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“Blessed is She Who in the Beginning Gave Birth” An Intellectual History of the Brown Women’s and the Student Pioneers of American Jewish

By Sienna Lotenberg

Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts In the Department of History at Brown University Thesis Advisor: Kelly Ricciardi Colvin April 5, 2018

Contents

Acknowledgments ...... iii Introduction ...... 1 1. The Women’s Minyan: , Tears, and Institutional Support ...... 19 2. ’s Radically Feminist Liturgical ...... 39 3. Beyond Brown: Academic , Left-Wing Spiritual Communities, and the Progressive Mainstream ...... 59 Conclusion ...... 91 Selected Bibliography ...... 99

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Acknowledgments

In the days when I was deciding on a thesis topic, my nerves calmed when I learned that a thesis did not have to reflect every facet of my academic interests in one crowning jewel of my undergraduate education. In retrospect, I did not need to worry: I had the great fortune to find the

Women’s Minyan, a subject which is as personally meaningful to me as it is intellectually stimulating, and which brings together my overlapping commitments to feminism, , and intellectual history. The road that brought me to a history thesis on Jewish feminist praxis and prayer was one whose clearest signposts were the people who not only shaped me but gave me space to shape myself. It is a great joy to be able to thank some of them here.

First and foremost, I am deeply indebted to Professor Kelly Ricciardi Colvin, without whom neither this project nor the joy it brought me would have been possible. She fundamentally shaped how I think about women and both within and beyond the academic realm, and supported me far beyond the call of duty as she steadfastly reminded me of my privilege and responsibility to bring forgotten voices back into the fore while encouraging me to trust my own. Other faculty in history department at Brown have contributed both to this thesis and my overall intellectual development. Most notably, the guidance of Professors Ethan

Pollock and Naoko Shibusawa through the thesis process has been invaluable. In addition, the

Hebrew skills I employ in this thesis are the result of five semesters of Professor Ruth Adler Ben

Yehuda’s methodical and patient teaching.

Among the most exciting aspects of this project was the opportunity to speak to some of the women who made the Women’s Minyan the space that it was and the faculty and staff who facilitated their work. I am profoundly grateful to Dr. Naomi Janowitz, Margaret Moers

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Wenig, Rabbi Laurie Rutenberg, Judy Kaye, Rabbi Richard Marker, and Dr. Rabbi

Blumenthal for giving graciously of their time to speak with me and share, firsthand, their experiences in a moment of history I have come to hold dear. I am also thankful for their generosity in sharing documents that vastly increased my primary source base and allowed me to learn about the Women’s Minyan in ways I never could have without them. In addition, Michael

Tyler contributed greatly to my analysis of post-1980 progressive through his sharing of stories and documents from Congregation Sha’ar Zahav’s various prayerbook projects; I am so grateful for his generosity and for Rabbi Mychal Copeland’s offer to put us in touch.

My fellow history thesis writers have provided endless support over the past three semesters. I am particularly grateful that Greer Christensen-Gibbons approached me on the Main

Green to commiserate about the prospectus process over a year ago; her friendship, thoughtful comments, and hours spent listening to me talk through ideas over coffee, tea, wine, and the phone have improved my writing and my life.

A host of Jewish clergy have contributed to my relationship with Judaism and prayer in ways that are visible in this thesis but go far beyond it. Rabbi Amy Schwartzman has led a congregation where Judaism became a relevant source of spiritual meaning and intellectual engagement for my whole life, and by her very being modeled for me that Jewish women belong in positions of leadership. Cantor Michael Shochet created an environment in which prayer had meaning through , and I credit him with bringing into my life the melodies that made me fall in love with . Cantor Tracey Scher built greatly on this musical-liturgical foundation and shaped me as a , a feminist, and a person by valuing my voice and contributions, even in my teenage awkwardness. Rabbi Mack has been an invaluable sounding board throughout the writing process and generously allowed me access to her personal prayerbook library.

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This thesis is about Jewish women making choices, and I am blessed to have a family that has encouraged my choices. I am particularly grateful for my , Lynne Doner

Lotenberg, who has inspired me to choose Judaism since day one and whose expertise in

Microsoft Word saved me many hours. I am lucky that she values our longstanding tradition of editing each other’s work as much as I do, and my grammatical correctness is due in large part to her efforts. It is an even greater blessing that she taught me to read and purchased -centric historical fiction for her kindergartener—who knew its impact would last this long? In addition, my sister Eliana has been a source of constant support mixed with teenaged derision without which I would take myself much too seriously.

Finally, I am grateful to Brown RISD Hillel for being a space of Jewish and community for me in the 2010s as it was for the Women’s Minyan in the 1970s. It has been a particular joy to research and write much of this thesis in the same walls that housed its subject.

The support of the staff and my fellow students, especially Noah Fitzgerel, Sarah Joffe, Abby

Skerker, Shosh Rosenzweig, Daniel Youkilis, and Andrew Marmor, made it possible for me to balance my Hillel presidency and my Reform Minyan leadership with this project and be proud of all of them. It is an abounding blessing to share an institutional lineage with the Women’s

Minyan, and I am grateful to all its members for shaping progressive Judaism as I know it and being exemplary makers of their own religious lives.

Modah ani l’faneichen—thank you all.

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Introduction

“The Lord is my Mother, my Strength,” read the assembled group of women and rabbinical students in unison. For Alpert, a Reconstructionist Rabbinical student, this moment was transformative. At the 1977 retreat of the newly-founded Women’s

Rabbinical Alliance, she prayed with a liturgy that spoke to her experience as a Jewish for the first time. Fourteen years later, the experience remained powerfully etched in her mind:

The experience of praying with Siddur Nashim ... transformed my relationship with .

For the first time, I understood what it meant to be made in God's image. To think of God

as a woman like myself, to see Her as both powerful and nurturing, to see Her imaged

with a woman's body, with a womb, with breasts – this was an experience of ultimate

significance. Was this the relationship that men have had with God for all these

millennia? How wonderful to gain access to those feelings and perceptions.1

Siddur Nashim, the prayerbook (siddur) that inspired this rabbi-to-be, was created in 1976 by two Brown University undergraduate women, Naomi Janowitz and Margaret Moers Wenig, for the Brown Women’s Minyan, the all-women prayer service they attended at Brown University.2

1 Rebecca Alpert, “What Gender is God?” , Winter 1991, 28; Carole B. Balin, “From Periphery to Center: A History of the Women’s Rabbinic Network,” in The Sacred Calling: Four Decades of Women in the Rabbinate, eds. Rebecca Einstein Schorr and Alysa Mendelson Graf (: CCAR Press, 2016), 140; “Rebecca T. Alpert,” directory website, accessed April 1, 2018, https://sites.temple.edu/rebeccatalpert/cv/. Alpert notes in her piece that she encountered the siddur at a “retreat for women rabbis and rabbinical students,” while Balin identifies the Women’s Rabbinical Alliance (WRA) as the group of this sort composed of women from the New York campus of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of and from the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College (RRC) in Wyncote, PA. Because Alpert was a student at RRC at the time, it follows that she was attending a retreat sponsored by this group. In addition, Balin notes in her chapter that the WRA prayed from Siddur Nashim at its 1978 convention. 2 Maggie M. Wenig, class of 1978, Interview for the Pembroke Center’s “Brown Women Speak” oral history archive, first interview, 1989. Interviewed by Dale Pichey, https://www.brown.edu/initiatives/women- speak/interview/maggie-m-wenig-class-1978-first-interview. A minyan is the required quorum for Jewish public

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Their prayerbook was the first of its kind: the first known siddur to gender God feminine in

English translation, to experiment with feminine metaphor in prayer, and to be self-consciously feminist.3 Even its name, Siddur Nashim, “Women’s Prayer Book,” reflected and signaled its character as a text created by women and for women.

For a document that marked such a milestone in the intellectual and spiritual development of Jewish feminism, Siddur Nashim remains both physically and academically obscure. I came across a few brief references to it in the summer of 2016 while doing some pleasure reading on the history of Jewish women.4 Months later, when I identified it as a potential primary source for a thesis on Jewish women’s history, I learned that I could procure it only by ordering it through Interlibrary Loan, despite its Brunonian origins. In 2017, amidst the age of the Internet, I could not find it catalogued in any library or archive on the campus where it was created. However, in 1977, a year after its publication, Siddur Nashim had become prominent enough in Jewish feminist circles that it would be used at a women’s rabbinical convention with ostensibly no connection to Brown. This seeming paradox of availability begs two essential questions: how influential and unique were Siddur Nashim and the Brown

Women’s Minyan both in their own time and vis-à-vis later prayerbooks and prayer communities? And how is their history and legacy so invisible in both the historiography and popular memory of Jewish feminism?

prayer, traditionally composed of a minimum of ten men, though in recent usage it often indicates ten Jewish adults of any gender. The issue of women counting in a minyan was contentious in some Jewish circles in the period under study; the women of the Brown Women’s Minyan were consciously asserting their ability to constitute a minyan by using that term in their name. 3 , Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism from a Feminist Perspective (New York: Harper and Row, 1990), 137-38. 4 I first learned of Siddur Nashim reading Judith Plaskow’s Standing Again at Sinai in winter 2015-16, but did not realize it was written by Brown students until reading The Sacred Calling: Four Decades of Women in the Rabbinate, ed. Rebecca Einstein Schorr and Alysa Mendelson Graf (New York: CCAR Press, 2016) in the summer of 2016.

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The Brown Women’s Minyan existed from fall 1973 until spring 1978, and was in the company of least four other university women’s minyanim active in the 1970s at Brandeis

University, University, the University of Minnesota, and .5 It is difficult to determine exactly when these groups began and whether they existed on still other campuses—archived advertisements in campus newspapers and a few references in journalistic and biographical writing form the majority of the written traces of these groups. The lack of scholarship on these and other Jewish women’s prayer groups is a noteworthy lacuna in the historiography of both Jewish feminism and university activism—although these communities pioneered major developments in American Judaism, little is known about their members’ practices, motivations, and experiences. A deeper understanding of these early groups will help develop an intellectual history of religious Jewish feminism and its impact on the mainstream

Jewish community. By giving serious consideration to the women’s minyan at Brown, I will begin to fill this historiographical gap.

One analytical thread this thesis addresses is that of certain voices’ marginalization in the institutional history and memory of both universities and Jewish institutions. The Brown

Women’s Minyan was, on the one hand, part of a larger phenomenon of Jewish women on college campuses bringing their feminism into their prayer and forging a Judaism in which their voices and experiences mattered. At the same time, the Brown Women’s Minyan was unique in the lasting impact it left on and theology with its siddur that offered a new, feminized version of God to American . By examining Siddur Nashim’s place and impact in the history of Jewish feminist thought, I will begin to craft an intellectual history of Jewish

5 Irving Spiegel, “Equality Sought by Jewish Coeds,” New York Times, April 20, 1975, https://www.nytimes.com/1975/04/20/archives/equality-sought-by-jewish-coeds-hillel-report-asserts-they-want- new.html; D. Friedman, Jew vs. Jew: The Struggle for the Soul of American Jewry (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000), 130; Advertisement, Columbia Spectator (New York, NY), Dec. 5, 1974. 3 feminism following the Second Wave, an intersection that is remarkably absent in the historiography of American Judaism, Second Wave feminism, and Jewish thought.

Although neither the Brown Women’s Minyan nor Siddur Nashim has been the subject of any serious scholarly consideration, references to Siddur Nashim are scattered throughout the footnotes of all sorts of Jewish feminist writing, from theory to liturgy to histories of the Jewish . Even the most cursory familiarity with the liturgy of today’s Progressive

Jewish movements points to Siddur Nashim’s importance (once, of course, one knows to look at all), as the gender sensitivity the Women’s Minyan leaders brought to their liturgy was incorporated into the liturgies of the Progressive Jewish denominations by the 1990s, with further developments continuing into the 2000s and 2010s. Into the early 1990s the book itself seems to have remained impactful and at least somewhat well-known—prominent Jewish feminist theologian Judith Plaskow cites it in some detail in her 1990 book Standing Again at

Sinai: Judaism from a Feminist Perspective, as does her colleague Adler in her 1998

Engendering Judaism: An Inclusive Theology and Ethics.6 Even though incorporating a gendered approach to God has gained popularity in denominationally published liturgies, it appears that the early pioneers of this approach have faded from view.

Not all of Janowitz and Wenig’s liturgical innovations became mainstream. Some, such as its prayer for and reinvention of the concluding prayer , were especially emblematic of the 1970s Second Wave feminist context in which they were created, and were outdated by the time of later publications. Other changes, such as the use of feminine God- language and the rewriting of certain to highlight women biblical heroes, although they continue to be advocated for by feminist liturgists to the present day, were not adopted by

6 Judith Plaskow, Standing Again at Sinai, 137-8; , Engendering Judaism: An Inclusive Theology and Ethics (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998), 98-99. 4 mainstream movements. Understanding the history of Jewish denominations’ selective approach to incorporating Siddur Nashim’s innovations can illuminate greater trends in the co-opting of

Jewish feminist ideology into a non-woman-centric progressive Judaism, and in the development of Jewish feminism and progressive Judaism in the last decades of the twentieth century.7

Jewish Women in the

Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Jewish women’s historical experience was profoundly influenced by Western gender norms. While traditional Jewish practice unquestionably ascribed different roles to men and women, Jewish assimilationist movements followed the models of Western culture in defining appropriate roles for women. For example, although in traditional Jewish law women are exempt from the obligation to participate in public prayer, women constituted the majority of worshippers in pews throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The “separate spheres” ideology which Jews adopted from their Christian neighbors celebrated women’s “innate” religiosity while encouraging men to turn away from religion in favor of more “scientific” thought. However, because public leadership positions were appropriate only for men, women’s religious role was to be focused on educating children and encouraging religious practice in the home.8 This began to change in the second half of the twentieth century, as women began to take on more positions, an action that other Jews increasingly accepted. In addition, Jewish women began to follow in the secular footsteps of the women’s movement by establishing women-only groups, such as university

7 Throughout this thesis I use the term “Progressive Judaism” (with a capital “P”) to refer to the aggregate of the Reform and Reconstructionist movements, while “progressive Judaism” (with a lowercase “p”) indicates a less institutional collection of Jewish communities, ideas, and people that are Reform, Reconstructionist, and further left. 8 Paula E. Hyman, “Gender and the Shaping of Modern Jewish Identities,” Jewish Social Studies 8, no. 2/3 (2002): 155-56. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4467634. 5 women’s minyanim, in which women’s voices and leadership were paramount. These religious developments receive scant attention in the literature on Jewish feminism.

The four American denominations of Judaism each had a different approach to the status of women in the period under study. The Reform and Reconstructionist movements were on the forefront of women’s empowerment, as both were at least ostensibly committed to women’s equality in Jewish life. The Reform Movement (which began in 1810s Germany as the first serious challenge to the hegemony of traditional Jewish practice) had introduced the ritual of confirmation as early as 1814 to replace or supplement the bar with a coming-of-age ceremony that celebrated and boys equally. American Reform rabbinic leadership, in the form of the Central Conference of American Rabbis (CCAR) championed women’s suffrage in the 1910s and even passed a resolution in 1922 supporting women’s rabbinic .9

However, patriarchal notions of women’s proper role remained entrenched in the Reform community well into the latter half of the twentieth century. Sylvia Barack Fishman explains that the alliance of temple Sisterhoods with (male) rabbis in the mid-twentieth century was in large part the manifestation of a perceived indebtedness to rabbis for “liberating” them by supporting suffrage and other feminist aims.10 In addition, a full half century passed between the CCAR resolution supporting women in the rabbinate and ’s 1972 ordination as the first

American woman rabbi. Meanwhile, several women completed a full rabbinic curriculum at the

Reform rabbinical seminaries, but were denied ordination. Instead, they earned master’s degrees

9 Balin, “’s Spiritual Daughters, the ERA, and the CCAR,” in The Sacred Calling: Four Decades of Women in the Rabbinate, eds. Rebecca Einstein Schorr and Alysa Mendelson Graf (New York: CCAR Press, 2016), 407. 10 Sylvia Barack Fishman, “Constructing Reform Expectations: Foreshadowing Change,” in Sisterhood: A Centennial History of , eds. Carole B. Balin, Dana Herman, Jonathan D. Sarna, and Gary P. Zola (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 2013), 338-40. Sisterhoods are women’s social organizations within Jewish congregations.

6 in with special certificates acknowledging their efforts.11 Moreover, women’s rabbinic ordination did not put an end to in the Reform community. A 1985 CCAR report on congregational fears vis-à-vis hiring a woman rabbi outlined concerns that the rabbinate was

“too rigorous” for women, that their first priority would be not to the congregation but to their families, and that women’s success would destroy rabbinic superiority and break down the relationship between rabbi and congregant.12 Even with women in the pulpit, Reform liturgies and continued to center men’s identities, concerns, and sacred moments, and few efforts were undertaken to make Judaism more equal, only Jewish leadership. In contrast, the

Brown Women’s Minyan sought to forge a central place for both actual women and the more illusory “women’s experience” in Jewish tradition and practice.

The Reconstructionist movement shared with Reform an institutional commitment to women’s equality, though it manifested somewhat differently. Reconstructionism was still a nascent denomination in the 1970s, as its founder, Mordechai Kaplan, had formally broken away from the Conservative movement only in 1955. By then, however, Kaplan already had a long history of championing women’s equality: he innovated the ritual of bat mitzvah in 1922 when, to his congregation’s surprise, his daughter Judith ascended the bimah and read from a printed edition of the .13 Historians Dash Moore and Andrew Bush discuss the role of

Reconstructionist thought, which constructed Jewish tradition from an anthropological perspective as a series of “folkways” rather than divine commandments, both in practically

11 Pamela S. Nadell, Women Who Would Be Rabbis: A History of Women’s Ordination, 1889-1985 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998), 42. Rabbi was ordained in Germany in 1935, and is the first known women to have achieved rabbinic ordination. She was murdered at Auschwitz in 1945, and did not live long enough to contribute to the world Jewish community to the extent that Sally Priesand did. In addition, Jonas’ identity was unknown in the United States until the 1990s, as the East German archives where her papers were housed were inaccessible to American scholars. Thus, for about twenty years, Priesand was thought to be the first woman rabbi in history. 12 Balin, ““From Periphery to Center: A History of the Women’s Rabbinic Network,” 145. 13 and Andrew Bush, “Mitzvah, Gender, and Reconstructionist Judaism,” in Women Remaking American Judaism, ed. Riv-Ellen Prell (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2007), 139. 7 permitting women greater participation in public Jewish ritual and in providing intellectual grounding for later Jewish feminist theologians such as Judith Plaskow and Rachel Adler. In addition, the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, which opened its doors in 1968, had a policy allowing for women’s ordination from the start, and ordained , the second woman rabbi in the United States, in 1974.14

In the 1970s, mainstream American did not identify egalitarianism as a central tenet (and does not to this day); however, in this period Orthodox women were gaining access to Jewish education that was more equal to that of their male peers. In addition, Orthodox women’s prayer groups (never identified as minyanim, a term which within Orthodoxy indicates a quorum of ten men) allowed women to participate in Jewish ritual in a way that strict interpretation of Jewish law precluded.15 A few Orthodox feminists, most notably Blu

Greenberg, were active in this period. However, Orthodox experience will not be a focus of this thesis, as Orthodox women’s religious concerns generally did not align with women in the other three major movements in the period under study.

Whereas the Reform and Reconstructionist movements (known together as the

“Progressive” movements) were by the 1970s committed to women’s full equality at least in theory, the debate over women’s role in public Jewish life was still animated and controversial in

Conservative Judaism. From the 1960s-1980s, the Conservative movement, which can be characterized as a “middle ground” between Reform and Orthodox Judaism, was determining where it stood on issues of women’s role in public Jewish life. Of particular concern, for example, were mixed seating in synagogue and the ability of women to perform acts of ritual

14 Moore and Bush, “Mitzvah, Gender, and Reconstructionist Judaism,”144-48. 15 Deborah Lipstadt, “Feminism and American Judaism: Looking Back at the Turn of the Century,” in Women and American Judaism: Historical Perspectives, eds. Pamela S. Nadell and Jonathan D. Sarna (Hanover: University Press of New England, 2001), 301. 8 leadership, such as leading prayer and reading from the Torah. In 1974, Conservative summer camps allowed women to be called to the Torah, although many congregations did not. Between

1972 and 1976, the percentage of Conservative congregations that did grew from 7 to 50 percent, a marked increase but one by no means indicative of wholesale change. A related issue was whether communities would include women in a minyan. In 1973, the Conservative Committee on Law and Standards authorized the movement to count women; however, even by 1986, only

83 percent of congregations did so.16 This context illustrates the political salience of the Brown

Women’s Minyan’s decision to use this term for their community.

