| This work attempts to clarify several basic questions brought into play by the emergence of a vibrant Jewish Feminism in the closing decades of the 20th century, and, in this way, to respond to the ongoing debate within American Jewish Feminism initiated by a famous exchange between Cynthia Ozick and Judith Plaskow over the "right question" for Jewish Feminism --- theological or halakhic. I offer a focused overview of the development of Jewish Feminism in the United States, a careful explication and interpretation of Ozick and Plaskow's seminal articles, a critical examination of how these two thinkers engage with biblical texts (taking as my examples Eve and Tamar from Genesis), and then reframe and reformulate this debate in light of the work of Blu Greenberg and to a smaller extent Tamar Ross. On this view, the right question for Jewish Feminism is one that aims, not at a settled answer, but rather at answerability: at a religious community in which women are full members, engaged in the ongoing, continual task of determining what it means to be Jewish --- a community that must be answerable for, even as it is answerable to, the Jewish religious tradition and its sacred texts. |
