Four Centuries of Jewish Women »

Four Centuries of Jewish Women's Spirituality is the first book-length exploration of Jewish spirituality as seen through the eyes of women. Drawing on archival material that has not been available to the contemporary reader, as well as new pieces written specifically for this volume, Ellen M. Umansky and Dianne Ashton have woven together a multiplicity of international voices, revealing the great variety of spiritual paths that modern Jewish women have taken. Contributors include Rebecca Gratz and Emma Lazarus, Amy Eilberg, Marcia Falk, Blu Greenberg, Kadya Molodowsky, and Judith Plaskow, among many others.

Publishers Weekly

Various works composed between 1560 and 1990 by some 100 Jewish women living in Europe, America and the stet/pk land of Israel testify to a strong, age-old female religious self-identity. Defending herself to a Catholic cleric in a 1641 pamphlet, Italian poet Sara Copia Sullam declares her belief in the immortality of the soul; 17th-century German merchant Gluckel of Hamelnsp ok urges her children to set aside time for the study of Torah and to be honest in money matters with both Jews and gentiles; and also offered here is a prayer, found in an anomymous 1648 Amsterdam collection, that women said when they put the Sabbath bread into the oven. During the 19th century, American Emma Lazarus honors, in a poem, the Touro Synagogue of Newport, R.I., and American Penina Moise composes English-language hymns for use in Reform temples. In 1916, American Zionist Henrietta Szold explains in a letter that she will defy Jewish tradition and say kaddish for her mother; and Hungarian-born WW II heroine Hannah Senesh dreams of a national homeland for the Jews. Contemporary voices create new rituals as they meditate on menstruation, sexual abuse and rape, miscarriage, conversion, feminism and nuclear arms. Umansky and Ashton are religion academics. (July)