One reaction to ’s stagnancy came in the havurah movement. This collection of countercultural Jewish prayer groups, whose name derives from the Hebrew word for “friend” (or, in political usage, “comrade”) was composed primarily of young adult Jews disillusioned with their Conservative movement upbringings. Havurot were characterized by their emphasis on egalitarianism, lay leadership (services were led by members, not by rabbis or cantors), and rejection of what their adherents deemed the capitalistic impulse of the organized

Jewish community (most clearly demonstrated by the selling of synagogue seats).17 Additionally, an early Jewish feminist activist group called Ezrat Nashim (“Women’s Help”) formed within the New York Havurah and pressured the institutions of the Conservative movement to count women in a minyan, call women to the Torah, and, in 1972, stopped just short of demanding women’s ordination.18 Jewish counterculture provided an early home for Jewish feminists,

16 Shuly Rubin Schwartz, “The Tensions that Merit Our Attention: Women in Conservative Judaism,” in Women Remaking American Judaism, ed. Riv-Ellen Prell (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2007), 158-59. 17 Rachel Kranson, “‘To Be a Jew on America’s Terms is Not to Be a Jew At All:’ The Jewish Counterculture’s Critique of Middle-Class Influence,” Journal of Jewish Identities 8, no. 2 (2015): 59-60. https://doi.org/10.1353/jji.2015.0022. 18 Riv-Ellen Prell, “Complicating a Jewish Modernity: The Jewish Theological Seminary, Columbia University, and the Rise of a Jewish Counterculture in 1968,” in Between Jewish Tradition and Modernity: Rethinking an Old Opposition: Essays in Honor of , eds. Michael A. Meyer and David N. Myers (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2014), 273. 9 although much like secular American counterculture, it did not turn its focus to women’s specific concerns.

Women affiliated with and adjacent to the Reform, Reconstructionist, and Conservative movements were living in the midst of significant change in their status and role in the Jewish tradition in the years when the Brown Women’s Minyan was active. These developments acted together to characterize a moment in American Judaism in which women were taking on religious and ritual leadership in multiple forms.

It should be noted that denominationalism is a distinctly Ashkenazi phenomenon that developed in the post-Enlightenment context of Western and the United States. This history excludes the experiences of Jews of Sepharadi and Mizrachi (Spanish and Middle

Eastern) descent and practice, and should not be taken to represent the totality of women’s status across the Jewish world at the time. Still, were (and are) overwhelmingly

Ashkenazi, and American Jewish denominational history is critical to understanding the Jewish religious feminism of which the Brown Women’s Minyan was an essential component.

Brown University

As the Brown Women’s Minyan existed alongside developments in the Jewish world, so too does context of Brown University in the late 1960s and 1970s interplay with its history. This period was one of activism, radicalism, and student-advocated change. Brown was not unique among American universities for the presence of the New Left, whose campus activists challenged the Vietnam War, the draft, and university racism, among other issues. For instance, in May 1970, a student strike provoked the faculty to send a resolution to Rhode Island congressmen and President Nixon opposing the war, and to make classes and final exams

10 optional so that students could engage in anti-war protests.19 Although protests at Brown did not reach the radical levels they did at schools such as Columbia, where students broke into the university president’s office to oppose the building of a gym in Morningside Park, Brown was home to a thriving activist campus culture in the 1970s.

Simultaneously, Brown became more committed to equal experiences for women and men on campus. Pembroke College and the Men’s College merged in 1971, creating a co- educational university and at least ostensibly granting full educational equality to women students at Brown.20 Another specific development of this period at Brown was the New

Curriculum (often called the Open Curriculum). Undergraduate students Ira Magaziner and Elliot

Maxwell proposed the New Curriculum in 1968, having developed it in a group independent study project, and it was adopted in 1969. It abolished all distribution requirements, and replaced broad introductory classes for freshmen with small, participatory seminars centered on specific subjects.21 This innovative approach to education became central to Brown University’s identity, as even today the Open Curriculum is touted as emblematic of the student-centric Brown education.22 It is in this context of students not only leading other students, but also challenging the faculty and indeed the institution of Brown itself, that the Women’s Minyan emerged.

19 Martha Mitchell, “Student Protests,” Encyclopedia Brunoniana (Providence: Brown University, 1993), http://www.brown.edu/Administration/News_Bureau/Databases/Encyclopedia/search.php?serial=S0490. 20 Brown’s History: A Timeline, accessed February 15, 2017, https://www.brown.edu/about/history/timeline/. 21 Ira Magaziner et al., Draft of a Working Paper for Education at Brown University (Providence, RI: self-pub, 1968); Mitchell, “Curriculum,” http://www.brown.edu/Administration/News_Bureau/Databases/Encyclopedia/search.php?serial=C0780 22 “The Brown Curriculum,” Brown University website, accessed March 15, 2018, https://www.brown.edu/academics/college/degree/curriculum; “1969: The New Curriculum Introduced,” Brown University Timeline, accessed March 15, 2018, https://www.brown.edu/about/history/timeline/new-curriculum- introduced; Samuel Rubinstein, “The Art of the Possible: Ira Magaziner ’69,” Brown Political Review, May 20. 2014, http://www.brownpoliticalreview.org/2014/05/the-art-of-the-possible-ira-magaziner-69/.

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However, while student innovations like the Open Curriculum occupy a place of pride within Brown’s identity and self-definition, the Women’s Minyan has been effectively forgotten in Brown’s institutional history. This is true even within the Jewish community at the university, where its impact was most acute. It is not difficult to guess why the Women’s Minyan has disappeared in the historical memory of the general Brown population—its status as both a

Jewish group and a women’s one leads to a dual oppression similar to the one historian Pamela

Nadell outlines in her article “The Impulse to Jewish Women’s History at the Tercentenary.”23

The Jewish aspect of this dual oppression is apparent in the realities that it was not until 1971 that the university employed an associate chaplain for Jewish students, and that the Brown Hillel was at the time (and remains to this day) privately funded, and not an official university group.24

Although longstanding intersectional marginalization of Jewish women’s history renders the lack of scholarship and institutional memory of the Brown University Women’s Minyan less than shocking, this thesis endeavors to understand how the Women’s Minyan was able to disappear so completely from Brown’s consciousness and begin to reverse that process.

Intellectual Context

It is no coincidence that the Brown Women’s Minyan was active in a period of radical social change in the United States that was particularly centered in universities. Indeed, the story of the Women’s Minyan rests at the intersection of Judaism, the student protest movements of

1960s and 1970s, and Second Wave feminism, distinct but related phenomena that shaped

23 Nadell, “The Impulse to Jewish Women’s History at the Tercentenary,” The Jewish Quarterly Review 94, no. 4 (2004): 637-38. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1455597. 24 George M. Goodman and Ellen Smith, The Jews of Rhode Island (Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 2004), 236; Mitchell, “Chapel,” http://www.brown.edu/Administration/News_Bureau/Databases/Encyclopedia/search.php?serial=C0330 12

American life and American Jews. Most scholars of Jewish feminism root its emergence with the development of Second Wave feminist ideology and activism, in which Jewish women were both leaders and participants. However, as useful as it is to periodize a variety of ideologies and political initiatives as belonging to one “wave” of feminism, this designation is a wholly imperfect means of categorizing the variety of perspectives that emerged among feminists in the

1960s and 1970s, as well as the relationships between these women and those who preceded and followed them in the project of . Though it is not flawless, I will employ the

“Second Wave” designation for simplicity’s sake to describe the sort of feminism that emerged in this period.

The Second Wave precipitated sweeping change both in the United States and throughout the West, propelling women to political and professional leadership, solidifying access to birth control and reproductive healthcare, and reshaping how American women perceived of themselves and their capabilities. It overturned centuries of thought on women as fundamentally

“lesser” or “separate,” and contributed to an intellectual climate that centered “the politics of personal life.”25 Jewish women were central to the movement from the start: Betty Friedan’s The

Feminine Mystique is universally considered one of its foundational texts, and ,

Bella Abzug, and Letty Cottin Pogrebin some of its most outspoken advocates.

It is crucial to note key distinctions between the secular Second Wave and the Jewish feminism that was influenced by and largely contemporaneous with it. Historian , in her article “Jewish Feminism Faces the American Women’s Movement: Convergence and

Divergence,” makes a distinction between “Jewish feminism” and “American feminism,” describing the former as “a loose construct of Jewish women who have brought feminist insights

25 Jane Gerhard, Desiring Revolution: Second-Wave Feminism and the Rewriting of American Sexual Thought, 1920 to 1982 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 3-4. 13 and critiques into the Jewish community and into the field of in the American university. All have been influenced by the American women’s movement, but all have dissented from some of its manifestations.”26 Jewish women attended university at significantly higher rates than American women as a whole. During their college years they were exposed to the works of feminist thinkers such as Simone de Beauvoir and Betty Friedan in the consciousness- raising groups that flourished on campuses in the 1970s. What made the women who became the pioneers of the Jewish feminist movement different from their fellow feminists of Jewish background was their conviction that they could not leave their Judaism behind in favor of their feminism. Rather, they used the tools of feminist analysis to critique Jewish tradition and

American . Nadell makes a similar argument in her book Women Who Would Be

Rabbis: A History of Women’s Ordination, 1889-1985: after an in-depth analysis of the road to women rabbis, she concludes that the main reason Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of

Religion ordained Sally Priesand in 1972 (although it had denied ordination to earlier women who had completed the rabbinic curriculum) was because women’s leadership had become more mainstream in American culture.27 Hyman and Nadell, taken together, develop a narrative of

American Jewish in which Jewish feminism was rooted in and dependent on the developments of the Second Wave.

Jewish women’s separation from some mainstream currents of the Second Wave could be both intentional and involuntary. Hyman’s article also discusses the Women’s Movement’s flirtation with anti- that bordered on anti-Semitism (and sometimes was anti-Semitic outright). This culminated in 1980 with a call at the International Women’s Conference in

26 Hyman, “Jewish Feminism Faces the American Women’s Movement: Convergence and Divergence,” in American Politics, ed. Deborah Dash Moore (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008), 221. 27 Nadell, Women Who Would Be Rabbis, 161. 14

Copenhagen to kill all Jews in order to root out Zionism. Feminist Jewish women, most notably

Letty Cottin Pogrebin, took to the pages of magazines such as Ms. and to express their convictions that feminism and Judaism could co-exist.28 Although the most egregious event

Hyman cites did not occur until four years after Siddur Nashim’s publication, the context of feminist anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism is necessary to understand some of Janowitz and

Wenig’s liturgical choices that position the State of at the center of their conception of the

Jewish present and future.

Another form of anti-Judaism existed in Christian religious feminism, a significant movement within the Second Wave. Theologians sought to replace the of Eve in precipitating the downfall of man with something less misogynistic, and so formulated a theory in 1971 that prior to the ancient , -worship had reigned supreme, only to be destroyed by biblical Judaism. In this ideology, Jesus came in order to restore egalitarianism.29 These currents helped to distinguish Jewish feminism from secular feminism and , which, because of Christian hegemony in the United States, were sometimes synonymous. Although it is not clear whether the Brown Women’s Minyan members were consciously the ability of Judaism to be feminist in opposition to some Christian feminism, this context is essential to a full understanding of Jewish religious feminism in the 1970s and 1980s.

The Jewish feminists of this period were not only advocating for a more gendered approach to Jewish religion; they were also asserting their ability to serve as ritual leaders of their own communities. This advocacy occurred in the context of younger communities seeking to transform Jewish practice into something more participatory than it had been in their youth.

Deborah Lipstadt links the history of the havurah to the musical revolution in Reform worship

28 Hyman, “Jewish Feminism Faces the American Women’s Movement,” 228-29. 29 Hyman, “Jewish Feminism Faces the American Women’s Movement,” 227. 15 ushered in by composer and songleader Debbie Friedman. The new music, which was initially popular in the Reform youth movement and its camps, took from the style of American folk music and emphasized congregational participation—to the chagrin of many Reform cantors who saw their importance waning. Both Friedman’s participatory Reform worship and the havurah movement, for Lipstadt, are examples of young Jews demanding more ownership of their Jewish experiences, from singing Friedman’s melodies to delivering their own sermons in a havurah.30 Women’s minyanim represented another facet of this push for greater ownership and participation, and took it further by demanding women’s centrality in Jewish prayer.

Another important development in the history of Jewish counterculture came in 1968, when students at the Jewish Theological Seminary held a sit-in and demanded that the school and the movement change its policies toward women, lay participation in Jewish life, and the capitalist influence on Jewish community. Scholar Riv-Ellen Prell argues that these events, though much less radical than the concurrent student activism at Columbia University six blocks south, were influenced by both the counterculture movement that produced the Columbia protests and by the nature of those protests themselves.31 In a similar way, the student protest activism experience at Brown in the late 1960s to early 1970s likely inspired and influenced the positioning of the Brown Women’s Minyan.

Unfortunately, there is not yet any systematic intellectual history of Jewish . One of the purposes of this thesis is to begin to fill this exact historiographical gap, with a local focus on the Women’s Minyan at Brown. As scholar Oshrat Morag notes, women

30 Lipstadt, “‘And It Not Be Stilled:’ The Legacy of Debbie Friedman,” in Between Jewish Tradition and Modernity: Rethinking an Old Opposition: Essays in Honor of David Ellenson, eds. Michael A. Meyer and David N. Myers (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2014), 115-16. 31 Prell, “Complicating a Jewish Modernity,” 275-76.

16 thinkers and commentators are not considered as consequential or authoritative by academics, who prefer to work on more famous names such as Heschel, Buber, and Rosenzweig.32 However, a few scholars have provided liturgical and theological scholarship that can begin to fill the persistent hole in the intellectual history and historiography of Jewish feminism. For example, this thesis builds on the foundations of Sara Smith’s article “The Imahot in the : A

History,” which gives a textual overview of the move to include the matriarchs (Sarah, Rebekah,

Leah, and Rachel) in prayers that invoke the , a major achievement in the development of mainstream gender-sensitive liturgy.33 In addition, Morag provides a cursory treatment of most major Jewish feminist theological perspectives, and Kari Hofmaister Tuling more carefully considers the role of gendered theology in liturgy and public worship. This thesis will combine the approaches of all three of these feminist scholars, providing archival and textual analysis of understudied, yet hugely significant, feminist developments in Jewish liturgy.34

This project aims to construct a history both of progressive Jewish women and of in progressive Jewish thought and theology. These two categories are distinct, although intimately linked with one another, as one concerns the lived experiences of diverse human beings gendered as women, while the other involves the notions of idealized rather than lived womanhood that exist and change across time in the (sub-)cultural imaginary. The first chapter focuses on women, particularly the members of the Brown Women’s Minyan, and their role in shaping for themselves a novel form of Jewish religious practice that both drew heavily

32 Oshrat Morag, “I Find By Experience: Feminist Praxis of Theology and Knowledge,” in The Sacred Calling: Four Decades of Women in the Rabbinate, eds. Rebecca Einstein Schorr and Alysa Mendelson Graf (New York: CCAR Press, 2016), 367. 33 Sara Smith, “The Imahot in the Amidah: A History,” Contemporary Jewry 32 (2012): 309, https://doi.org/10.1007/s12397-012-9092-0. 34 Morag, “I Find by Experience,” 367-77; Kari Hofmaister Tuling, “Shifting the Focus: Women Rabbis and Developments in Feminist Theology,” in The Sacred Calling: Four Decades of Women in the Rabbinate, eds. Rebecca Einstein Schorr and Alysa Mendelson Graf (New York: CCAR Press, 2016), 379-89. 17 from and subverted more “traditional” modes of worship. The textual legacy of the Women’s

Minyan forms the basis of chapter two, which delves deeply into the text of Siddur Nashim to explore new images of theological femininity that were themselves a significant contribution to the Jewish feminist canon. The third chapter builds upon this analysis to examine how these ideas penetrated the intellectual culture of Jewish feminism and progressive Judaism and how, in doing so, they shaped the ways that ordinary American Jews experienced and understood God.

Essential to the Jewish feminist project and underlying much of my analysis is an interpretation of the verse, “And God created the person in God’s own image, created it in the image of God, created them male and female.”35 This is taken in the Jewish feminist and progressive traditions to indicate that every human being, of any gender, is equally similar to

God. Thus, to people conversant with this tradition, the gendering of God has implications for hierarchies of human worth based on gender. The Women’s Minyan was part of a tradition that sought to redefine the role of femininity in constructing popular and human beings within the American Jewish community. It is the central goal of this thesis to uncover their role in this process of transformation.

35 Gen. 1:28, translation mine. 18

1. The Women’s Minyan: Prayer, Tears, and Institutional Support

In the fall of 1974, three women at Brown University began a three-semester group independent study project with religious studies professor David Blumenthal. They had approached him with the idea to write a women’s prayerbook to use in their women’s minyan.

He was intrigued by the idea, but thought that the women first needed a stronger grounding both in the treatment of women in traditional rabbinic interpretation () and in the structure and literary style of Jewish liturgy. So the three undergraduate students—Naomi Janowitz, Margaret

Moers Wenig, and Deborah French—studied these subjects with him for credit. They spent a year on detailed background study: they learned about women in midrash in the 1974 fall semester and Jewish liturgy in the spring of 1975, and only in the fall of 1975 did they begin writing their own prayerbook under the auspices of their independent study. At the end of the process, each had earned ten percent of the course credit necessary for graduation on this project alone, and by the spring of 1976, they were using their original liturgy, compiled in a prayerbook titled Siddur Nashim (literally “Women’s Prayerbook”), in the Brown Women’s Minyan.1

The composition of Siddur Nashim marked the peak of the Women’s Minyan’s intellectual contribution to Jewish thought and theology, and the achievement for which it is best

(though still barely) remembered. The Brown Women’s Minyan, however, represented much more for its participants than a creative liturgy lab: it was the place where their Judaism and their feminism could coherently coexist. The Women’s Minyan provided space for women to exist not as second-class Jews, but as equal but distinct participants in the chain of Jewish tradition.

1 David Blumenthal in discussion with the author, November 2017. 19

The Brown Women’s Minyan was one of few Jewish feminist groups of the 1970s to leave a significant documentary contribution to the corpus of Jewish text. The reasons they were able to do so are multifold, as I will explore in this chapter, and hinged on the historical context of progressivism and feminism in the 1970s, the institutional support they received from Brown

University and Brown Hillel, and an element of luck—the right students happened to be at

Brown at the right time. My attention to the historical factors at play, however, should not detract from the specific vision and contributions of the women involved: though the stage may have been set at Brown for the Women’s Minyan to innovate and thrive in the 1970s, ultimately the credit belongs to the college-aged Jewish women who took millennia-old Jewish tradition into their own hands and, with painstaking care, molded it into something that made sense not just for women but for feminists.

The contribution of the Brown Women’s Minyan to the progressive Jewish approach to gender in liturgy and theology may seem outsized for its five-year lifespan; the group only existed from 1973 to 1978. However, in this brief time, the Women’s Minyan both shaped and was shaped by developments in American Jewish feminism, and provides a useful lens through which to understand this movement’s early history. During its years of existence, the Women’s

Minyan, and Jewish feminism, moved from a position of irrelevant obscurity in American Jewish discourse to one of both controversy and creativity. That is to say, whereas in the early 1970s

Jewish feminism was still too nascent for Jewish communal leaders to see it as a threat, by the end of the decade the concerns and innovations of Jewish feminists were contentious and widely debated. Though the growth of Jewish feminism spurred a Jewish anti-feminism, both of these forces contributed to the development of a substantive feminist critique of Jewish tradition, not

20 just in essays and magazines but also in prayer and community structures, that would shape

American and indeed world Judaism for decades to come.

Thus, study of the Women’s Minyan allows for a more specific identification of when the distinct Jewish feminism that historian Paula Hyman develops in contrast to secular American feminism began to emerge.2 The years preceding 1973 saw two major milestones in the history of Jewish women: the Jewish feminist group Ezrat Nashim was founded in New York in 1971, and in 1972 Sally Priesand was ordained as the first woman rabbi in the United States. Both of these early Jewish feminist victories highlight the movement’s incipiency: Ezrat Nashim was one of the first Jewish feminist prayer and activist groups, and it began only in 1971.3 Priesand’s ordination, too, shows how undeveloped Jewish feminism was: though women had been striving for ordination in the United States since the late nineteenth century, Priesand attested that she did not intend to make a feminist statement in becoming a rabbi, only to serve the Jewish People.

Moreover, her ordination was not preceded by any sort of campaign or vote on women’s ordination; rather, the school’s president made an individual decision to ordain her alongside her male classmates.4 In the early 1970s, Jewish women were beginning to gain positions of leadership and bring their feminist consciousness to their Judaism, but even in this context it was only at Brown that an early iteration of Jewish feminist spirituality manifested in this impactful a way.

Although the contributions of the Brown Women’s Minyan to American Jewish and feminist history are apparent in the documents they left behind, most notably Siddur Nashim,

2 Paula E. Hyman, “Jewish Feminism Faces the American Women’s Movement: Convergence and Divergence,” in American Jewish , ed. Deborah Dash Moore (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008), 221. 3 Pamela S. Nadell, Women Who Would Be Rabbis: A History of Women’s Ordination, 1889-1985 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998), 170-73. 4 George Vecsey, “Her Ambition is to Become a Rabbi,” New York Times, April 13, 1971, https://www.nytimes.com/1971/04/13/archives/her-ambition-is-to-become-a-rabbi-and-a-housewife.html; Nadell, Women Who Would be Rabbis, 165-68. 21 little contemporary writing about the more basic facts of the minyan’s existence survives, as is so often true in the history of people operating outside of positions of power. Thus, this chapter is largely reliant upon oral history, with all of its potential pitfalls. Fading memories, conflicting accounts, and lack of textual corroboration all color the narrative. These challenges necessitate a degree of informed speculation as I attempt to construct a history of a community most of whose written records have been lost. A fuller understanding of the Women’s Minyan is essential to the construction of a more complete history of Jewish feminism and progressive Judaism and thus, the memories of its participants and advisors are necessary supplements to limited documentary evidence.

