power. Women are to wait for the repentance of the oppressor, seeking to convert men by their good example. This notoriously slow way of bringing about
deceptive to speak of rabbinic opinion, customs, or sayings as monolithic. Even if one assumes that the Talmud gives an accurate picture of Jesus’s Jewish background, the Talmud is at least as ambivalent as the New Testament on the subject of women. Yet writers dealing with Jewish attitudes toward women often select only the most negative rabbinic passages on the topic. Their treatment of Judaism is analogous to conservative Christian arguments for the subordination of women which quote only
Grace: Women’s Experience and the Theologies of Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1980). 3. See “The Jewish Feminist: Conflict in Identities,” p. 35 in this volume. 4. My essay “Appropriation, Reciprocity, and Issues of Power,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 8 (Fall 1992): 105–110, which was part of a panel on “Appropriation and Reciprocity in Womanist/Mujerista/Feminist Work” at the 1991 Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion, is