Spirituality and Religious Life

Jewish feminism in Germany today is an expression of a wide-reaching renewal of Judaism occurring in many European countries since the early 1990s. German Jewish feminists built on the historical tradition of the Jewish women’s movement in pre-Holocaust Germany and has since taken many paths.

Challenging all varieties of American Judaism, feminism has been a powerful force for popular Jewish religious revival. The accomplishments of Jewish feminists have transformed American Jewish life, even as the ultimate goal of gender equity and shared power has yet to be fully realized.

The Jewish League for Woman Suffrage (JLWS) was the only Jewish women’s organization in England—and the world—devoted exclusively to obtaining both national and Jewish suffrage for women.

American Jewish women have played an outsized role in the foundation of Jewish museums all over the country. Barred from traditional spaces of power in the early twentieth century, many women—adjacent to power as Rebbetzins, philanthropists, and secretaries of libraries and other Jewish organizations—leveraged their connections to found new kinds of cultural institutions: museums.

Zipporah Nunes was born a Conversa in Portugal circa 1710. After escaping to London to avoid being re-examined by the Inquisition, her family began practicing Judaism openly; later she became one of the first Jews to settle in the newly formed colony of Georgia in 1733.

Paula Jacques (b. 1949) is a French radio hostess and a novelist. Her works, which feature memorable female protagonists, most often portray the French-speaking Jewish community of Egypt prior to their expulsion at the time of the Suez crisis.

Women writers faced many obstacles in the early years of modern Hebrew, but by the end of the twentieth century they had overcome marginalization to become a central part of the country’s literature. The achievements of women’s writing in Hebrew rank among the unquestionable triumphs of Israeli feminism.

A study of the role of Jewish women in household formation, the household, and household dissolution, as well as their engagement in Jewish culture in early modern Italy, raises the question of how much of Jewish practice reflected the context of the surrounding society and how much engaged options in traditional Jewish practices, which were selected to meet their own needs. Despite the wealth of information about some well- known women and reports of the activities of many unnamed women, Jewish women, like Christian women, still functioned in the context of women and the period does not represent a Renaissance for women.

Dance has been an integral element of the Jewish community since biblical times. An intense desire to share the joy of dance, coupled with a strong identification with both Israel and their Jewish roots, spurred a group of influential women to create a flourishing movement of Israeli folk dance in North America. Today, Israeli folk dance enjoys a wider popularity than ever.

The Israel Women’s Network (IWN) was founded in 1984 and is responsible for many of the feminist breakthroughs in Israel. Though the success of IWN led to an undesirable degree of politicization, it remains an active agent in Israeli feminism.

International Coalition for Agunah Rights (ICAR) was created to solve the problem of women whose husbands refuse to grant them Jewish divorces, through a combination of education and activism. Although some of the member organizations remain active in North America, ICAR itself has become a primarily Israel-focused coalition.