Academic Year 1973-1974: The Beginning

As the sun began to set on Saturday, December 1, 1973, the Brown Women’s Minyan had its first publicly advertised service.5 They met in the large upstairs meeting room of 80

Brown Street, the Brown Hillel building. Together, they prayed the (afternoon) service, including a reading from the Torah. Around ten women were in attendance; for all but perhaps one or two of the women present, this was the first time in their lives they had ever attended a service led by a woman.6

At the beginning of the 1973 fall semester, Brown Hillel’s rabbi and executive director,

Richard Marker, led two weekly services: an egalitarian Friday evening service and a

Saturday morning service with a mechitzah, a divider between men and women.7 In Marker’s

5 “Public Worship at Brown,” Brown Daily Herald, Nov. 30th, 1973. 6 Naomi Janowitz in discussion with the author, September 2017; Margaret Moers Wenig in discussion with the author, November 2017; Laurie Rutenberg in discussion with the author, November 2017; Richard Marker in discussion with the author, November 2017. It is unclear how many participants attended this first service or the subsequent ones, as my interviewees mostly remember the group size as somewhere around ten, though none clearly recall how many women were present. 7 Rutenberg in discussion with the author, November 2017. 22 morning service, only men could lead prayer or read from the Torah, a reality that became increasingly frustrating to the women students who were learning and living in the feminist climate of Brown’s campus in the 1970s. Women’s glaring absence from the service, as well as a desire to create opportunities for the expression of a particularly Jewish feminism on Brown’s campus, spurred a few Jewish women to begin a Jewish feminist group.

In its earliest stage, this group was food-centric: they met for frequent dinners, discussed relationships between Judaism, Jewish women, and Jewish food, and even exchanged recipes.

This approach did not threaten the status quo of women’s position in the Jewish community, as food was traditionally associated with women both in American and Jewish culture. Naomi

Janowitz, who was a first-year student in the fall of 1973, recalls that at some point, the women involved decided to experiment with a women’s-only service.8 Marker recalls hearing of a women’s minyan at Wellesley College at a conference for Jewish campus professionals and suggesting it to some women students.9

The Women’s Minyan made a conscious attempt not to compete with other prayer offerings at Hillel.10 Throughout its entire documented existence, the Women’s Minyan met for

Saturday minchah (afternoon) services, at times ranging from 3:30 to 4:30 PM, as announced in the Brown Daily Herald alongside announcements for other religious services, including the

Shabbat evening and morning services at Brown Hillel. No other minchah services were regularly offered at Hillel in this period.11 Unlike a Friday evening, the minchah service provided the opportunity for the women to read from the Torah, as a is included in its

8 Janowitz in discussion with the author, September 2017. 9 Marker in discussion with the author, November 2017. 10 Janowitz, September 2017; Rutenberg, November 2017; Wenig in discussion with the author, November 2017. 11 “Public Worship at Brown,” Brown Daily Herald, Nov. 30, 1973; Dec. 7, 1973; January 11, 1974; October 24, 1975; September 16, 1976.

23 liturgy. Some Women’s Minyan participants attended other services at Hillel, while others only attended the Women’s Minyan.12

A few feminist-aligned men had attended the feminist dinners, but nevertheless, Janowitz and the other women who established the Women’s Minyan chose to exclude men from participating in it. They wanted to form a space that centered women’s experiences and was free from the potential for male domination.13 This exclusion caused disagreement within the Brown

Hillel community—Janowitz recalls that some students, including women, felt uncomfortable with a group in which men were not welcome, and wondered whether this was indeed as bad as the exclusion of women which feminists purported to oppose. Some Jewish students challenged the existence of the group on the grounds of Jewish law: because the traditional definition of a minyan was the quorum of ten men required for certain prayers to be said, they considered it improper and even disrespectful for the Women’s Minyan to refer to itself as such.14

However, most participants I interviewed recall broad-based support for the Women’s

Minyan. The group enjoyed the backing of Rabbi Richard Marker, who saw supporting student initiatives as an essential part of his work and whose was a frequent attendee.15 This validation, as also indicated by inclusion of Women’s Minyan service times in the Brown Daily

Herald, differentiates the Brown Women’s Minyan from at least one other university women’s minyan of the period—the group at Columbia and Barnard had separate announcements in the campus newspaper and met outside of the Hillel space.16 It seems that the Hillel foundation at

Brown was more receptive than those at other universities to such ritual innovation. As

12 Rutenberg, November 2017. 13 Janowitz, September 2017; Marker, November 2017. 14 Janowitz, September 2017. 15 Janowitz, September 2017; Wenig, November 2017; Rutenberg, November 2017; Marker, November 2017. 16 Advertisement, Columbia Spectator (New York, NY), Dec. 5, 1974. 24

Blumenthal and others have characterized it, Brown’s institutional identity in this period as a locus of progressive innovation may have, alongside Marker’s stated endorsement, contributed to this early support.

Some male Jewish students at Brown also contributed to the nascent project. One,

Jonathan Zimmit, brought his technical expertise in Jewish worship to contribute to the Women’s

Minyan, as he taught the women how to chant prayer and Torah in traditional Ashkenazi melodies (nusach and trope), skills that many congregations taught to boys but not girls.17

Although its leaders would one day produce a prayerbook written entirely in English, the Brown

Women’s Minyan prayed, at least in its early days, with the traditional Hebrew text. Many participants saw the Women’s Minyan as an opportunity to hone their ritual skills and developed the ability to both lead prayer and read Torah. In congregations of the time, women were either barred from these roles or socially discouraged from taking them on, so Women’s Minyan leaders were forced to learn them quickly in order to perform them in the service. Although at the time the bat mitzvah was gaining popularity for adolescent girls, few Reform and

Conservative congregations of the era entrusted girls with equal ritual leadership to boys in these ceremonies, while Orthodox congregations did not hold them at all.18 Some of the women I interviewed recalled celebrating their own bat mitzvah, while one, Wenig, specifically mentioned that she had not. Nevertheless, few women recalled having substantive Jewish ritual leadership experience before college, and relied on the men in the Hillel community and a few women with strong backgrounds in Orthodox prayer to teach them the skills necessary to successfully organize and lead a weekly service.19

17 Rutenberg, November 2017. 18 Regina Stein, “The Road to Bat Mitzvah in America,” in Women and American Judaism: Historical Perspectives, eds. Pamela S. Nadell and Jonathan D. Sarna (Hanover: Press, 2001), 227-32. 19 Rutenberg, November 2017. 25

Most participants in the Women’s Minyan were undergraduate students. Those I interviewed recall that a few graduate students also attended, along with Rabbi Richard Marker’s wife, Gail Marker. A Brown Alumni Monthly article notes two alumnae who were regular attendees, Gladys Chernack Kapstein ’40 and Carolyn R. Lenz ’73. Presumably they heard about the group by word of mouth, as there do not appear to have been any off-campus publicity efforts.20 Members of the Women’s Minyan remember its numbers as rather small, perhaps ten to fifteen participants.21 The group’s size, however, should not be seen as a mark of insignificance, as the Women’s Minyan both provided meaningful spiritual experiences in the lives of its participants and was also a locus of Jewish feminist innovation that would live beyond the

Minyan’s five-year history.

The Right Conditions: Student Protest, Feminism, and Brown

Given how controversial feminism was in the United States during the 1970s, one might expect more pushback against a group of women taking the reins of ritual leadership, a role which had almost always been granted only to men. Conversations within the Brown Jewish community to some degree represented debates surrounding women’s empowerment and equality in American culture, as there was some debate within the American Jewish community about whether women-only prayer communities were acceptable. However, the Brown community’s overall answer appears to have been a resounding “yes,” as none of the women I interviewed recall any virulent opposition to the group’s existence, although there were women who chose not to join it and men who harbored resentment at their exclusion.22 This general

20 K.S., “Judaism is Not for Men Only,” Brown Alumni Monthly, February 1975, 20. 21 Wenig, November 2017; Janowitz, September 2017; Rutenberg, November 2017. 22 Janowitz, September 2017; Rutenberg, November 2017. 26 support as the Women’s Minyan began is indicative of a campus culture at Brown conducive to challenging the status quo on multiple fronts, including feminist Jewish innovation.

By 1973, Brown University had incorporated many of the ideals of the 1960s student protest movement into its self-conception and institutional brand. Although protests at Brown did not reach the radical levels they did in this period at other universities, Brown’s activist campus culture in the 1960s and 1970s was engaged in questioning existing power structures. The

Women’s Minyan was founded in 1973, in the context of various challenges to the educational status quo at Brown, but certainly, with the onset of equal coeducation, in an environment in which substantive feminist victories were within recent institutional memory. During this period, many thinkers and activists within the Second Wave feminist movement came to assign importance to women-only communities, as consciousness-raising groups and feminist collectives gained traction as primary loci of feminist activity.23 The merging of Pembroke into the now-fully coeducational Brown was a victory for the feminist ideal of educational equality; however, it did not spark a decline in the importance of women-only spaces to feminist organizing.

Within this context, the Women’s Minyan came into being—not as a political consciousness-raising group, but as collective of women with a shared goal: promoting women’s voice and leadership in the Jewish community. Jewish undergraduate women at Brown had at their fingertips a host of opportunities for feminist engagement on campus beyond the Women’s

Minyan. There were even multiple avenues for feminism with a religious lens at Brown including multifaith feminist programs offered through the chaplain’s office.24 Some Women’s

23 Anna Krugovoy Silver, “The Cyborg Mystique: The Stepford and Second Wave Feminism,” Women’s Studies Quarterly 30, no. 1/2 (2002): 60, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40004637. 24 Judy Kaye in discussion with the author, October 2017.

27

Minyan participants were active in other feminist circles on campus, while others focused their feminist energies and attentions on the Women’s Minyan.25

The feminist consciousness present in university culture around the United States and at

Brown specifically was not the only factor that made Brown a fitting place for Jewish feminist innovation in the 1970s; a few factors in the Jewish community contributed to the Women’s

Minyan’s success. Marker, the Hillel director who was concurrently the first Jewish associate university chaplain in the Ivy League, was at the time a young rabbi who had experienced a feminist awakening during his rabbinical school years at the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS) in the mid- to late 1960s. Before coming to Brown, he had taught classes on on other campuses, and, by his own recollection, was already committed to the inclusion of women in Jewish community.26

During Marker’s tenure, JTS had been home to a significant student protest movement of its own, largely sparked by the one at Columbia University a few blocks south. In addition, during this period many rabbinical students were engaged in their studies in order to evade the draft, fueling a countercultural fire. Beginning in spring 1968 (Marker’s final semester), many students protested and sought to reshape the school’s curriculum, including a call for JTS to ordain women as rabbis, a benchmark that would not be met until 1985.27 Although Marker was not present for all of these events, his rabbinic education was surely shaped by its overlap with one of the most politically active periods in the Seminary’s history. He brought this experience

25 Kaye in discussion with the author, October 2017; Rutenberg, November 2017. 26 Marker, November 2017. 27 Riv-Ellen Prell, “Complicating a Jewish Modernity: The Jewish Theological Seminary, Columbia University, and the Rise of a Jewish Counterculture in 1968,” in Between Jewish Tradition and Modernity: Rethinking an Old Opposition: Essays in Honor of David Ellenson, ed. Michael A. Meyer and David N. Myers (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2014), 267-74. 28 and his youth to Brown, both of which likely contributed to the Women’s Minyan’s institutional support.

In addition, the curricular changes at Brown that accompanied the student protest movement created not only a student culture conducive to the Women’s Minyan’s development, but also faculty culture and academic programs that allowed for the Siddur Nashim project to occur as it did. Because of the institutional emphasis on student-directed learning Brown adopted during this period, it was possible for Wenig, Janowitz, and French to spend three semesters in independent study with Blumenthal working on their prayerbook. In addition, Blumenthal recalled that his colleagues on the religious studies faculty were fully supportive of this project— as he put it, “It was Brown. The crazier, the better.”28

Moving Toward the Radical in Prayer and Practice, 1974-1976

Marker remembers another consequential show of support for the Women’s Minyan within the Providence community: when approached by a few of the group’s organizers in 1973, an Orthodox rabbi gave the opinion that it was acceptable under Jewish law (halakhah) for women to have a service and read from the Torah, so long as they omitted the prayers for which a quorum of ten Jewish men (the traditional definition of a minyan) was required.29 To accommodate the broad swath of Jewish women who were interested in praying with the

Women’s Minyan, leaders followed this directive in the early years and prayed a full service

28 Blumenthal in discussion with the author, November 2017. 29 Marker, November 2017. This approach is the one now taken among many Orthodox feminists, and remains controversial within American Orthodoxy.

29 without Barchu, the call to worship, and , a prayer used both in mourning and to delineate sections of the service, both of which required a minyan.30

At first glance, it seems shocking that an Orthodox rabbi in 1973 would approve of a woman leading prayers for a group of women when that issue is still a hotly debated one in the

Orthodox world in 2018.31 It appears that, in 1973, the nascent Jewish feminist movement, separate but related to the mainstream American Second Wave, was not yet developed enough to be seen as a threat to the established order. However, not everyone approved of the project:

Wenig remembers that a local Conservative rabbi, who also taught as an adjunct professor at Brown, disapproved of the Women’s Minyan and of the Siddur Nashim project in particular, and considered it frivolous. Judy Kaye, another member of the Women’s Minyan, remembers giving a talk about the experience at her home Reform synagogue in Brookline,

Massachusetts that “ruffled some feathers.”32

By 1976, however, the Women’s Minyan in particular and Jewish feminism in general had seen growing opposition to their innovations and activity, and in response, the Women’s

Minyan reversed the norms of its earlier years and began to disregard the concerns of Jewish women whose practice was more “traditional.” Marker recalls that it was during this period that women from more conservative backgrounds began to avoid participating in the Women’s

Minyan, as their families and home communities began to disapprove of women’s heightened leadership in Jewish life. Whereas the Women’s Minyan had previously accommodated more conservative students by excluding prayers that require a minyan and praying an unchanged traditional liturgy, as fewer of these women attended, the more progressive women in the group

30 Marker, November 2017; Rutenberg, November 2017. 31 Uriel Heilman, “‘’ Spreads Among Orthodox—and Rabbis Fire Back,” Forward, March 5, 2014, https://forward.com/news/193860/partnership-minyan-spreads-among-orthodox-and-ra/. 32 Wenig, November 2017; Kaye, October 2017. 30 advocated for creating a more radical and innovative prayer service. Participants began singing or saying all the prayers in the service, including the ones requiring a minyan, and introduced radically feminist and feminized liturgy in their services. The sense was that if more conservative women were not going to come anyway, there was no reason to make compromises in order to accommodate them.33 This progressive push from the second “generation” (really only a year or two younger) of Women’s Minyan participants culminated in the writing and compilation of

Siddur Nashim, the group’s most lasting contribution to Jewish thought, theology, and prayer.

It was not only the growing dearth of Orthodox women that spurred the Women’s

Minyan to begin to adopt more feminized liturgy; there was also a prevailing feeling that the traditional, masculine liturgy simply did not fit a room full of worshipping women. Rutenberg vividly recalls an experience of leading an English reading, reciting the words, “Happy is the man that trusts in You,” before she gasped and stopped reading, unable to go on, as she realized that the words she was using in prayer had nothing to do with her own life, as she would never know the experience of being a man who trusts in God.34 These feelings of disjointedness that surrounded the traditional liturgy spurred Women’s Minyan participants to move from the format of a more traditional service that happened to include only women to one of a prayer experience that was specifically and overtly feminist. This shift reflects trends in the secular American feminist movement, as the concept of an amorphous “women’s experience” became paramount in defining feminist cultural transformation.35 In addition, it contributes to an understanding of this early period of Jewish feminism—it seems that even by 1974 (when Janowitz, Wenig, and

French approached Blumenthal about writing a women’s siddur) or 1975, Jewish feminist

33 Marker, November 2017. 34 Rutenberg, November 2017. 35 Lisa Maria Hogeland, Feminism and Its Fictions: The Consciousness-Raising Novel and the Women’s Liberation Movement (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), 74. 31 thinkers and activists were making waves big enough to be seen as a threat among more conservative leaders, who discouraged their undergraduate women congregants and community members from partaking in Jewish feminist experiences like the Women’s Minyan.

Although Siddur Nashim was the major contribution of the Women’s Minyan to the documentary record of Jewish feminism, it did not at all replace the traditional Hebrew liturgy in services.36 Depending on who was leading prayer, its English readings might be employed in lieu of the Hebrew text, or its creative translations might provide a commentary for worshippers to contemplate as they uttered more masculine . Nevertheless, the presence of

Siddur Nashim in the Women’s Minyan community marked it as one which was committed to elevating “women’s experience” and reimagining the possibilities of Jewish prayer and, thus, of

Jewish community. The Women’s Minyan’s shift in the years 1974 to 1976 from a group of

Jewish women to a more decidedly feminist Jewish collective is evidence both of the influence that the rising tide of Jewish feminism had on women’s place in the Jewish community and of the historical place of the Women’s Minyan as a harbinger of Jewish feminist transformation.

Tears, Prayers, and Proto-

Though the women I interviewed all shared different stories and stressed different aspects of the Women’s Minyan, one surprising thread ran through those interviews: all four women mentioned, without any prompting, that many participants cried. Tears flowed freely at Women’s

Minyan services, it seems, and I (as an observant Jew myself) would not characterize Judaism as a religious tradition in which outward displays of emotion are common in worship services.

When describing why they cried in services or why they thought others did, the interviewees

36 Janowitz, September 2017. 32 stressed that the Women’s Minyan provided a kind of space none of them had experienced before: one where their Judaism and their feminism could coexist coherently. Most of the women explain that they came to the Women’s Minyan with a strong Jewish identity and an already existent feminist consciousness; however, never before had both of these identities been upheld and validated simultaneously.37 These experiences further point to the nascent nature of Jewish feminism in the 1970s—in later decades, in would not be nearly so rare to find a space in which feminism and Judaism were equally valued. In addition, these stories shed light on how developments in Jewish feminism anticipated what would become a defining ideology of what is commonly periodized as feminism’s Third Wave: the concept of intersectionality.

Intersectional theory, as put forth by critical race theorist Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw in

1991, is the understanding that oppression and identity operate on overlapping levels which intersect with each other and work with and against each other to shape individual and communal experiences of both oppression and belonging.38 By the 2000s and early 2010s, this idea had taken hold in feminist and other progressive movements as a heuristic for understanding the lives of people whose identities are multiple, and potentially as a framework for solidarity between different identity groups.

The students in the Women’s Minyan understood their intersecting identities as Jews and as women, and mobilized in support of both groups: as part of Brown Hillel, they raised funds for the during the War, and participated in various feminist consciousness-raising and activist activities around campus.39 However, never before had there

37 Janowitz, September 2017; Kaye in discussion with the author, October 2017; Wenig, November 2017; Rutenberg, November 2017. 38 Kimberle Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (1991): 1242-45. 39 Rutenberg, November 2017; Kaye, October 2017. 33 existed a space where they could grapple with concerns specific to Jewish women, such as their exclusion from roles of leadership in prayer and the masculine liturgical language that established men as normative Jews. In the Women’s Minyan, students were able to not only talk about these issues but rectify them on a small scale—rather than just discussing whether women should read Torah, for example, they publicly did so every week. Their tears in these moments are telling, as they demonstrate that the intersectional experience of feminist prayer was one that was not only historically significant, but powerful in Jewish women’s lived experience.

This anticipation of intersectional theory was hardly limited to the Women’s Minyan—it was present in the feminist subgroups that emerged as issues that pertained to groups other than straight white women were sidelined on the front lines of the American Second Wave. However,

Jewish feminism provides a curious case, as many of the most prominent leaders of the mainstream feminist movement, such as , Betty Friedan, and Gloria Steinem, were themselves Jewish women, though the issues that formed the core of their agenda were not specifically Jewish ones. Even though white Jewish women did not experience the same marginalization within the women’s movement as women of color (there were some bouts of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism in the global Second Wave, but for the most part Jewish women were welcomed in the feminist world), they still felt a push toward grappling with their particular issues, even as Jews who were quite assimilated into mainstream American culture.40 The

Women’s Minyan reminds us that even when a group is included in a rights movement on the national stage, specific inequalities do not diminish in importance.

The Women’s Minyan is not merely an example of a particularistic feminist sub- movement that emerged during the Second Wave. The group’s leaders were pioneers in the

40 Hyman, “Jewish Feminism Faces the American Women’s Movement,” 228-29. 34 development of a feminism that could hold space for more and different identities, and succeeded in both making space for Jewish women to subvert tradition and rewriting the language of Jewish tradition to include women’s particular concerns and experiences.

1976-1978: The Final Years of the Women’s Minyan

In the two years following the introduction of Siddur Nashim’s feminine liturgy to the

Women’s Minyan in 1975-1976, it seems that the tide of change within the group slowed, while it continued to be a space for women to learn the skills of Jewish leadership and take ownership of Jewish tradition. By fall 1978, announcements for the Women’s Minyan were absent from the

Brown Daily Herald, and no one I interviewed recalls who might have taken on the reins after

Wenig, Shira Stern, and a few other leaders graduated the previous spring. It seems that after these women left Brown, the momentum for the Women’s Minyan slowed to a halt, largely contemporaneously with slowing American feminist enthusiasm as the 1970s came to a close.41

Although there remained feminist Jews at Brown, they expressed their identities and politics in spaces other than the Women’s Minyan.

