Women and Water: Menstruation in Jewish Life and Law » (1st Edition)

RAHEL R. WASSERFALL, a French-born Israeli anthropologist, is currently Resident Scholar in Women's Studies program at Brandeis University.

Provocative essays address the question of women's menstrual rituals in Jewish law, history, and culture.

Library Journal

Part of the publisher's new series on "Jewish Women," this interesting book traces Jewish law on the purifying effects of water on women. Addressing a basic tenet of religious Jewish family life, the book also describes ethnographic and anthropological variation in adherence to water purification traditions. The Middle Ages saw a rabbinical expansion upon the rationale of the purification process, detailed in the codification of Jewish law in the first century. With the spread of the Jewish Diaspora, the populations of different geographic areas added local custom to traditional rabbinical law. The shifts in these populations, due to the Holocaust and the birth of the State of Israel, make for interesting historical, ethnological, and anthropological studies. Each article is annotated and has a bibliography. Recommended for academic libraries and for larger public libraries where Judaic studies, women's studies, anthropology, and ethnography are collected.--Idelle Rudman, Touro Coll. Lib., New York Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.