Also by the fall of 1978 there were two Shabbat morning services every week at Brown, an Orthodox one (as before) in which only men could lead prayer and chant Torah, but also a

Conservative one whose leadership and participation was egalitarian.42 The gap that the

Women’s Minyan had directly filled no longer existed, and it seems that the urgency of a separate women’s prayer space began to evaporate. It appears that when Wenig and Stern

41 Rosalyn Baxandall and Linda Gordon, “Second-Wave Feminism,” in A Companion to American Women’s History, ed. Nancy A. Hewitt, re-print (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 420-21, 427. 42 Wenig, November 2017; Marker, November 2017. 35 graduated in 1978, enthusiasm for the Women’s Minyan left campus with them, and the group had its final minchah service in either the late spring or early fall of that year.

The Women’s Minyan’s five-year life, from 1973 to 1978, had an outsized impact on the history of Jewish feminism and on the lives of the women who participated in it. A striking number of students in the Women’s Minyan went on to further leadership in both Jewish communities and Jewish scholarship. Naomi Janowitz (class of 1977), one of the authors of

Siddur Nashim, became a scholar of religion in late antiquity, and has written on the role of women and femininity in the texts and traditions of this period.43 Many of the women went on to the rabbinate and continued to pursue Jewish feminism in both their actions and their writing:

Margaret Moers Wenig served as a congregational rabbi and professor of liturgy and homiletics at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, and her 1990 sermon “God is a Woman and She is Getting Older” has been translated into multiple languages and continues to be preached worldwide.44 Laurie Rutenberg (class of 1975) also became a rabbi, and credits her time in the Women’s Minyan with turning prayer into a religious rather than just a communal experience for her.45 Shira Stern (class of 1978), another Women’s Minyan participant who entered the rabbinate, brought her feminism into her contributions to the pioneering 2000

Women’s Torah Commentary.46 These are only a few of the women whose professional careers

43 Janowitz, September 2017; “Naomi Janowitz,” UC Davis Religious Studies website, accessed March 16, 2018, https://religions.ucdavis.edu/people/profile/225. 44 Wenig, November 2017; “Margaret Moers Wenig, Rabbi, D.D.,” HUC-JIR website, accessed March 16, 2018, http://huc.edu/directory/margaret-moers-wenig; Ralph Blumenthal, “A Rabbi Whose God is a Loving and Long- Suffering Mother,” New York Times, August 31, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/01/nyregion/01experience.html; Wenig, “God is a Woman and She is Growing Older,” in The Book of Women’s Sermons: Hearing God in Each Other’s Voices, ed. E. Lee Hancock (New York: Penguin Publishing, 2000), 260-63. 45 Rutenberg, November 2017. 46 Wenig, November 2017; Marker, November 2017; Shira Stern, “,” in The Women’s Torah Commentary: New Insights from Women Rabbis on the 54 Weekly Torah Portions, ed. Elyse Goldstein (Burlington, VT: Jewish Lights, 2000), 106.

36 in the Jewish community were influenced by their time in the Women’s Minyan. Even among the women who did not pursue Judaism professionally, Judy Kaye (class of 1978) credits her time in the Women’s Minyan with spurring her involvement with the left-wing spiritual movement , in which she is now a highly involved lay leader who leads services for her minyan one to two times per month.47

The women whose lives and careers the experience of the Women’s Minyan impacted themselves made significant contributions to American Jewish feminism while they were still undergraduate students. They created one of the earliest spaces for feminist Jewish spirituality, and wrote a liturgy that was not only emblematic the feminism and religious creativity they cultivated, but was also a resource for Jewish feminists outside of Brown to use in their own writing and observance. As I have shown, the specific conditions at Brown, from the Open

Curriculum to the progressive culture to the specific prayer offerings at Hillel, facilitated this burst of inspiration and innovation. The credit, though, belongs not to the conditions but to the women whose pioneering vision shaped Jewish feminist thought, prayer, and history.

47 Kaye, October 2017. I have the privilege of attending Soulful Shabbat, the Providence, R.I., Jewish Renewal minyan of which Kaye is a leader. 37

38

2. Siddur Nashim’s Radically Feminist Liturgical Theology

Some of [Naomi] Janowitz and [Margaret Moers] Wenig's liturgy has weathered well the

more-than-a-decade since it was written, but ten years have also clarified the

incompleteness of its explorations. The very accumulation of female pronouns in certain

prayers is a glorious celebration of women's power that is rare in the culture and rarer still

in a religious context. But while female imagery is important for many reasons, of itself it

does not address the nature of God as dominating Other. Although changing pronouns

and some imagery modifies and softens the traditional picture of God, it does not

fundamentally alter the conception of a great potentate fighting for his/her people and

ruling over the world. The God of Janowitz and Wenig is still a strong of arm, a

savior of Israel who rescues her children from slavery and drowns Egyptians in the sea.1

So writes prominent Jewish feminist theologian Judith Plaskow in her 1990 book Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism from a Feminist Perspective. Though she recognizes that Naomi Janowitz and

Margaret Moers Wenig made some contribution to the development of Jewish feminist theology and practice, she downplays the novelty of their work, largely to bolster the more sweeping change she proposes in the ensuing chapter. However, Plaskow recognizes that it is crucial to view Siddur Nashim as a fundamental precursor to much, if not all, of the Jewish feminist writing that followed it, particularly works of liturgy and theology. A proper understanding of

Siddur Nashim’s significance in progressive Jewish intellectual history requires a detailed

1 Judith Plaskow, Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism from a Feminist Perspective (New York: Harper and Row, 1990), 137-38. 39 engagement with the text itself. This chapter will center on the liturgy of Siddur Nashim, and consider its importance as a central text of Jewish feminism.

Prayer texts play a dual role in the intellectual and cultural history of enacted Judaism: on the one hand, they allow us to see the ideologies and theologies of whoever had enough communal clout to author the prayerbook alone or with a committee, whether for an individual community or an entire denomination. However, the words of a prayer text have a life beyond the page: when used, they come to embody a community’s theology and worldview. Jewish feminist scholar Rachel Adler theorizes that “by means of communal prayer, Jews rehearse and authenticate their formulations of Jewish identity and sustain and refashion religious meanings.”2

Liturgical prayer, particularly in the vernacular, is a process of repeatedly articulating values, and in doing so, making their importance manifest as a communal ethos. For example, when a congregation weekly pronounces the words, “We proclaim now Your Oneness and our own hope for unity; we acclaim Your creative power in the universe and in ourselves, the Law that binds world to world and heart to heart,” it ritually engenders an ideology in which human unity and connection are intimately linked to and holiness.3 Liturgy, then, allows us not only to read the ideologies of its authors but also to discern the values being simultaneously impressed upon and enacted by the worshipping community. Moreover, though liturgy is widely thought to remain stagnant over centuries, it is often updated and changed to meet the needs of those who use it, particularly in the modern and postmodern world.4

2 Rachel Adler, Engendering Judaism: An Inclusive Theology and Ethics (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998), 76. 3 Gates of Prayer for Shabbat and Weekdays: A Gender Sensitive Prayerbook, ed. Chaim Stern (New York: Central Conference of American Rabbis, 1994), 71. This English liturgy is not a direct translation of the Hebrew, nor even a paraphrased translation, but rather a passage that plays on the themes of the Hebrew text and, due to its font, is demarcated as being intended to be read aloud by the congregation. 4 The Hebrew word most often rendered in English as “liturgy” is nusach, which encompasses not only the words of prayer but also the melodies in which they are to be sung or chanted as well the bodily movements, such as bows and steps forward and back, that accompany Jewish prayer. In the context of this thesis, when I use the term

40

Vernacular liturgy is particularly salient to a cultural history of prayer for two main reasons. Firstly, because most non-Orthodox American Jews tend to have only a cursory knowledge of Hebrew, English liturgies have the power to shape the values of a larger number of worshippers.5 In addition, because of the common (if erroneous) belief that the Hebrew liturgy had been static throughout , American Jews tend to be somewhat resistant to liturgical changes in the Hebrew text.6 Therefore, changes in English versions of liturgy provide a useful glimpse into changing theologies and ideologies within mainstream denominational

Jewish practice. Over the period between 1975 and 1995 and continuing into the next century,

English liturgy in the Progressive Jewish denominations, Reform and Reconstructionist, shifted to be more gender-inclusive, or, in the language of the 1994 edition of the Reform prayerbook,

“gender sensitive.” However, it was not only English liturgy and translations that were de- masculinized in this period—changes to the Hebrew liturgy, such as inclusion of the biblical matriarchs (Sarah, Rebecca, , and Rachel) alongside the patriarchs (, , and

Jacob) and some changes in Hebrew God-metaphors, also entered mainstream Progressive prayerbooks in this period. These developments fundamentally shaped the ideologies of gender hierarchy made manifest in Jewish prayer, and thus worked alongside other factors to shape

God’s identity in the minds of progressive Jewish worshippers.

About a year after the Brown Women’s Minyan began to meet, Naomi Janowitz and

Maggie Wenig began to rewrite and reimagine the traditional liturgy, its language, and its images, to make it more representative of women’s experience. It no longer made sense, they

“liturgy” I am referring specifically to written words of prayer. 5 Leonard Plotnicov and Myrna Silverman, “Jewish Ethnic Signalling: Social Bonding in Contemporary American Society,” Ethnology 17, no. 4 (1978): 413. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3773191. 6 , On Changes in the Jewish Liturgy: Options and Limitations (: Urim Publications, 2010), 24, 54-55.

41 thought, for a group of women to pray exclusively in metaphors that praised God as a king and a father.7 Ultimately their project moved far beyond simply naming women in addition to men or erasing God’s masculinity in favor of a gender-neutral deity. Siddur Nashim presents a God who is explicitly feminine and unapologetically powerful, and images of biblical women who are, too.

Understanding the changes that were adopted into later liturgies, both in the progressive mainstream and in the left fringe, allows for a better understanding of the Jewish feminist ideas of the Second Wave that became incorporated into mainstream progressive Jewish ideology and practice over the following decades.

Analysis of Siddur Nashim’s contributions requires comparison to traditional Jewish liturgy; however, the idea of one ancient “traditional liturgy” is an oversimplification. While many elements of Jewish liturgy have been stable for centuries, differences exist both among

Jewish ethnic groups (Sephardi and Mizrachi liturgies are somewhat different than Ashkenazi liturgies) and between different written editions.8 For this analysis, “traditional” elements of liturgy are restricted to those that are uniform among Orthodox-aligned Ashkenazi siddurim, as

American Jewry and Jewish institutions are overwhelmingly Ashkenazi, and Orthodoxy has made the fewest revisions of the prayer text in the twentieth century. I recognize that this is a wholly imperfect standard, as historians argue that the Orthodox Judaism that developed in reaction to the nineteenth-century Reform movement did so in conscious opposition to modernity and change.9

7 Naomi Janowitz in discussion with the author, September 2017; Laurie Rutenberg in discussion with the author, November 2017. 8 Hirsch Jakob Zimmels, Ashkenazim and Sephardim: Their Relations, Differences, and Problems as Reflected in the Rabbinical , 2nd ed. (Hoboken, NJ: KTAV Publishing House, 1996), 99-100. 9 Michael A. Meyer, Response to Modernity: A History of the Reform Movement in Judaism (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1988), 193-94.

42

In its final form, Siddur Nashim is a mostly complete Shabbat prayerbook, lacking just the musaf (additional) service, which most progressive communities eschewed because of its connection to the biblical sacrificial cult. It is quite possible that this omission was ideological, as Siddur Nashim reimagines a messianic age free of animal sacrifice.10 In an interview, Janowitz explained that the creative liturgy that she and Wenig wrote for the Women’s Minyan, which they eventually consolidated into Siddur Nashim as it exists today, was not intended to replace the traditional liturgy but rather add commentary on the Hebrew prayers. They wrote their liturgy to present Jewish women at Brown with new ways to conceive of God and Judaism in which their own experiences were present and paramount.11

Janowitz and Wenig’s liturgy had distinct ideological and theological features that separated it from the traditional liturgy and from other prayerbooks of the time and which defined it as a feminist text. One unusual feature of Siddur Nashim is immediately apparent: it is entirely in English (although many prayer titles are written in the transliterated original Hebrew).

Five feminist elements particularly characterize Siddur Nashim: the inclusion of the matriarchs

(Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel, and Leah) alongside or in addition to the patriarchs (Abraham, Isaac, and ), the grammatical feminization of God, the use of motherhood and womb imagery as a primary metaphor to describe the divine, the entering of women into a bodily covenant with God by characterizing menstruation as analogous to circumcision, and the radical reconception of a coming messianic age. Each of these five categories is itself a dramatic departure from any other

10 Leon A. Morris, “The Calves of Our Lips: The Inescapable Connections Between Prayer and Sacrifice,” CCAR Journal: The Reform Jewish Quarterly (Summer 2013): 98-101, https://www.templeadasisrael.org/sites/default/files/uploaded_files/site/About_Us/Calves_of_our_Lips(1).pdf. 11 Janowitz in discussion with the author, September 2017; Naomi Janowitz, email message to the author, January 29, 2018. Janowitz and Wenig never “finished” Siddur Nashim, and consider the version of it that exists today to be a draft of a project that was never completed. For this reason, they chose not to publish their siddur. 43

Jewish liturgy that existed in 1976; together, they constitute a sweeping feminist-theological transformation of Jewish prayer.

Invoking Matriarchs and Other Biblical Women

One of the simplest innovations of Siddur Nashim is the naming of the matriarchs in prayers that reference the ancestors of the Jewish People. Although it is now practically universal in Reform and Reconstructionist Judaism, and common in Conservative Judaism, to name Sarah,

Rebekah, Rachel, and Leah after Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, no mainstream prayerbooks from before 1989 include the matriarchs. Around the time of Siddur Nashim’s publication, many left- leaning Jewish groups, such as Hillels and havurot, and graduating classes at the

Reconstructionist Rabbinical College were beginning to include the matriarchs in the first blessing of the Amidah (standing prayer), though I am not aware of any that did so before 1976.12

Although Janowitz and Wenig were not alone in making this innovation, they did not take what became the typical approach to including these biblical women. In some places, they name only matriarchs, excluding the traditionally-invoked male characters entirely.13 At other times, they include the matriarchs first, followed by the patriarchs, sometimes even using epithets traditionally used for male ancestors to refer to female ones. For example, the traditional version of the first blessing of the Amidah ends with referring to God as magein Avraham, “Abraham’s shield,” whereas this blessing in Siddur Nashim concludes with the phrase “shield of Sarah and shelter of Abraham.”14 The text follows a similar pattern in cases where the traditional liturgy

12 Sara Smith, “The Imahot in the Amidah: A History,” Contemporary Jewry 32 (2012): 317, https://doi.org/10.1007/s12397-012-9092-0. 13 Naomi Janowitz and Margaret Moers Wenig, Siddur Nashim: A Sabbath Prayer Book for Women (Providence: self-published, 1976), 58, 88. 14 Janowitz and Wenig, Siddur Nashim, 18, 55, 66, 86. 44 includes the word avot, “fathers/patriarchs.” In these cases, Janowitz and Wenig generally replace the literal translation not with the gender-neutral “ancestors,” but with the phrase

“ and fathers,” or even just “mothers,” and thus ensure that women are specifically included.15

In contrast, the prayerbooks of the 1980s and beyond that incorporated the matriarchs into this and other blessings never did so at the expense of the patriarchs’ inclusion. They translate avot (“fathers”) or avot v’imahot (“fathers and mothers”) as a gender-neutral

“ancestors,” and order the names of the matriarchs either in a list following the patriarchs

(“Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel, and Leah”) or with wives’ names following those of their husbands (“Abraham and Sarah; Isaac and Rebekah; Jacob, Rachel, and

Leah”).16 Janowitz and Wenig’s choice to use “mothers” as the default and name women before men if men are mentioned at all connects their version of feminism to the strands of Second

Wave thought that sought to undermine by placing female figures at the helm of emerging cultural myths.17

Even in the seemingly simple and obvious move to bring matriarchs into the liturgy alongside their male counterparts, Janowitz and Wenig make sweeping changes to the gender ideology of Jewish liturgy. Unlike other progressive prayerbooks of the late twentieth century,

Siddur Nashim’s inclusion of the matriarchs does not merely include them—it centers them. Just

15 Janowitz and Wenig, Siddur Nashim, 45, 52. Although they invoke both “mothers” and “fathers,” in their English prayers, Janowitz and Wenig include the names of prayers in the transliterated original Hebrew throughout Siddur Nashim, and as such the names of prayers such as Ezrat Avoteinu (“Our Fathers’ Help,” p. 52) and Av Harachamim (“Merciful Father,” p. 65) appear in the Hebrew masculine form. 16 Congregation Beth El of the Sudbury River Valley, V’taher Libenu. (Sudbury, MA: private publication, 1980), 43; Gates of Prayer for Shabbat and Weekdays: A Gender Sensitive Prayerbook, edited by Chaim Stern (New York: Central Conference of American Rabbis, 1994), 22; Kol Haneshamah: Shabbat Eve, edited by David A. Teutsch et al, 2nd ed. (Wyncote, PA: Reconstructionist Press, 1993), 98-99. 17 Sheila Collins, “Reflections on the Meaning of ,” in Womanspirit Rising: A Feminist Reader in Religion, eds. Carol P. Christ and Judith Plaskow (: Harper and Row, 1979), 70-72. 45 as femininity is intrinsic to the overall theology of Siddur Nashim, women and their contributions to the Jewish past (and therefore the Jewish present) are of critical importance to

Janowitz and Wenig’s liturgical project. Unlike the inclusion of a list of women following men or a pairing of women after their husbands, the “women first” or “women only” approaches which Janowitz and Wenig employ implies women are not secondary to the Jewish story, but equally crucial to it. This statement is subversive in its own right, especially considering that their mere inclusion of the matriarchs was unusual and potentially unprecedented.

Siddur Nashim’s authors also made the radical move of appropriating patriarchs’ typical epithets for female figures. For example, where other liturgies called God Abraham’s “Shield” and Sarah’s “Guardian” or “Helper,” epithets that highlight the dependency usually associated with femininity, Janowitz and Wenig instead referred to God as the “shield of Sarah and shelter of Abraham.”18 They cast Sarah as empowered, a warrior who primarily requires God’s protection in battle. Abraham’s need for shelter, then, is relatively gender-neutral, as shelter is a need not only of those with power and might, but also of those who lack it. Through this seemingly minor change in phrasing, the authors of Siddur Nashim forge a Judaism in which women whose legacies had for centuries been shoved out of patriarchal religious tradition are recognized as possessing agency and power.

The changes in naming and characterizing men and women ancestors outlined above are supplemented by Janowitz and Wenig’s original liturgical re-imaginings of the matriarchs and other biblical women in prayer. To supplement ’ Song of the Sea in the prayer for redemption, they include the section of Miriam’s song that directly follows it in the Torah,

18 Gates of Prayer for Shabbat and Weekdays, 22; Kol Haneshamah: Shabbat Eve, 98-99; Janowitz and Wenig, Siddur Nashim, 18.

46 bringing the words of Moses’ sister to share the venerated position of her brother’s.19 Miriam is also invoked in the morning blessing Baruch Sh’amar, “Blessed is the One Who Spoke,” which opens the second introductory section of the Shabbat morning service. This time, she is positioned alongside David as a writer of the songs that are used for worship (traditional Judaism ascribes to David authorship of the ).20 In addition, Siddur Nashim’s text invokes David’s female ancestry: he is called the “son of Jesse and descendant of Ruth,” hearkening to the biblical narrative which asserts that the biblical heroine Ruth birthed the family that would become the Davidic dynasty.21 Similar to the inclusion of the matriarchs, these additions assert women’s equal place in the worshipper’s remembering of ancestors and biblical heroes. This act of spoken remembrance is essential to Jewish prayer, as it brings the worshipper into relationship with the memory of a shared ancestry that characterizes covenantal Jewish religious identity. By naming biblical women as part of this sacred memory, Siddur Nashim makes the Jewish women who worship with it members of the covenant as fully as Jewish men.

“Blessed be She:” God’s Grammatical Gender

Apart from the inclusion of biblical women as objects of religious memory, one of the most obvious and significant departures of Siddur Nashim from the “traditional liturgy” is its almost universal gendering of God as grammatically feminine in English, the exclusive language of the text. A sufficient discussion of this innovation must include some recognition of the differences in grammatical gender in English and in Hebrew, specifically as related to God:

19 Janowitz and Wenig, Siddur Nashim, 15; Exod. 15:1-21. The prayer reads, “The children of Israel went on dry land in the midst of the sea. And Miriam the prophetess took a timbrel in her hand; and all the women went out with her with timbrels and with dances. And Miriam called to them, ‘Sing to the Lord, for She has triumphed gloriously.’ Then Moses and the children of Israel continued, singing this song to the Lord…” 20 Janowitz and Wenig, Siddur Nashim, 39. 21 Janowitz and Wenig, Siddur Nashim, 44. 47 unlike English, Hebrew is a completely gendered language in which every word (besides prepositions and a few verb forms) has grammatical gender. Thus, some feminist scholars of

Judaism argue that God is only gendered in Hebrew text to the same extent a table might be: carrying a gender for grammatical purposes, but by no means analogous to a man or a woman.22

In addition, there is no single word for “God” in Hebrew as there is in English. Whereas in

English God is only called “God” as a proper name, or some euphemism like “the Divine,”

Hebrew has no such universal proper name—common names for God include the ineffable

YHVH, vocalized with the placeholder Adonai (“my lords”), the name Elohim, which literally means “,” and the rabbinic HaKadosh Baruch Hu, “the Holy One, Blessed be He,” among countless others. Although the vast majority of Hebrew names for God are gendered masculine, some, such as Shechinah (“indwelling presence”) are grammatically feminine. On the other hand, English is a language in which only persons and animals have grammatical gender, and thus the existence of gendered pronouns in English brings along with it connotations of gender identity which do not exist to the same extent in the Hebrew. Therefore, it can be argued, the universality of God’s grammatical masculinity in English does not adequately represent the nuances of God’s gender in the original Hebrew texts of the and the .23

All this considered, Janowitz and Wenig took a radical but singular approach to God’s gender. The radical element was their use of feminine pronouns—for example, in their translation of the Mourner’s Kaddish:

22 Marcia Falk, “Notes on Composing New Blessings toward a Feminist-Jewish Reconstruction of Prayer,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 3, no. 1 (1987): 46, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25002054. 23 “Yedid Nefesh,” Sefaria, accessed March 23, 2018, https://www.sefaria.org/Yedid_Nefesh?lang=bi. In some prayerbooks, the poem Yedid Nefesh addresses God as grammatically feminine, while others do not. No English scholarship of which I am aware provides analysis of these different forms. My inclination is that the author of the poem, likely a 16th-century Kabbalist, wrote it addressing one of God’s feminine emanations, but that later prayerbooks compilers were uncomfortable with the feminine language and edited it to be in the masculine. This liturgical poem does not appear in Siddur Nashim and is thus not a primary object of my analysis. 48

The vast name of G-d is intensified and sanctified throughout the world which She

created according to Her will. May She establish Her dominion within your life and

within your days, and within the life of all the , and say Amen.

Let Her great name always be blessed.

Blessed and glorified, exalted and honored, magnified and praised is the name of the

Holy One, blessed is She, whose glory transcends all praises, songs, and blessings that

can be rendered unto her, and say Amen.

Let there be unending peace from and life for us and for all Israel, and say Amen.

May She who creates peace in the create peace for us and for all Israel, and say

Amen.24

A first glance might indicate that Judith Plaskow’s characterization of this grammatical feminization as theologically insufficient is correct—Janowitz and Wenig directly translate the hierarchical Kaddish, in which God creates from above and is deserving of praise from below, making only the surface-level change in gender pronouns. However, a closer reading of this and the many other texts in Siddur Nashim that resemble it points to the theological radicalism of the prayerbook’s authors: beyond casting biblical women as possessing strength and agency, they effectively deify feminine power by ascribing it to God. This is a cogent statement of feminism, which presents women’s dominion as not a frightening aberration but rather an imitation of

God’s attributes. Jewish thought had conceived of divine power as exclusively masculine from biblical times to the twentieth century, and Janowitz and Wenig, through their liturgy,

24 Janowitz and Wenig, Siddur Nashim, 28.

49 revolutionize the very idea of what that divine power is and can be by ascribing it to a deity that is unmistakably feminine and undoubtedly Jewish.25

Divine Images of Pregnancy and Birth

In addition to this simple but significant grammatical shift, God is gendered feminine throughout the text in imagery and metaphors, particularly those of motherhood and birth. The

God of Siddur Nashim is a nurturing and powerful Mother who has given birth to the world. In the Hashkiveinu prayer that expresses hope for safety through the dangers of nighttime, a worshipper using Siddur Nashim would pray for “shelter…in the soft folds of Your skirt.”26 God is praised at the beginning of the Torah service as “Mother of the womb,” and in the prayer Av

Harachamim (“Compassionate Father”), the liturgy asks God to be compassionate “as a mother shows compassion on her children,” playing upon the linguistic connection between the words rachamim (“compassion/mercy”) and rechem (“womb”).27

More explicit womb and birthing images are present in the blessing Baruch She’amar

(“Blessed is the Speaker”) of the morning service: God is the one “who in the beginning, gave birth” and whose “womb covers the earth…[and] protects all creatures.”28 Whereas the language of “motherhood” could be seen to simply replace the idea of God as a male parent with God as a female parent, the language of physical birthing and of the womb not only God as a

25 Luke Devine, “How Became the God(dess) of Jewish Feminism,” Feminist Theology 23, no. 1 (2014): 75-76, http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0966735014542380. Even in (the Jewish mystical tradition that emerged in the ), whose literature refers to God as having two feminine sefirot (emanations) out of ten, images of those feminine elements of the Godhead are portrayed as submissive, powerless, and in need of protection. 26 Janowitz and Wenig, Siddur Nashim, 16. 27 Janowitz and Wenig, Siddur Nashim, 63, 82. Curiously, rather than beginning this blessing “Merciful Mother,” which would fit the general paradigm of their gender-flipped translation style, Janowitz and Wenig open the prayer Av Harachamim with a gender-neutral “Merciful G-d.” 28 Janowitz and Wenig, Siddur Nashim, 39. 50 woman, but sexes God as biologically female. It should be noted that this does not mean that the authors of Siddur Nashim or the members of the Women’s Minyan conceived of God as a literal embodied woman; rather, they endeavor to undermine the typical image of God as male not by conceiving of a genderless God, but by supplementing the hegemonic masculine conception with their own explicitly feminine reproductive metaphors. Beyond this explicit maternal imagery,

Janowitz and Wenig use reproductive language like “pregnant with gentleness” to describe

God.29 Their language choices serve to feminize the divine in ways that transcend simple grammar and create a completely new image of a deity that remains unquestionably the God of

Israel: changes in gender imagery render God a nurturing mother-deity, but also a God who has power and is in a hierarchical if gentle relationship with the Jewish People.

In keeping with Second Wave images of feminine power, the motif of female bodies as sources for religious understanding does not stop with basic feminine images—the bodily processes of birth and menstruation are referenced throughout the text as markers of a woman’s relationship with the divine. In some places, these images are simply exhortations for divine protection of more feminine activities; for example, the worshipper exhorts that she “not give birth to children in terror.”30 In addition, pregnancy and birth are metaphorical resources through which human women and a feminine God can share in the act of creation, as the liturgy connects

God’s mothering of Her people to Sarah’s mothering of her children.31

29 Janowitz and Wenig, Siddur Nashim, 69, 75. 30 Janowitz and Wenig, Siddur Nashim, 80. 31 Janowitz and Wenig, Siddur Nashim, 37. 51

A Feminist Messianic Ideology

The most radical religious conceptualization of women’s bodies in Siddur Nashim does not concern birth, but rather menstruation. Seeking to create a female-bodied analogue to circumcision, an act that seals the covenant between God and Israel in the flesh of the penis,

Janowitz and Wenig propose menstruation as a similar mark of the covenant. Employing the

Bible’s language of animal sacrifice in which “the life is in the blood,” they assert that a woman’s period is a monthly personal sacrifice. This allows for a monthly atonement, and connects women to divinity because it recalls the ability to create life that women share with

God. Menstruation, they write, is a mark of the continual renewal of life. Thus, the act of menstruation connects the woman with God for much the same reason that circumcision provides a constant and physical reminder of the covenant to men.32 Because menstruation is, in the ideology of Siddur Nashim, the marker of a woman’s relationship with God, Janowitz and

Wenig include an original blessing to be recited on the first day of one’s period. This blessing thanks God for the ability to “breathe” life into creations through blood, and exhorts God to accept the blood as an offering.33

In more contemporary feminist terms, this perspective on menstruation is challenging, both in its use of women’s biological difference as a basis for a feminist re-understanding of religion and in its assertion that to be a woman is to possess a womb and the ability to menstruate and become pregnant. What about transgender Jewish women? Infertile women? Lesbians who in the 1970s likely would not have been imagining a future that involved giving birth? In these

32 Janowitz and Wenig, Siddur Nashim, vi-vii. 33 Janowitz and Wenig, Siddur Nashim, vi-vii, 96; Janowitz in discussion with the author, September 2017. Janowitz explained that the Prayer on Menstruation was the most controversial part of Siddur Nashim within the community of the Women’s Minyan. In addition, it was a source of humor: some women called it the “thank God I’m not pregnant” prayer, while others hung it on bathroom walls. 52 respects, Plaskow is somewhat right in that Siddur Nashim presents a basis for a feminist

Judaism that would require expansion to include the experiences of those whose bodies and lives do not fit the birth-centric imagery of this text. However, in the context of the 1970s, when

Jewish feminism was nascent and theologically undeveloped, it would be difficult to overstate the radicalism and forward-thinkingness of the vision of God and divine femininity that Janowitz and Wenig create. Their God is one who, in keeping with the Second Wave notion of “women’s experience,” shares elements of women’s lives and is thus a God to whom women can relate, and their metaphor is one that facilitates women conceiving of their own lives as sharing in the divine project and engaging in co-creation.

The liturgy of the Prayer on Menstruation also presents one of the clearest explanations of messianic ideology in the prayerbook. Janowitz and Wenig’s completely new messianic ideology is just as revolutionary as their reconception of God. In keeping with the tradition of

Progressive Judaism, the authors do not envision a bodily messiah coming at the end of Jewish history as the traditional Jewish construction of a messianic future imagines (conceived of in the

Rabbinic period using biblical prophecies as proof texts).34 However, they go much farther than merely asserting that the messianic era will come without an embodied messiah. Because, they attest, menstruation for atonement will not be necessary in the World to Come, the Prayer on

Menstruation includes a plea that “the day [may] soon come when Your presence will return to dwell within us. Then our blood will no longer be needed for atonement, and all our womb’s strength will be directed towards replenishing the earth and assisting you in the deliverance of a full creation.”35 On first glance, this text might seem to connect pregnancy explicitly with the

34 Gershon Scholem, The Messianic Idea in Judaism and Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality (New York, Schoken Books, 1971), 71-72. 35 Janowitz and Wenig, Siddur Nashim, 96. 53 messianic vision and imply that women might somehow be cosmically obligated to give birth.

However, in their explanatory notes to this prayer, Janowitz and Wenig lay out their vision, in which, because the offering of menstrual blood is a means toward atonement and a messianic age would be free of sin and thus atonement, the womb’s only remaining purpose would be procreation.36

The characterization of messianic redemption in terms of God’s presence “return[ing] to dwell within,” they explain, is a rejection of the hope for the building of a Third Temple and the resumption of biblical animal sacrifice. Instead of God’s presence returning to the ancient site of ritual practice, it will return to individuals. This formulation also implies a rejection of the traditional idea of what the Jewish People has been missing since the ’s destruction in 70 A.D. Whereas Jewish writing for centuries had focused on the loss of the

Temple as the impetus for a spiritual exile, Janowitz and Wenig assert that what has been missing is not a site for sacrifices, but rather God’s personal presence within each individual.

This is a radical shift, and the authors know it: in the explanatory notes, they refer to this change as a complete “reversal of the rabbinic idea of redemption.”37

Janowitz and Wenig further explore ideas of messianic redemption in their rewriting of the Aleinu, the prayer that begins each service’s concluding section. The traditional Aleinu expresses pride in the particularity of the Jewish people and hopes for the messiah. The Aleinu in

Siddur Nashim, on the other hand, speaks of the State of Israel and the future relationship of

Jews in the diaspora to , and speaks of connection to God in the context of the Jewish

State’s establishment and future. In constructing this liturgy, they invoke the biblical judge

Deborah, an Israelite leader during the conquest of the as described in the books of

36 Janowitz and Wenig, Siddur Nashim, vi-vii. 37 Janowitz and Wenig, Siddur Nashim, viii. 54

Joshua and Judges. They recall Deborah’s leadership in settling the Promised Land and make overt connections between this story and the narrative of modern Zionism:

Dead, dead were Israel’s villages,

Until they arose, the people of Deborah.

For through them and through their children

God drew, from the desert, growth

And nursed the plains with rain.38

In this prayer, the Jewish people is called the people of Deborah, and the mythos of the establishment of the modern state of Israel is retold through the lens of a biblical conquest overseen by a woman in political leadership. This narrative, by its place in the Aleinu and by intent as stated in their explanatory note, becomes one that replaces messianic redemption. This ideology is not completely innovative—it echoes widespread messianic hopes and ideas of the

State of Israel that reverberated around the Jewish world throughout the mid-twentieth century.

However, by employing Deborah, rather than the burly and masculine “new Jew,” as the central figure of Zionist-messianic redemption, Janowitz and Wenig extricate this ideology from patriarchy and machismo, presenting a feminist response to a uniquely Jewish problem.39

It would be hard to imagine a radically feminist Jewish group taking such a position in our time—the communal memory of the establishment of the State of Israel has become more

38 Janowitz and Wenig, Siddur Nashim, 92. 39 Uri Ram, “National, Civic, or Ethnic? Contesting Paradigms of Memory, Identity, and Culture in Israel.” Studies in Philosophy and Education 19 (2000): 405-22. https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1023/A:1005211009924.pdf; Dan A. Porat, “From the Scandal to in Israeli Education.” Journal of Contemporary History 29, no. 4 (2004): 622-23 http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0022009404046757; Oz Almog, The Sabra: The Creation of the New Jew, trans. Haim Watzman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 4-5, 78-79, 136-37. In Israeli and American Zionist discourse in the 1960s and 1970s, the “New Jew” as a hypermasculine ideal type emerged, largely as a response to victimization at the hands of the Nazis. The New Jew was a subject rather than an object, an idealized soldier capable of self-rule and self-defense.

55 fraught among those on the . Context matters here: while the international feminist movement in the 1970s largely condemned Zionism in anti-Semitic undertones, Jewish feminists in the United States were seeking ways to support Israel and simultaneously be politically progressive, an experience that historian Paula Hyman cites as a foundational moment in the development of a Jewish feminism distinct from American feminism.40 Through this text, then, worshippers in the Women’s Minyan assert a few different values simultaneously: their belief in the redemptive qualities of the State of Israel, their support for women in positions of political leadership, and their desire to center their Jewish understandings of Jewish memory in notable women.

This vision of redemption differs significantly from that presented in the Prayer on

Menstruation. Whereas Siddur Nashim’s Aleinu marks redemption with a political event, its

Prayer on Menstruation characterizes it as a process of the return of an indwelling . While these two redemptive ideologies do not complement each other especially well, they both offer images of that run completely counter to the rabbinic image of the embodied messiah returning to the earthly Jerusalem, constructing a Third Temple, and resuming the activities of the sacrificial cult.

These shifts in messianic ideology and the radical inclusion of women and femininity into not just Jewish communal memory but into God Herself simultaneously demonstrate deep engagement with the Jewish tradition and radical change to it. Although Janowitz and Wenig wrote this text as undergraduates, it is clear throughout that they were steeped in Jewish learning: they appropriate the liturgical forms of the eighteenth-century Chasidic rabbi Yizchak of

40 Paula E. Hyman, “Jewish Feminism Faces the American Women’s Movement: Convergence and Divergence,” in American Jewish Identity Politics, ed. Deborah Dash Moore (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008), 228- 29. 56

Berditchev, cite stories from Talmudic and midrashic texts, reference the apocryphal Book of

Jubilees, and include original translations of the tchines—women’s vernacular prayers from .41 In addition, they were clearly well-versed in the feminist canon of their time—their use of the female body as a source of meaning and their emphasis on elevating the category of “woman” fits into the white feminist intellectual tradition of the 1970s.42 Through a thorough engagement with Jewish text, the authors of Siddur Nashim created a deeply intellectual, meticulously researched, and ideologically radical articulation of a spiritual and theological approach to a lived Jewish feminism. This feat makes it all the more surprising that the Brown Women’s Minyan faded from the historical narrative of Jewish feminism and was so overlooked as Jewish feminism continued to develop.

41 Janowitz and Wenig, Siddur Nashim, 37, 79, 10, 7. 42 Sheila Collins, “Reflections on the Meaning of Herstory,” 70-72; Jane Gerhard, Desiring Revolution: Second- Wave Feminism and the Rewriting of American Sexual Thought, 1920 to 1982 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 4-6; Susan Archer Mann and Douglas J. Huffman, “The Decentering of Second Wave Feminism and the Rise of the Third Wave,” Science and Society 69, no. 1 (2005): 62-64, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40404229. 57

58

3. Beyond Brown: Academic Jewish Feminism, Left-Wing Spiritual Communities, and the Progressive Mainstream

The Brown Women’s Minyan provided a Jewish experience that was new not only to

Brown’s campus, but also to the world Jewish community. Although there were contemporaneous women’s minyanim, as well as progressive Jewish communities experimenting with egalitarian liturgy, the Brown Women’s Minyan was unusual in that it left behind a substantial documentary record of a Jewish feminist group’s liturgical writing earlier than the

1980s. Moreover, few if any later attempts to create gender-inclusive Jewish liturgy emphasized divine femininity and the experience of womanhood to the extent that Naomi Janowitz and

Margaret Moers Wenig did in 1976 in Siddur Nashim. The innovations of the Brown Women’s

Minyan, though never quite matched in terms of their centering of women, were hugely influential in Jewish circles far beyond Brown.

The decades following the Women’s Minyan’s existence saw an outpouring of Jewish feminist writing. New liturgies and theologies sought to find space within Judaism for women to be not only equal participants in ritual, but also equal manifestations of the divine image in both liturgical and theoretical formulations of Jewish ideology. The Women’s Minyan was an early player in the quest to make these changes, which eventually extended into major Jewish denominations’ approaches to prayer. The communities and thinkers that followed the Women’s

Minyan built on its work, and often cited Siddur Nashim as a text that inspired and informed their choices. The Women’s Minyan was not simply one of many communities swept into a period of liturgical change brought about by the influence of Second Wave feminism on

59 relatively assimilated Jews; rather it was a catalyst for liturgical and theological innovation that continues in Progressive (and, increasingly, Conservative) Jewish circles to the present day.1

Siddur Nashim offers perhaps the most comprehensive, though not systematic, articulation of a specifically feminist Jewish theology written prior to 1990. Judith Plaskow, the earliest and to date most influential Jewish feminist theologian, in 1982 revolutionized the conversation within Jewish feminist thought in her highly influential essay “The Right Question is Theological,” in which she argues that a fully feminist Judaism would require not only new concepts of Jewish personhood and community, but of God as well.2 Siddur Nashim had, through its rigorous engagement with gendered metaphors for and images of God, presciently provided an answer to Plaskow’s “question” before she even asked it. As more systematic articulations of

Jewish feminist theologies (including Plaskow’s), as well as new, published feminist liturgies written by scholars rather than students entered the scene, Siddur Nashim and the legacy of the

Brown Women’s Minyan became a relic of an earlier time and nearly forgotten.

In addition, the legacy and contribution of the Women’s Minyan and Siddur Nashim present something of a paradox: Some of their innovations made their way into mainstream

Progressive Jewish liturgy and shaped how the majority of affiliated Jews in the United States learn to pray and conceive of God. Nevertheless, many of the particularly feminist aspects of their work were not taken up by others, or their adoption was limited to the left-wing fringe of the Jewish community. For example, the feminine gendering of God in Siddur Nashim is

1 “Progressive Judaism” refers to the Reform and Reconstructionist Movements in the United States, while “Conservative Judaism” is the centrist denomination which considers Jewish law binding but takes a liberal approach to its interpretation, not to be confused with Orthodoxy, which takes a strict approach to Jewish legal interpretation. 2 Judith Plaskow, “The Right Question is Theological,” in The Coming of Lilith: Essays on Feminism, Judaism, and Sexual Ethics, 1972-2003, eds. Plaskow and Donna Berman (Boston: Beacon Press, 2005), 63-64.

60 exchanged for a gender-neutral approach in later liturgical writing, and prayers that specifically highlight women, rather than naming them alongside men, are seldom adopted. The very idea of having a minyan of only women, grounded as it was in Second Wave concepts of gendered spaces, eventually gave way to egalitarian space as the epicenter of feminist Jewish prayer.3 By the twenty-first century, all-women’s services were present primarily in Orthodox communities that continued to bar women from leading prayer and chanting Torah in the presence of men.4 In sum, the innovations that became mainstream, while significant, were the ones that did the least to transform the hegemonic idea of God as male—it is quite easy to imagine an “Almighty

Sovereign” as rather identical to an “Almighty King.” While gender-neutral God-language may perhaps open the door to a wider variety of individual interpretations, it does not fundamentally alter the premises of divine gender in the way that Janowitz and Wenig’s prayerbook did.

Nevertheless, the legacy of the Brown Women’s Minyan remains pertinent, as the prayer and belief of Progressive Jews both on the fringe and in the mainstream are indebted to it.

In chapters one and two, I uncovered the history of the Women’s Minyan within the context of Brown and the American Jewish community and examined the distinct feminist vision of Siddur Nashim’s liturgy. That history is remarkable, providing a powerful and early example of young Jewish women bringing the feminism they espoused in the setting of the progressive university to particularly Jewish and spiritual concerns. This chapter builds upon that analysis and endeavors to answer not the questions of who they were, what they did, and what they wrote, but instead poses what is in one sense the most significant question: how did the Women’s

Minyan and its writing shape the landscape of Jewish feminism over the decades that followed

3 Women-only Jewish spaces remained common into the 1990s, in groups such as B’not Esh and the University of Michigan Women’s Minyan. 4 Marcus, Bat Sheva and Ronnie Becher, “Women’s Tefillah Movement,” Jewish Women’s Archive, accessed February 15th, 2018, https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/womens-tefillah-movement. 61 its members’ graduation from Brown? Even more consequentially, how did mainstream

Progressive Judaism’s engagement with this Jewish feminism shape the religious and spiritual lives of Jews of all genders? The Women’s Minyan was an early Jewish feminist community with an outsized impact on the work of those who came after them, from scholars to small communities to entire denominations. This chapter will explore the legacy and impact of the

Women’s Minyan and Siddur Nashim in the world outside Brown: from the newspaper and magazine articles that spread awareness to the scholars who incorporated their ideas and theology into works that became the intellectual foundation of religious Jewish feminism to the prayerbooks in which a watered-down version of these ideas became standard, not only in liturgical language, but also in religious belief.

The Women’s Minyan and Siddur Nashim in the Landscape of Early Jewish Feminism

Although there were many Jewish feminist groups aiming to adapt two thousand years of tradition into relevant religious practice for the modern feminist, the Women’s Minyan was unique in its time for creating such a comprehensively feminized prayerbook. As it began to garner press attention both in and outside of Rhode Island, Janowitz recalls, letters began to stream in asking for photocopies, individual prayers, and even the entirety of Siddur Nashim.

Professor David Blumenthal, who advised the independent study from which the prayerbook emerged, never successfully convinced Janowitz and Wenig to publish it (even today, they consider it a draft they never finished); however, through these articles and correspondences

Siddur Nashim began to circulate throughout the Jewish feminist world.5

5 David Blumenthal in discussion with the author, November 2017; Naomi Janowitz, email message to the author, January 29, 2018. 62

The Women’s Minyan and its liturgy were consistently subjects of news stories in both the Jewish and secular press. As early as 1975, the Women’s Minyan was profiled in the Brown

Alumni Monthly, a piece referenced in some later articles and correspondence with the minyan’s leaders. In that year, too (before Siddur Nashim was edited into its final form), the Providence

Journal and the New York-based Jewish Post published articles on the Women’s Minyan at

Brown that was addressing God as “She.” In addition, a New York Times article that year profiled the Women’s Minyan alongside similar groups at other universities.6 News of the Women’s

Minyan and their feminine God continued to spread: The Jewish Post ran another article in 1976 when the siddur was finished, and Janowitz and Wenig published a piece about their prayerbook and their minyan in 1977 in The Jewish Student Press Service.7 International news outlets even covered the Women’s Minyan, as in 1976 both The Times (London) and published pieces about Jewish feminism in the United States that referenced the feminist liturgy in Providence, Rhode Island.8

It was not until 1977 that the Women’s Minyan made its way into the magazine literature that constituted the intellectual center of Jewish feminism until the 1990s. Lilith, the preeminent

Jewish feminist magazine, ran a piece in late 1977 that both described the Brown Women’s

Minyan and included excerpts of their liturgy. For the first time, interested readers could learn that there existed Jewish liturgy with a feminine God and also a sense of the Minyan’s

6 K.S., “Judaism is Not for Men Only,” Brown Alumni Monthly, February 1975, 17-20; “Women Only at Brown U. Hillel Services: God Addressed as ‘She,’” Jewish Post, April 11, 1975; Richard C. Dujardin, “’Women’s Minyan’ Gives God Her Fuller Imagery,” Providence Journal-Bulletin, May 10, 1975; Irving Spiegel, “Equality Sought by Jewish Coeds, New York Times, April 20, 1975. 7 A. Blumenthal, “’Our Mother, Our Ruler’ Instead of Father, King,” Jewish Post, August 13, 1976; Maggie Wenig and Naomi Janowitz, “Women Count: Minyan at Brown University,” Jewish Student Press Service, September 1977. 8 David J. Goldberg, “The Spirit of Adam’s Wife Versus Jewish Orthodoxy,” Times (London), March 26, 1976; Geoffrey Wigoder, “Women’s Lib and Judaism,” The Jerusalem Post, December 28, 1976.

63 prayers. Through this publication, a wide array of Jewish feminist readers could gain access to the sort of the liturgical transformation Janowitz and Wenig were pioneering. In the months following this issue of Lilith, the Associated Press reported on Siddur Nashim—at least two newspapers, in Chicago, Illinois, and Jacksonville, Florida, ran the story, and it is likely that others did as well.9

It appears that a somewhat common response to the press attention was to write to the

Women’s Minyan and ask to see Siddur Nashim or pieces of its drafts. Though surely many of these letters have been lost, Janowitz sent me copies of a few of them: from Rabbi Roland B.

Gittelson from Temple Israel in Boston in 1975, hoping to include their material in an alternative

Reform prayerbook (which may never have been published); from the office of the chaplain at the Naval Education and Training Center in Newport, Rhode Island, to use as a resource for a task force on ; and from Richard Shapiro of Longmeadow, Massachusetts, hoping to include excerpts in his anthology on gender relationships in (which also appears not to have been published). In 1977, Wenig received a letter (apparently in response to previous correspondence) from the Conservative ’s Director of

Publications, Rabbi Jules Harlow, who critiqued the idea of having any separate liturgy for a specific group of Jews and noting his “negative reaction to [the] basic project.” That same year, a member of Fabrangen, a havurah in Washington, D.C., wrote Wenig asking for a copy of Siddur

Nashim to use in their retreat focused on gender issues.10 Even today, David Blumenthal uses

9 Naomi Janowitz and Maggie Wenig, “Selections from a Prayerbook where God’s Image is Female,” Lilith, Fall/Winter 1977/1978, 27-29; Associated Press, “’She’ is Divine in New Book of Jewish Prayers,” Chicago Sun- Times, June 3, 1978; “Female God Used by Jews,” Florida Times-Union (Jacksonville, FL), (exact date unknown) May, 1978. 10 Roland B. Gittelson, letter to Richard A. Marker, April 16th, 1975; Judith D. Gere, letter to Jewish Women’s Prayer Group, April 9, 1975; Richard Shapiro, letter to Naomi Janowitz, not dated; Jules Harlow, letter to Maggie Wenig, September 29, 1977; Arthur I. Waskow, letter to Maggie Wenig, September 30, 1977. Notably absent from these correspondences are the specifically Jewish feminist groups who might be assumed to be most interested in

64

Siddur Nashim as an assigned text in his religious studies classes at Emory University, and

Wenig told me that every so often she still receives an email asking for a copy.11 In addition, many university and seminary libraries have a copy (though, as previously mentioned, Brown’s does not).

One source does indicate that Siddur Nashim was at least once in use in Jewish feminist circles: Rabbi Rebecca Alpert, with whose story I began this thesis, recalls in a 1991 magazine article her transformative experience praying with it at a Women’s Rabbinical Alliance convention in 1977.12 While we cannot know how many women used it, it is clear that the inspirational power of being fully included that led so many Women’s Minyan participants to cry during prayer was not limited to the Brown community. Moreover, it was no mere coincidence that the Brown Women’s Minyan was the subject of press attention and the recipient of requests for photocopies—the vision, effort, and scholarly rigor that Janowitz and Wenig in particular brought to the Siddur Nashim project characterized it as a foundational, though oft-forgotten, text in the Jewish feminist corpus.

Jewish Feminism in the Academy

The circulation of both Siddur Nashim and the memory of the Brown Women’s Minyan was not only influential among feminist Jews and within feminist Jewish communities; its overarching theology and underlying assumptions about how to fully include women in Jewish

this liturgy. My inclination is that this is due to a lacuna in the preserved documents rather than a lack of interest—if Janowitz is correct in her recollection that she received many letters asking to see the liturgy and responded by sending photocopies, these letters must represent only a fraction of those that were received. It is clear from the source material I did collect that awareness of the Women’s Minyan and the text of Siddur Nashim circulated throughout the second half of the 1970s and beyond, though it is impossible to tell how quickly and how far. 11 Margaret Moers Wenig in discussion with the author, November 2017; David Blumenthal in discussion with the author, September 2017. 12 Rebecca Alpert, “What Gender is God?” Reform Judaism, Winter 1991, 28. 65 practice also began to be incorporated into systematic Jewish thought. As Jewish feminist scholars began to be taken seriously in the academy in the 1980s and 1990s, the ideas that had previously circulated in newsletters, magazines like Lilith, and communal publications like

Siddur Nashim were incorporated into peer-reviewed articles and scholarly books, and they gained the legitimacy that these media provided. In this period, scholars of Jewish women and

Jewish feminism had many disciplinary backgrounds: some, like Paula Hyman and Pamela

Nadell, were historians, others, like Riv-Ellen Prell, were anthropologists, and still others were scholars of religion, literature, and political theory.13 Those who built upon Siddur Nashim were primarily liturgists and theologians, who incorporated its metaphors and images into their own work.

Preeminent Jewish feminist theologian Judith Plaskow was one of the first scholars to include Siddur Nashim as a part of the Jewish feminist canon and critique it as such. In the collection Womanspirit Rising: A Feminist Reader in Religion, which she edited with Carol

Christ for publication in 1979, she includes an excerpt of Siddur Nashim’s Shabbat morning service, which contains both the simplistic shift from masculine to feminine pronouns alongside

Janowitz and Wenig’s creative version of the song Miriam sang after the crossed the sea into freedom.14 Plaskow was the first Jewish feminist to call the problem of women in

Judaism a theological one, rather than a political or social one, in 1982 (six years after Siddur

Nashim came to its final form); she has remained among the most influential Jewish feminist

13 Richard Cohen, “Paula E. Hyman,” Jewish Women’s Archive, accessed February 15th, 2018, https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/717/05/; “Pamela S. Nadell,” Jewish Women’s Archive, accessed February 15th, 2018, https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/author/nadell-pamela; “Riv-Ellen Prell,” Jewish Women’s Archive, accessed February 15, 2018, https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/author/prell-riv-ellen. 14 Janowitz and Wenig, “Sabbath Prayers for Women,” in Womanspirit Rising, ed. Carol P. Christ and Judith Plaskow (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1979), 174-78.

66 intellectuals.15 Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism from a Feminist Perspective, Plaskow’s 1990 magnum opus (and still the most seminal text in Jewish feminist theology), is a book that greatly expands on Janowitz and Wenig’s work while remaining somewhat dependent on it.

It is difficult to quantify the import of Plaskow’s most comprehensive work. Danya

Ruttenberg, a rabbi and editor of the 2001 Jewish feminist anthology Yentl’s Revenge describes

Standing Again at Sinai as so widely read that it “has become almost part of the generational collective unconscious.”16 Nevertheless, nearly every subsequent exploration of Jewish feminist theology cites Plaskow’s work, as it provides the most comprehensive theoretical basis to date for feminist interrogations of Jewish theology and religious practice. Moreover, Plaskow’s standing in the academy gives to her work the credence that so many feminist scholars struggle to achieve: she was president of the American Academy of Religion for 1997-1998 and co- founded the academic Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion.17 In addition, both the

Reconstructionist and Reform rabbinical seminaries have granted her honorary degrees in recognition of her scholarship.18 Plaskow has likely exerted more intellectual influence on behalf of Jewish feminism than any other thinker, and it was she who brought the ideas that Janowitz and Wenig began to develop in the Brown Women’s Minyan to the fore.

Plaskow includes in Standing Again at Sinai one chapter each on God, Torah, and Israel, as well as one on sexuality. In each, she considers how Judaism might be reshaped and transformed in order to depatriarchalize it such that women might no longer be “Other,” a

15 Plaskow, “The Right Question is Theological,” 56; Hava Tirosh-Samuelson, “Judith Plaskow: An Intellectual Portrait,” in Judith Plaskow: Feminism, Theology, and Justice, ed. Hava Tirosh-Samuelson and W. Hughes (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2014), 1. 16 Debra Nussbaum Cohen, “Judith Plaskow is Still Standing, Twenty Years On,” , Jan. 18, 2011, https://forward.com/culture/134754/judith-plaskow-is-still-standing-twenty-years-on/. 17 Tirosh-Samuelson, 10. 18 “Judith Plaskow: Professor Emerita, Religious Studies,” College Campus Directory, accessed March 6, 2018, https://manhattan.edu/campus-directory/judith.plaskow.

67 category she borrows from midcentury French feminist theorist Simone de Beauvoir.19 Her overarching argument is that in order to be feminist, Judaism must do away with all hierarchies, not just those of gender. In the chapter on Israel, she argues not only that women should hold the same status in Jewish communities as men, but also that the paradigm of Jewish chosenness must be exchanged for one of distinctiveness so as not to create a hierarchy of Jews over non-Jews.20

As for sexuality, she asserts that it should be viewed positively and understood as “an aspect of our life energy and power [that] connects us with God as the sustaining source of power and energy in the universe” and valued as much in women as it is in men.21

Plaskow’s attention to problematic hierarchies within Jewish religion and her assertion that a feminist Judaism must dismantle them lies at the root of her critique of Janowitz and

Wenig’s work. In the majority of Siddur Nashim’s liturgy, images of divine domination remain intact except that feminine pronouns replace male ones. However, the chapters in Standing Again at Sinai that most incorporate the creative, rather than merely grammatical, aspects of Siddur

Nashim are on Torah and God. In these cases, Janowitz and Wenig’s approach appears to be an example of the sort of innovation Plaskow promotes. Though she cites the “incompleteness” of their theology which “does not fundamentally alter the conception of a great potentate fighting for his/her people and ruling over the world,” Plaskow calls throughout the book for the same kind of creative reimagining of divine metaphors that define the most innovative sections of

Siddur Nashim.

The central thesis of Plaskow’s chapter on Torah is that a feminist Judaism is one that is informed by women’s experience, which must be uncovered from its marginalization in the

19 Plaskow, Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism from a Feminist Perspective (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1990), 2-3. 20 Plaskow, Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism from a Feminist Perspective, 118. 21 Plaskow, Standing Again at Sinai, 210. 68 central narratives of the Jewish People. Torah, she explains, is a human creation influenced by the patriarchal cultural norms of its time. Necessarily, then, women whose stories were as foundational to Jewish existence as their male counterparts’ were written out of the text partially or completely. The solution to this problem, according to Plaskow, requires both biblical scholarship devoted to uncovering those women and the use of modern midrash so as to imagine who those foundational women could have been because we lack the sources to understand who they were.22

Janowitz and Wenig include such modern midrash in their liturgy, and they also elevate the stories of biblical women using the portrayal of these characters in the text of the Torah itself.

Far beyond the mere inclusion of the matriarchs in blessings that name the patriarchs (which was itself radical for 1976), they place a creative version of the Song of Miriam (the original text of which is Exodus 15:21) alongside the excerpts of the Song of Moses that make up the prayer for redemption.23 Original, creative writings about biblical women abound: the Shabbat evening service begins with a “Psalm of Rebekah” and a modern midrash from the perspective of Isaac’s fictional sister is present in the morning service. In addition, the authors incorporate translations of older writings about women not present in the traditional siddur, such as Rachel’s prayer for exiled people, written sometime in the first millennium C.E.24

Plaskow’s idea of how a feminist Judaism would understand God is also present in

Siddur Nashim. Her chapter on God presents a feminist theology that hinges on the biblical prohibition against worshipping idols—to portray God as inherently masculine, in her view, is to

22 Plaskow, Standing Again at Sinai, 53-56. “Modern midrash” is a blanket term for creative storytelling and myth- making about biblical characters and narratives that follows the general style of Rabbinic midrashic tradition in late antiquity, which sought to explain inconsistencies or confusing passages in the biblical text through additional stories. 23 Janowitz and Wenig, Siddur Nashim: A Sabbath Prayer Book for Women (Providence: self-pub, 1976), 15. 24 Janowitz and Wenig, Siddur Nashim, 11, 31, 35. 69 superimpose a human construct (gender) onto the divine, thus turning gender into an object of idolatrous worship. In other words, God-as-male is a fallacy rooted in inappropriately assigning divine status to masculinity. The solution Plaskow puts forth is another one of imagination: she calls for a plethora of new, nonhierarchical, nonmasculine metaphors and images to understand

God.

Again, Siddur Nashim contains an early version of the reimagined divine metaphors

Plaskow deems essential to a Jewish feminist theological project. Janowitz and Wenig’s prayer for menstruation presents a nurturing mother-God whose womb is the vessel of divine creation.25

They describe God as “pregnant with gentleness” and exhort Her to “renew our intimacy as in former days.”26 These images present not only feminine but also nonhierarchical metaphors for the divine-human relationship. Though it is impossible to know what Plaskow was thinking as she wrote, her obvious familiarity with Siddur Nashim (it was excerpted in a book of hers, after all) indicates that Janowitz and Wenig’s theological imagination laid the groundwork for

Plaskow’s insistence that more and better divine images and metaphors might solve the problem of God’s hegemonic masculinity in the Jewish consciousness.27

It is important to note that many of the texts that inform Plaskow’s thought, including

Gross’ articles, are rooted in the 1970s religious feminist trend of appropriating “Eastern” and pagan (including ancient Canaanite) religious ideas and practices seen as more open to feminine

25 Janowitz and Wenig, Siddur Nashim, iii-iv. 26 Janowitz and Wenig, Siddur Nashim, 69, 71. 27 Plaskow’s theology is built on much more than Siddur Nashim, even in the context of its usage of 1970s feminist ideas. Her book is dependent on the thought of such feminist writers and thinkers as Audre Lorde and bell hooks as well as the work of Christian feminist theologians like . She cites scholar of comparative religion Rita Gross, whose 1976 article “Female God Language in a Jewish Context” dealt theoretically with the questions Janowitz and Wenig were contemporaneously tackling in the process of liturgical creation. In addition, she builds on her own previous work and that of liturgist Marcia Falk among many others who were writing fragmentary feminist liturgy in the decade preceding Standing Again at Sinai’s publication.

70 divinity.28 These ideas are absent from Siddur Nashim, which uses only secular feminist and

Jewish intellectual and literary traditions to construct images of a feminine God. Perhaps this is part and parcel of the “incompleteness” Plaskow describes, or a result of the seeming absence of appropriationist religious feminist thought of the 1970s from Brown’s campus. In any case, even though it did not conform to some of the prevailing notions of what a Jewish feminist construct of divinity should be, Siddur Nashim pioneered a method of liturgical and theological creation without crossing the boundary of a more concrete definition of idolatry: worshipping (even the attributes of) other gods.

Siddur Nashim continued to be an essential Jewish feminist foundational text in the work of Rachel Adler, herself a co-founder of the University of Minnesota Women’s Minyan and the only prominent Jewish feminist theologian besides Plaskow to date. Adler builds upon Plaskow’s analysis in her 1998 Engendering Judaism: An Inclusive Theology and Ethics, which deals less with divinity outright but rather takes on Jewish law and praxis, examines the ethics of relationship and sexuality, and presents a nonpatriarchal paradigm for Jewish .29 Her chapter on “inclusive worship” deals most with the issues of interest in this thesis. In this most theological of the book’s chapters, Adler sets forth what she calls a “spirituality of otherness” centered on the fundamental difference between God and people which makes divine-human relationship possible. In addition, she works through Plaskow’s condemnation of hierarchical images of God, and puts forth the metaphors of mentoring and parenting as relationships with power disparities that are nonetheless non-degrading.30

28 Rita M. Gross, “Steps Toward Feminine Imagery of Deity in Jewish Theology,” Judaism 30, no.2 (Spring 1981), 189-90. 29 Samuel D. Friedman, Jew vs. Jew: The Struggle for the Soul of America Jewry (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000), 130. 30 Rachel Adler, Engendering Judaism: An Inclusive Theology and Ethics (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998), 92-94. 71

For liturgy, Adler affirms the necessity of moves away from patriarchal liturgical language that Siddur Nashim embodies as part of creating a “praxis of prayer” in which the words of worship could accurately and meaningfully reflect the values of the communities speaking them aloud. Like Plaskow, Janowitz, and Wenig, she promotes the use of new metaphors and feminine language, but she also warns that feminized images of God should be feminist in themselves, putting forth a “God-She” who is not exclusively “hushed, modest, helpful, and receptive. Adler directly criticizes Plaskow, Janowitz, and Wenig, among others, who root their feminist theology in an essentialist notion of “women’s experience,” and argues for a more critical look at gender in order to construct appropriate theological images. In addition, she questions the authenticity of borrowing goddess images from other religious traditions.31 In these critiques, Adler explicitly challenges Siddur Nashim alongside other works exemplifying the feminist-theological current of gender essentialism, and in doing so places it squarely within the theological and liturgical tradition of the period.

Another writer who operated within the intellectual sphere of Jewish feminist liturgy that

Janowitz and Wenig pioneered was the poet and liturgist (as well as comparative literature scholar) Marcia Falk. Her 1996 Book of Blessings presents a practical application of Plaskow and

Adler’s ideas, as well as others in circulation at the time. Falk presents liturgy for weekdays,

Shabbat, and women’s (New Moon) observances, usually deviating significantly from the traditional liturgical text. Rather than making small changes in gendered language and imagery, she writes new Hebrew blessings that align with the spiritual purpose of the originals, or incorporates modern poems in Hebrew or English, often by Israeli women poets. These blessings overall replace the dominant metaphor of God-as-King with one of God-as-Creator,

31 Adler, 98-99, 102-03, 237. 72 employing primarily imagery of wells and springs with the words ma’ayan, eyn, and m’kor

(“spring,” “fountain,” and “source,” respectively). 32 This is not quite so archetypically feminine as Janowitz and Wenig’s dominant imagery in their creative liturgy of pregnancy, menstruation, and birth, though it still evokes feminine notions of creating and providing without the bodily essentialism of Siddur Nashim’s God.

Rather than present a series of names for God, Falk uses one, Eyn Hachayim, “Well (or, as Falk translates it, Source) of Life.” Taking the place of masculine pronouns in the traditional formulation Baruch Atah Adonai (“Blessed (m.) are You (m.) Adonai”) is the formulation n’vareich et Eyn Hachayim, “Let us bless the Source of life.” The first person plural future tense of a verb is one of the few in Hebrew that is always gender-neutral, thus ridding this frequent utterance of its gendered status to the extent possible and using a noun, eyn, that is grammatically feminine. Falk generally avoids using verbs referring to God, opting for nouns to serve as metaphors instead; however, when she does use a verb, it is conjugated in the feminine to agree with the feminine subject Eyn Hachayim.33 This practice is only noticeable in the Hebrew; Falk’s

English translations are gender-neutral (in contrast to Siddur Nashim’s explicitly feminine

English), though the use of gender-neutral English should not negate the significance of feminized language in the Hebrew text. These Hebraic changes along with Falk’s liturgical structure and frequent incorporation of modern poetry dramatically separate her prayers from the more traditional liturgies many communities cherish, and likely explain why the Book of

Blessings was not taken up as a primary worship text. Nevertheless, it continues to be a resource for Jewish leaders to incorporate feminist theologies into worship.

32 Marcia Falk, The Book of Blessings: New Jewish Prayers for Daily Life, the Sabbath, and the New Moon Festival (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1996), vi-viii, 34-39, 174-75. 33 Falk, Book of Blessings, 128-29. 73

While The Book of Blessings provides a meaningful example of how Jewish liturgy can be revolutionized in both Hebrew and English while maintaining its poetic artistry, it also upholds a hegemonic notion of what it is to be “feminine.” Falk builds on the work of Janowitz,

Wenig, and Plaskow in presenting God in metaphors with more space for notions of archetypical femininity than those of kingship and dominion. However, unlike Siddur Nashim, it seems to imply that a more feminine God cannot exert power in a “masculine” way, and to some extent upholds the notion that masculinity alone can exercise authority. Falk’s God can create, nurture, and nourish, while Janowitz and Wenig’s can do all these and protect Her people in war as well.

The prayer communities that did incorporate Jewish feminist theology into their liturgical language tended to follow a path more like Falk’s, challenging divine masculinity with metaphors of traditional motherliness and leaving out any images of female power.

Left-Wing Liturgy in Small Communities

Jewish feminist theological ideas were not confined to the academy—in the 1980s and

1990s, feminist and left-wing Jewish religious communities were on the forefront of developing forms of enacted Jewish progressive spirituality. Havurot, LGBTQ+ congregations, and Jewish feminist spirituality collectives like B’not Esh incorporated the growing body of Jewish feminist theologies into their worship practices and particularly into their liturgies.34 In this section, I will examine a few siddurim used in small communities that were, concurrently with Jewish feminism’s major theorists, experimenting with the role of gender in their conceptions of God.

34 Martha Ackelsberg et al., “Beyond Halacha: Jewish Feminist Spirituality: B’not Esh Jewish Feminist Spirituality Collective Founding Letter,” (March 30, 1981) Jewish Women’s Archive, accessed March 6, 2018, https://jwa.org/sites/jwa.org/files/mediaobjects/bnot_esh_founding_letter.jpg. Many prominent Jewish feminist intellectuals were members of B’not Esh, most notably Judith Plaskow, who credits her experience in B’not Esh as fundamental to her Jewish feminist theological project (Plaskow, “Spirituality and Politics: Lessons from B’not Esh,” Tikkun 10, no. 3 (May 1995): 31). 74

This examination of left-wing communal siddurim is not intended to be comprehensive, or even broadly representative of the liturgies that existed in these communities in this period. A complete study of the myriad progressive liturgical traditions that emerged from the Jewish counterculture and Jewish feminist movements of the late 1960s through the 1990s is far beyond the scope of this thesis. However, in order to develop a clearer picture of Siddur Nashim’s liturgical context and its unique prescience, a survey of a few liturgical texts with progressive approaches to divine gender is in order.

The communities and thinkers that took up the Women’s Minyan’s Jewish feminist mantle generally fell within the scope of what was considered the Jewish “left.” In the latter third of the twentieth century, concerns in the center and on the right of the Jewish community were more focused on the role of women in the physical synagogue—whether to allow them to sit with men, read Torah, lead prayer, preach on the pulpit, and serve as rabbis and congregational leaders. By the early-to-mid 1970s, these issues were mostly settled on the left, at least in principle—communities affirmed women’s place in the synagogue, though they continued to see man as the archetypical Jew and Jewish leader.

Though left-wing communities increasingly espoused women’s fundamental religious equality and even moved away from masculine liturgical depictions of God, few if any went as far as Janowitz and Wenig in presenting an almost exclusively feminine God. Instead, most excised explicitly masculine English God-language while leaving the Hebrew intact; others transformed some but not all masculine Hebrew God-language into the feminine. Although over forty years have elapsed since Janowitz and Wenig wrote Siddur Nashim, it remains the only almost completely feminized Jewish prayerbook that is extant and at least somewhat accessible.

75

Not even communities far on the Jewish religious left have undermined the masculine God to the extent that the Women’s Minyan did in 1975-6.

Before progressing further, I should note the complexity of using a spectrum of “left” and

“right” borrowed from secular politics to describe Jewish ideologies and communities. Broadly,

Orthodoxy is positioned on the right because of its insistence on adherence to strict interpretation of Jewish law (halachah). Conservative Judaism is in the center, as it affirms the centrality of halachah but also incorporates modern Western values. The “liberal denominations,” Reform and Reconstructionist Judaism, are on the left, as they allow for more malleability in the role of

Jewish law in individual and communal practice (though each denomination does so for somewhat different reasons).35 Farther left than these are individuals and communities whose practice and values are even less “traditional” than those characteristic of the Reconstructionist and Reform movements.36

35 Central Conference of American Rabbis, “Reform Judaism: A Centenary Perspective,” (San Francisco, 1976), https://www.ccarnet.org/rabbinic-voice/platforms/article-reform-judaism-centenary-perspective/; Deborah Dash Moore and Andrew Bush, “Mitzvah, Gender, and Reconstructionist Judaism,” in Women Remaking American Judaism, ed. Riv-Ellen Prell et al. (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2007), 135. Reform ideology in the late 20th century emphasized individual religious choice, while Reconstructionist ideology was more concerned with the evolving nature of Judaism as a set of cultural practices. 36 Though the left-right spectrum is a mostly useful means to categorize different Jewish practices, it oversimplifies the myriad issues that divide American Jews and define Jewish communities. It conflates issues of observance with those of politics, assuming that Jews who are stringent about keeping kosher are de facto more likely to oppose both including LGBTQ+ people in Jewish communities and a two-state solution in Israel/Palestine. In reality, individual Jews’ identities, beliefs, and politics are much too nuanced to be placed on a one-dimensional line. In addition, when dealing with the left half of the Jewish spectrum, Reform tends to be further left in terms of observance, while Reconstructionism as an institution tends to be more politically progressive than Reform. Nevertheless, because the left/right spectrum is already broadly in use to describe Jewish communities, I will employ it for the sake of clarity, with the following caveat: when describing an individual, community, or idea as “left-wing,” I will be referring specifically to its gender (and often sexuality) politics—the degree to which it challenges the centrality of masculinity, male leadership, and heteropatriarchy to its Judaism. Thus, what I will deem a “left-wing community” was one that took its feminist and/or queer approaches to Judaism farther than the mainstream of the Reform and Reconstructionist movements contemporaneous to it (though the community may have been affiliated with either of them). The term “mainstream” is also troublesome, as it implies one cohesive mainstream when, indeed, different ideas gain recognition in different communities. However, it is the best term the English language provides to describe practices acceptable to those who have the authority to decide what is acceptable to a wide swath of people. 76

In 1980, only a few years after Siddur Nashim was written, Massachusetts’ Congregation

Beth El of the Sudbury River Valley published V’taher Libenu (“Purify Our Hearts”), a complete

Shabbat siddur with gender-neutral liturgy. Congregation Beth-El was affiliated with the Reform movement, but sought to create a prayerbook that was more Hebraically complete and inclusive of women than Gates of Prayer: The New Union Prayerbook, the 1975 Reform siddur. Nine years before the Reconstructionist movement’s Kol Haneshamah (the first gender-inclusive denominational prayerbook), Congregation Beth-El included the matriarchs in their liturgy, listing each directly after her husband (“God of Abraham and Sarah, God of Isaac and

Rebekah…”). V’taher Libenu refers to God almost exclusively with the gender-neutral “Holy

One of Blessing,” using this phrase both as a name for God and a replacement for the phrase

Baruch Atah Adonai, “Blessed are You, God.” The morning blessings that precede the formal morning service present an even greater departure from direct translation: the phrase Baruch

Atah Adonai, Eloheinu Melech ha’olam (lit. “Blessed are you, Adonai our God, king of the world”) becomes in the English “Your presence fills creation, Holy One of Blessing.” This formulation employs a less hierarchical metaphor of creation (though not the more feminine birth) rather than one of monarchy. However, gender-neutral English translations are not universal in V’taher Libenu, as a few lines of Psalm 96 are translated with masculine pronouns, as in the phrase “proclaim His salvation.” 37 On the whole, V’taher Libeinu takes an approach to making the liturgy less patriarchal that was quite progressive for a denominationally-affiliated community at the time. However, it takes the neutralizing approach of removing most references to God’s gender (though it leaves some intact).

37 Congregation Beth El of the Sudbury River Valley, V’taher Libenu (Sudbury, MA: private publication, 1980), 4, 43. 77

In contrast, the 1991 edition of Siddur Birkat Shalom (“Blessing of Peace”), the prayerbook of Havurat Shalom in Somerville, Massachusetts, a small left-wing Jewish community associated with the havurah movement, includes Hebrew prayers that gender God feminine.38 Although it was compiled much later than V’taher Libenu, it nevertheless represents one of the earliest instances besides Siddur Nashim of a feminine God in Jewish liturgy. Whereas in Siddur Nashim God is exclusively feminine in English (not to mention Janowitz and Wenig’s unrealized plans to create a siddur that included feminized Hebrew), Siddur Birkat Shalom switches between a God gendered masculine and one gendered feminine. For example, the morning blessings’ openings alternate between the traditional masculine Baruch Atah and the grammatically feminine B’ruchah At (both “Blessed are You”), with the verbs in the blessing following the grammatical gender of its opening words. In English, most translations of the masculine and feminine prayers are identically gender-neutral. However, some other blessings’ translations include the English pronouns “she” and “her.” In addition, both feminine and masculine blessings replace the characterization Melech ha’olam (“King of the world”) with

M’kor hachayim, “Source of life,” in an approach similar to that in V’taher Libenu’s English translations. The members of the Havurat Shalom Siddur Project state in their introduction that presenting a non-hierarchical theology in this and other ways in central to their project.39

The editors of Siddur Birkat Shalom shared with Janowitz and Wenig a willingness to take theretofore unseen radical approaches to feminist prayer, both in their Hebrew grammar and in their willingness to alter direct Biblical quotes. Firstly, they put forth a new Hebrew

38 Congregation Beth-El and Havurat Shalom both published siddurim that are extant and accessible on Inter-Library Loan. Although both are located in Massachusetts, they differ in other significant ways: Sudbury is a higher-class area than Sudbury, and while Beth-El is a congregation affiliated with a denomination, Havurat Shalom is an independent havurah. 39 Havurat Shalom Siddur Project, Siddur Birkat Shalom (Somerville, MA: private publication, 1991), 6, vi-viii. 78 conjugation pattern, based on both modern Israeli Hebrew and classical rabbinical Hebrew, for the future tense which indicates rather than erases the presence of women in the few tenses that are gender-neutral in modern Israeli Hebrew. In addition, they made the controversial move to alter God’s gender in many psalms, which are texts directly taken from the Bible.40 Because of a hierarchy of tradition that places biblical text at higher level than post-biblical liturgical text, changing it at all, even just into the feminine, was seen as a step too far among many Jews, and the editors of Siddur Birkat Shalom acknowledge that the decision to do so was a difficult one.41

Although V’taher Libenu and Siddur Birkat Shalom present different approaches to gender-inclusive liturgy, they share two key features, both of which draw intellectual lines back to Siddur Nashim. Most obviously, both include matriarchs alongside patriarchs in relevant prayers. More notably, both refer in their introductions to the “idolatry” of assuming God to be male, citing the verse in Genesis that declares all people to be created in God’s image.42 This idea, which saw early light in Siddur Nashim and its most comprehensive articulation in

Plaskow’s Standing Again at Sinai, was prevalent in the American progressive Jewish community by the early 1980s, less than five years after Siddur Nashim was compiled into its final form but a decade before Plaskow’s most famous work. This points to the continued existence of an American Jewish left throughout the end of the twentieth century that was receptive to liturgical theologies whose first extant iteration was among members of the Brown

Women’s Minyan.

The feminization of the liturgy that Janowitz and Wenig first articulated was also taken up by specifically LGBTQ+ (or, in the parlance of the time, “gay and lesbian”) Jewish

40 Havurat Shalom Siddur Project, Siddur Birkat Shalom, ix, 11. 41 Havurat Shalom Siddur Project, Siddur Birkat Shalom, iii. 42 Havurat Shalom Siddur Project, Siddur Birkat Shalom, ii; Congregation Beth El, V’taheir Libeinu, 4. 79 communities. In 1981, New York’s Congregation Beit (CBST) printed the first edition of Siddur B’Chol L’vav’cha (“With All Your Heart”), which included the matriarchs in the Amidah.43 The next year, Congregation Sha’ar Zahav in San Francisco began to use a revised version of the liturgy for its and Yom Kippur services which, though it did not name the matriarchs, did include the appellation Imenu Malkateinu (“Our Mother, our Queen”) alternatingly with the traditional (“Our Father, Our King”) in the eponymous prayer that forms a touchstone of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur liturgy.44 In 2000, the congregation compiled a Friday evening siddur of material written in the congregation over preceding years that is highly judicious with its adjustments to biblical text, but does add references to daughters alongside sons in the V’ahavta prayer, includes matriarchs in the

Amidah, and contains liturgy that refers to God in the feminine in the Hebrew text.45 By 2009, the congregation published Siddur Sha’ar Zahav (“Golden Gate Siddur”), the first full Jewish prayerbook (usable for Shabbat, weekdays, and holidays, as well as other festive moments) to include feminine versions of almost all of the liturgy, in both Hebrew and English.46 However, other LGBTQ+ congregations took the gender-neutral approach: for example, CBST’s 2008 siddur retains God’s masculine gender in Hebrew with a gender-neutral English translation.47

Left-wing communities that published their own prayerbooks took a variety of approaches to divine gender in their liturgies, which can be broadly categorized as feminine-

43 Congregation Beit Simchat Torah, Siddur B’Chol L’vav’cha: A Working Draft of the Order of Services for Shabbat and Yom Tov Morning (New York: unpublished, 1981), 50. 44 Congregation Sha’ar Zahav, Therefore Choose Life: Prayerbook for Rosh Hashanah (San Francisco: private publication, 1982), 67-68. 45 Congregation Sha’ar Zahav, Siddur Le’erev Shabbat: Siddur for Shabbat Evening, 3rd ed. (San Francisco: private publication, 2000), 60, 97, 45. 46 Siddur Sha’ar Zahav, ed. Michael Tyler and Leslie Kane (San Francisco: Congregation Sha’ar Zahav, 2009), 139- 40. 47 Siddur B’Chol L’vav’cha, ed. Sharon Kleinbaum et al. (New York: Congregation Beit Simchat Torah, 2008), 106- 18. 80 inclusive (such as the 1991 Siddur Birkat Shalom and the 2009 Siddur Sha’ar Zahav) and gender-neutral (like the 1980 V’taher Libenu and the 2008 Siddur B’Chol L’vav’cha). Feminine- inclusive liturgies tended to include large-scale changes to Hebrew prayers, while gender-neutral ones mostly left the Hebrew text intact while replacing masculine pronouns and epithets in

English with gender-neutral ones.

Neither group took Janowitz and Wenig’s approach of replacing all, or even most, masculine God-language with its feminine equivalent. The gender-neutral approach, though less radical, was the one that became mainstream, alongside the incorporation of the four major matriarchs.48 Though this dominant approach was a watered-down version of the Siddur

Nashim’s radical original, the Women’s Minyan and its successor communities contributed to a significant change in Progressive liturgical language, as I will lay out in the following section.

Reform, Reconstructionist, (Conservative): Making it into the Jewish Mainstream

Siddur Nashim was not just a foundational text for later Jewish feminist thinkers and farther-left prayer communities—it also provided a basis for subsequent mainstream Progressive liturgies. In 1989, the committee of Reconstructionist rabbis published the first edition of Kol

Haneshamah (“Every Soul”), which replaced the 1945 Reconstructionist Sabbath Prayer Book.

Kol Haneshamah was the first denominationally-published siddur to incorporate some of the liturgical and theological changes which Jewish feminists had been experimenting with for the previous two decades, although individual Reconstructionist leaders and communities had begun to adopt these changes prior to the new prayerbook’s publication.

48 No extant liturgy I have seen includes the handmaids Bilhah and Zilpah, Jacob’s secondary wives, in the recollection of the matriarchs in the Amidah. 81

Kol Haneshamah was the first of a few denominational siddurim to explicitly include women in its conception of the Jewish people and to excise masculine attributes from its conception of God in English (though not in Hebrew). This Reconstructionist prayerbook includes the matriarchs in the Amidah and other prayers that invoke the patriarchs and names

Miriam alongside Moses in Mi Chamochah, the prayer for redemption (although unlike Siddur

Nashim it does not supplement with text of Miriam’s song in the book of Exodus).49 It presents a grammatically gender-neutral God by using “God’s” as if it were a possessive pronoun in place of the more literal “his,” and with phrases like “sovereign of all worlds.”50 In addition, it describes human individuals and community with gender-neutral language, using, for example,

“descendant” rather than “son.”51

Though the new, gender-neutral Reconstructionist siddur was the first of its kind to be published by a Jewish denomination, the changes in the Reform Movement’s official liturgy between 1975 and 1992 present an even more convenient opportunity to examine the influence that the Jewish feminist liturgy and theology had on mainstream Jewish worship over the decades following. In 1975, just as Janowitz and Wenig were beginning to experiment with new

English liturgy at Brown, the Central Conference of American Rabbis (CCAR), the rabbinical association of American Reform Judaism, published Gates of Prayer: The New Union

Prayerbook. This siddur, the first major revision to Reform liturgy since the 1940s, represented a significant development in Reform Jewish ritual and thought.52 In 1992, the CCAR published a revision of Gates of Prayer, this time entitled Gates of Prayer for Shabbat: A Gender Sensitive

49 Kol Haneshamah: Shabbat Eve, ed. David A. Teutsch et al., 2nd ed. (Wyncote, PA: Reconstructionist Press, 1993), 87, 98-99. I could only acquire a second edition of Kol Haneshamah: Shabbat Eve, which differs from the first only in its hardcover binding and in the correction of a few minor errors, per the editor’s note on page xxiii. 50 Kol Haneshamah: Shabbat Eve, 94, 66. 51 Kol Haneshamah: Shabbat Eve, 92. 52 Irving Spiegel, “Rabbis Announce New Prayer Book,” New York Times, Oct. 11, 1975. 82

Prayerbook, whose “sensitivity” to gender involved including biblical matriarchs and presenting a God who was gender-neutral in English. Chaim Stern, the editor of both editions of Gates of

Prayer, lays out his overarching changes in the introduction to the 1992 edition:

Just before Gates of Prayer went to press in late 1974, the Editor changed all English-

language references to human beings in general that on their face excluded women, to

gender-neutral terms. Thus, ‘mankind’ became ‘humankind,’ ‘fathers’ became

‘ancestors’ or ‘fathers and mothers,’ and so on. He did not at that time change language

referring to God and he made no attempt to emend the Hebrew texts. Now, nineteen years

later, we present several services for weekdays and Shabbat in which the gender-neutral

approach is applied to God, and, in some degree, to the Hebrew.53

By 1974, it was evident to Stern, one of the most influential Reform rabbis and scholars in the twentieth century, that women should be included in descriptions of the human collective.

However, in this 1975 first edition, his God remained solidly masculine—although human women were gaining a presence in the liturgy, divinity remained squarely in the male domain.54

Of course, more than liturgy changed in Reform (and Reconstructionist) Judaism in the intervening decades. After Sally Priesand was ordained America’s first woman rabbi in 1972, the number of women rabbis and cantors graduating from the Reform seminary skyrocketed, bringing more women into positions of leadership and influence than ever before.55 The rabbinic committee that produced the original Gates of Prayer in 1975 included no women; although

53 Gates of Prayer for Shabbat and Weekdays: A Gender Sensitive Prayerbook, ed. Chaim Stern (New York: Central Conference of American Rabbis, 1994), iv. This 1994 edition combined the 1992 Gates of Prayer for Shabbat: A Gender Sensitive Prayerbook and the 1993 Gates of Prayer for Weekdays: A Gender Sensitive Prayerbook. 54 Gates of Prayer: The New Union Prayerbook, ed. Chaim Stern (New York: CCAR Press, 1975), 299. 55 Carole B. Balin, “From Periphery to Center: A History of the Women’s Rabbinic Network,” in The Sacred Calling: Four Decades of Women in the Rabbinate, ed. Rebecca Einstein Schorr and Alysa Mendelson Graf (New York, CCAR Press, 2016), 139. In 1980, there were 15 women Reform rabbis and almost 60 women Reform rabbinical students.

83 there was not a full committee for the revised “gender sensitive” edition, Stern credits one woman, Rabbi Donna Berman, as a member of the working group tasked with editing the liturgy.56 It appears that women’s presence in the Jewish professional world could indeed change women’s presence in the movement’s standard liturgy. The mere presence of a lone woman tasked with editing the prayerbook, however, is not enough to account for the sweeping changes in gendered God-language apparent in the later editions of Gates of Prayer. After all, for the revision to even occur necessitated a general agreement that the liturgy ought to be more inclusive of women’s experience. As popular attitudes about women’s status shifted and editorial committees gained women members, a God without gender became the default Progressive

Jewish understanding of divinity, at least in the English translation that run-of-the-mill American

Jews could understand.

The gender-sensitive editions of Gates of Prayer differ from the original largely in their gender-neutral approach to God-language. Although feminized language about God made Siddur

Nashim controversial as it was being written, compiled, and distributed in the 1970s, less than twenty years later the largest American Jewish denomination put forth a dominant image of God relatively devoid of masculinity. However, there is an essential difference between the gendering of God in Siddur Nashim versus those in the gender-sensitive Gates of Prayer and Kol

Haneshamah: whereas Siddur Nashim’s God-language is explicitly feminine, with words like

“She,” “Mother,” and the like employed to describe Her, the revised Gates of Prayer, like its

Reconstructionist counterpart, takes the gender-neutral approach of V’taher Libenu and Siddur

56 Gates of Prayer for Shabbat and Weekdays: A Gender Sensitive Prayerbook, iv; Gates of Prayer: The New Union Prayerbook, xv-xvii.

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B’chol L’vav’cha and presents a genderless God, the Parent and Sovereign whose personal pronouns include “God’s” and “Godself.”57

Another change the “gender-sensitive” edition shared with the new Reconstructionist siddur was the inclusion of the matriarchs in the Amidah and the revision of every prayer that contains the words avot or avoteinu (“fathers,” “our fathers”) to add v’imahot or v’imoteinu

(“and mothers,” “and our mothers”).58 Though this addition is a significant milestone in the development of liturgically egalitarian Reform Judaism, Stern does not go nearly as far toward the language of the feminine as Janowitz and Wenig: matriarchs always follow patriarchs, and women are never named without men, just as in Kol Haneshamah. A somewhat minor difference between Gates of Prayer for Shabbat and Holidays and Kol Haneshamah concerns the naming of Miriam alongside her brother Moses—while the 1989 Reconstructionist version inserts

Miriam’s name into Mi Chamocha, the prayer for redemption, the 1992 Gates of Prayer includes only Moses. Miriam does appear in the 2007 Reform prayerbook Mishkan T’filah (“ of Prayer”). Like Kol Haneshama, Mishkan T’filah includes a plurality of divine images and metaphors, mostly in alternative readings rather than translations of God’s name. These readings, often of contemporary poetry, are placed alongside nearly every prayer to present personally resonant texts to worshippers with differing theologies. Despite the commitment to varying images of God and the divine-human relationship, nowhere in the prayerbook is God depicted as specifically feminine; the theological approach remains completely gender-neutral.59

57 Gates of Prayer for Shabbat and Weekdays: A Gender Sensitive Prayerbook, 40; Kol Haneshamah: Shabbat Eve, 94. 58 Gates of Prayer for Shabbat and Weekdays: A Gender Sensitive Prayerbook, 22, Kol Haneshamah: Shabbat Eve, 98-99. Compare Gates of Prayer: The New Union Prayerbook, 265. 59 Mishkan T’filah: A Reform Siddur, ed. Elyse D. Frishman (New York: Central Conference of American Rabbis, 2007), 158, 166-80. 85

Although Kol Haneshamah came three years earlier than the 1992 Gates of Prayer revision, it was somewhat more comprehensive in its attempt to create egalitarian liturgy. Like

Gates of Prayer for Shabbat, Kol Haneshamah was shaped by women’s presence on its editorial committee, but even more of them: rather than the lone Donna Berman on Stern’s committee, two of five rabbis and two of four laypeople on Kol Haneshamah’s editorial committee were women.60 Another distinction more pertinent to the discussion of Siddur Nashim’s impact and legacy is the more creative approach to naming God in Kol Haneshamah: while Gates of Prayer for Shabbat defaults to “Eternal God” (in place of “Lord”) as a translation for YHVH, the four- letter ineffable divine name, Kol Haneshamah employs a variety of attributes and images in place of a consistent translation, such as “Ancient One,” “Kind One,” and “Boundless One,” usually pertinent to the theme of the prayer in which they are used.61 Though not nearly as radical as presenting a God of different genders, these varying images do, on a non-threatening level, present many divine images that may be resonant for different worshippers, and therefore somewhat incorporate the Jewish feminist ideas of the period. The Reconstructionist siddur committee likely took a more progressive approach than Stern both because it was doing a complete overhaul of the liturgy rather than merely a revision and because the smaller

Reconstructionist movement has historically tended to be more politically progressive than the more establishment-oriented Reform movement. The nearly equal presence of women’s voices on the committee probably also contributed to Kol Haneshamah’s gender awareness, although it did not go nearly as far as some of its small-community contemporaries.

60 Kol Haneshamah: Shabbat Eve, iv. 61 Kol Haneshamah: Shabbat Eve, 46; Kol Haneshamah: Shabbat Vehagim, ed. David A. Teutsch, 2nd ed. (Wyncote, PA: Reconstructionist Press, 1995), 90-92, 72. In the original 1989 version, these specific attributes are listed in small text under the word “Yah,” one of God’s many names in Hebrew. In the 1994 edition (2nd ed: 1995) for Shabbat and Holidays, this format is replaced with the attributes listed in small-caps text to distinguish them from the rest of the English text. 86

The Conservative Rabbinical Assembly also published a revised siddur in the 1990s: the

1998 update to the 1985 Siddur Sim Shalom (“Make Peace”) included an optional addition of the matriarchs in the Amidah and similar “gender-sensitive” God-language to the 1992 Reform siddur (the 1985 first edition did not incorporate any of the ideas about divine gender that were circulating in the progressive Jewish world).62 However, this book only included biblical women in one blessing, rather than the many that invoke them in Gates of Prayer for Shabbat and Kol

Haneshamah. Even the Conservative movement’s new Siddur Lev Shalem (“Whole Heart”), published in 2015, presents two versions of the Amidah: one with matriarchs and one without.63

Within the compromise between tradition and modernity that forms the core of Conservative

Jewish ideology, the movement’s leaders have chosen not to make gender equality in the liturgy a communal value, but rather a matter of personal preference.

The Jewish feminist call for liturgy that included not just human women but also feminine elements in God’s characterization was successful to widely differing degrees in three of the four major American denominations, though most so in the Reform and Reconstructionist movements. Despite this success, neither of these denominations have yet gone so far as to gender God specifically feminine in even a fraction of their prayers.

The developments I have outlined in this chapter grew out of a Jewish feminist liturgical impulse that had its earliest articulation in the Brown Women’s Minyan. Janowitz and Wenig’s siddur was among the earliest, and perhaps the first, Jewish prayerbook to include the matriarchs on equal footing with the patriarchs, which became a common means for mainstream Progressive

62 Siddur Sim Shalom for Shabbat and Festivals, ed. Leonard S. Cahan and Jules Harlow (New York: Rabbinical Assembly, 1998), 92, 114-116; Siddur Sim Shalom, ed. Jules Harlow (New York: Rabbinical Assembly, 1985), 334- 337. 63 Siddur Lev Shalom for Shabbat and Festivals: Musaf l’Shabbat, ed. Ed Feld (New York: Rabbinical Assembly, 2015), https://www.rabbinicalassembly.org/sites/default/files/assets/public/publications/sls/musaf-shabbat.pdf. 87 movements to make their liturgies more egalitarian. In addition, Siddur Nashim provided a feminist-theological foundation for other liturgies and theological works to build upon in later decades. While it is apparent that some thinkers and writers, particularly Plaskow and Adler, associated with these works were familiar with Janowitz and Wenig’s liturgy, others may not have been. Nevertheless, the ideas and contributions of the Women’s Minyan were part of the intellectual current in late-twentieth century Jewish feminism and progressivism that was reflected in a variety of liturgical texts. Moreover, the thinkers who did directly incorporate

Women’s Minyan innovations into their work were influential scholars whose ideas saw fruition, or at least widespread acknowledgement, in progressive Jewish communities.

Although some of its elements were adopted along the left of the Jewish religious spectrum, Siddur Nashim remains the most radical articulation to date of the image of a God who can both give birth and march into battle. Though feminist theologians like Plaskow advocated an abolition of hierarchical images in Jewish prayer, such images remain even in the Progressive denominations’ liturgies, and the God who is sovereign is almost universally the God who is male, at least in the Hebrew version of the text. The vast majority of English translations that seek to undermine God’s grammatically masculine gender do so merely by changing pronouns not even to the feminine, but to the gender-neutral. This approach does not undermine the culturally hegemonic idea of a male God to nearly the extent that feminine pronouns and imagery, as seen in Siddur Nashim and some of its successors, does. The undergraduate students in the Brown Women’s Minyan created an image of God that would, ironically, simultaneously revolutionize progressive Jewish theology and allow it to stagnate with a genderless but mostly masculine divinity.

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Moreover, these liturgical innovations have flourished in progressive Jewish communities while the very existence of the Women’s Minyan has been all but forgotten. This is the essence of its paradoxical history: while this group of visionary Jewish women in their late teens and early twenties made changes that would shape Jewish practice for decades to come and made strides on issues that remain on the front burner of Jewish feminism when that movement was in its earliest beginnings, even the Jewish community at Brown was generally unaware of their existence until I embarked on this project. The legacy of their transformative innovation is marginalized in Jewish history because they were women, in Jewish women’s history because they were young, and Brown’s history because they were Jewish women.

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Conclusion

The students who founded the Women’s Minyan over four decades ago, in 1973, sought to create a new avenue for Jewish women at Brown to develop their spiritual lives. As an unintended consequence, they also contributed to the religious experiences of innumerable

Jewish people in the United States and around the world. In its own time, the students who attended the Women’s Minyan were moved to tears by the experience and often inspired to pursue Jewish professional leadership and academic religious studies. These students, who lived at the height of the Second Wave, anticipated the Third Wave turn toward intersectionality, as they created a Judaism with space for their womanhood and a feminism with space for their

Jewishness. Moreover, they created a praxis for enacting this proto-intersectional Jewish feminism through their liturgy, and in doing so put forth the most radical model to date of a siddur that centers women and femininity. Though Janowitz and Wenig chose not to publish it,

Siddur Nashim circulated through the Jewish feminist world by photocopy and the postal service, and provided a foundation for the Jewish feminist texts, both theoretical and liturgical, that came after it. However, the vision of feminist prayer that the Women’s Minyan put forth, in which only women are invited and every divine image is evaluated for its relevance to women’s experience, remains radical over forty years later.

In the , the number forty combined with a unit of time is a literary signal for a momentous event that serves as a division between epochs: forty days of Noah’s flood, Moses’ forty days on Mount Sinai, the forty-year reigns of both David and , and most significantly of all, the Israelites’ forty years wandering in the desert after the Exodus and before

91 crossing the Jordan into the Promised Land.1 The year 2018 marks forty years since the

Women’s Minyan disappears from the written record and seems to have dissolved. In these forty years, Jewish feminist scholarship has flourished, women have reached previously unimaginable positions of Jewish leadership, and a generation of children in the Reform and Reconstructionist movements have grown up naming the matriarchs and praying to a gender-neutral God.

I was one of those children. By the time I was born in 1996, Jewish naming ceremonies for girls were standard in my Reform congregation, and I never even heard an Amidah without

Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel, and Leah until I was eleven. My large, suburban synagogue has been headed by a woman senior rabbi since 1998, and I never gave a thought to the fact I was allowed to chant Torah just like the boys at my bat mitzvah.2 I even learned in religious school that a minyan is a quorum of ten adult Jewish people, with no caveat that anyone might not count me.

My feminist awakening came in high school, at about the same time that I began to attend

Shabbat services every week and think critically about the prayers I had memorized years earlier.

I realized that even though I prayed to a grammatically gender-neutral God, the default divine image in my mind was still a masculine warrior patriarch, even though the gender of the God I actually thanked, yearned for, and loved was much more expansive. The liturgical issues the

Women’s Minyan confronted are as alive in my own life and spiritual practice as they are in the ongoing Jewish feminist conversation. Even as I critique the various denominations’ prayerbook committees for not being even close to as radical as Janowitz and Wenig in their Hebrew and

English gendering of God, I still relish the familiar cadence of the masculine blessing formula

Baruch Atah Adonai, Eloheinu Melech ha’olam as it rolls off my lips.

1 Genesis 7:4; Deuteronomy 9:11, 25; 2 Samuel 5:4; 1 Kings 11:42; Numbers 32:2,25. 2 I grew up at Temple Rodef Shalom in Falls Church, Virginia, with senior rabbi Amy Schwartzman. 92

This tension between familiarity and progressive innovation and the desire to have both forms the basis of the current state of Jewish feminist prayer and theology in Progressive

Judaism. Leaders of mainstream institutions embrace Jewish feminism as a mode of analysis and, for the most part, no longer decry it for going “too far” by daring to imagine a God who is not male. However, a new paradox emerges: although Jewish feminism has entered the mainstream Jewish consciousness, its study and the adoption of its ideals remain optional. It no longer exists only on the far fringes of American Judaism, but remains marginalized.

This mainstreamed marginality is most evident in rabbinic and cantorial curricula in

Progressive and Conservative seminaries. At Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of

Religion, “Feminist Theology” and “Women in the Midrash” are listed as “frequently offered electives.”3 The Reconstructionist Rabbinical College did not offer any courses specifically on women or feminism in the 2016-17 academic year, although the description for the elective course “Contemporary Jewish Thought 1” notes that the course explores the impact of feminism on Jewish thought.4 Though the Conservative Jewish Theological Seminary maintains a Jewish

Women’s and department, none of its courses are requirements in the rabbinical program.5 The significance of Jewish feminism’s place in the schools that train Jewish communal leaders should not be understated; however, as long as these courses remain elective, the innovations of Jewish feminism will struggle to penetrate mainstream practice, and communities will remain complacent in their worship of a masculine God whose name is rendered genderless in English.

3 “Course of Study,” Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, accessed March 2, 2018, http://huc.edu/academics/become-rabbi/course-study. 4 Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, Catalogue 2016-17, 36. 5 “Iyun,” Jewish Theological Seminary, accessed March 2, 2018, http://www.jtsa.edu/iyun.

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This is not to say that the American Jewish community has not made feminist strides in the past forty years. The number of women rabbis in has grown from under ten to over one thousand, and women leaders are ubiquitous in Jewish institutions.6 (Of course, there remains a substantial gender pay gap, among other employment equality issues.)7 Bat mitzvah rituals in nearly all non-Orthodox congregations are equal to bar mitzvah ceremonies, and one would be hard-pressed to find a non-Orthodox congregation which does not count women in a minyan. Little Jewish girls like I once was grow up in Reform, Reconstructionist, and

Conservative families never thinking that they should not participate in prayer, be called to the

Torah, or aspire to professional Jewish leadership. Aspiring women Jewish professionals like I am now find no dearth of women mentors and supporters on their journeys.

Although there has not been a Brown Women’s Minyan for forty years, women and nonbinary students and young adults remain on the forefront of progressive Jewish transformation. Today’s Brown RISD Hillel, of which I was the 2017 student president, remains a community that grapples with issues on the forefront of Jewish feminism and progressivism.

Both of Brown RISD Hillel’s minyanim work to transform traditionally binary prayers to be inclusive of genderqueer and nonbinary students, while student groups create intentional spaces for students whose Jewish identities are intersectional and strive to forge a Jewish reality in which women and queer people’s leadership is so commonplace as to be unremarkable.8 In

6 “Home,” Women’s Rabbinic Network, accessed March 2, 2018, https://womensrabbinicnetwork.org/; Francine Klagsbrun, “Three Decades Later, Conservative Women Rabbis Have Made an Impact,” The New York Jewish Week, May 4, 2015, http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/three-decades-later-conservative-women-rabbis-have-made-an- impact. The Reform Women’s Rabbinic Network notes it has over 700 members, while the Conservative Rabbinical Assembly in 2015 had around 300 female members. 7 Josh Nathan-Kazis, “Reform Underpay Female Rabbis—Despite Emphasis on Social Justice,” The Forward, October 27, 2017, https://forward.com/news/386291/reform-synagogues-underpay-female-rabbis-study- finds/, accessed March 2, 2018. 8 Almost by accident, Brown RISD Hillel’s 2018 Student Executive board was made up of entirely women. In addition, the Reform Minyan’s leadership team in Spring 2018 was unintentionally composed of more nonbinary

94 addition, young people from Brown and elsewhere continue in Janowitz and Wenig’s tradition of liturgical innovation through publications on , an online platform for creative Jewish practices.9 Outside of Brown, a New York-based group called Wominyan has been running retreats for “Jewish-women” in their 20s and 30s since around 2014 where participants “[take] ownership of Judaism, exploring practices that celebrate, embrace, reimagine, and examine what it means to be a Jewish-woman.”10 Young adults continue to challenge norms and assumptions in

Jewish communities, and push toward a future in which the feminine is celebrated in Jewish ritual and practice.

From liturgy to leadership, the forty years that have elapsed since 1978 have shown that the Jewish status quo with regard to gender is not immovable, but also that even within momentous change can exist remarkable continuity. Jewish communities include women in ritual, but are still resistant to changing the words they say and their notions of the God they praise to be less patriarchal. I hope that forty years from now, Jewish leaders (myself included) will have begun to address liturgical patriarchy in a more sweeping manner. The underlying principle of Jewish feminist theology—that how we relate to God’s gender is also how we relate to human gender—necessitates this transformation is in order to create a more equitable community.

The students of the Brown Women’s Minyan dared to imagine this reality over forty years ago, and pioneered modes of Jewish feminist community and prayer that served as models for those who came after them. The theologies that dominate progressive Jewish thought are

people than men. 9 Koatz, Benjamin, “A Prayer for Closeting/Misgendering Yourself,” Ritualwell: Tradition and Innovation, accessed March 8, 2018, https://ritualwell.org/ritual/prayer-closetingmisgendering-yourself. Koatz is a 2016 graduate of Brown, with whom I prayed at Brown RISD Hillel’s Havurah Minyan in 2015-16. 10 Wominyan’s Facebook page, accessed March 8, 2018, https://www.facebook.com/wominyan/. 95 dependent on their creativity, and yet the Women’s Minyan is practically unheard of even among

Reform and Reconstructionist Jews. I hope that this thesis can begin to do justice to the work that

Naomi Janowitz, Margaret Moers Wenig, Deborah French, Shira Stern, Laurie Rutenberg, Judy

Kaye, and many others put in to shaping a new reality for the Jewish progressives and feminists of all genders who stand on their shoulders.

Even more, I hope that the Women’s Minyan’s vision of a fully inclusive Judaism can be realized in my lifetime, and be even more intersectional and progressive than Brown students could have hoped to be in 1978. The issue of liturgical familiarity looms, but my parents’ generation grew up without women on the pulpit or matriarchs in the Amidah. Perhaps in forty years’ time there will exist a generation of Jewish children for whom hearing God called “She” is natural, whose conceptions of God’s power are not based on images of domination, and who feel comfort and familiarity articulating feminine as well as masculine Hebrew prayers. Hegemonic patriarchy and are intractable, but I pray that one day “I don’t think God is a man” might be as comfortable an utterance as “I don’t celebrate Christmas.”

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Selected Bibliography

Primary Sources

Interviews Blumenthal, David (Brown religious studies professor, 1973-6). Interview with Sienna Lotenberg. November 29, 2017. Janowitz, Naomi (Brown class of 1977). Interview with Sienna Lotenberg. September 14, 2017. Kaye, Judy (Brown class of 1978). Interview with Sienna Lotenberg. October 3, 2017. Marker, Richard (Brown associate chaplain and director of Brown Hillel, 1971-82). Interview with Sienna Lotenberg. November 16, 2017. Rutenberg, Laurie (Brown class of 1975). Interview with Sienna Lotenberg. November 21, 2017. Wenig, Maggie M. Interview for the Pembroke Center’s “Brown Women Speak” oral history archive, first interview, 1989. Interviewed by Miriam Dale Pichey. https://www.brown.edu/initiatives/women-speak/interview/maggie-m-wenig-class-1978- first-interview. Wenig, Maggie M. Interview for the Pembroke Center’s “Brown Women Speak” oral history archive, second interview, 2013. Interviewed by Elisa Glubok. https://www.brown.edu/initiatives/women-speak/interview/maggie-m-wenig-class-1978- second-interview. Wenig, Margaret Moers (Brown class of 1978). Interview with Sienna Lotenberg. November 7, 2017.

Letters and Correspondence Gere, Judith D. Letter to Jewish Women’s Prayer Group, April 9, 1975. Gittelson, Roland B. Letter to Richard A. Marker, April 16, 1975. Harlow, Jules. Letter to Maggie Wenig, September 29, 1977. Shapiro, Richard. Letter to Naomi Janowitz, not dated. Waskow, Arthur I. Letter to Maggie Wenig, September 30, 1977.

Newspaper and Magazine Articles Alpert, Rebecca. “What Gender is God?” Reform Judaism, Winter 1991.

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Associated Press, “‘She’ is Divine in New Book of Jewish Prayers.” Chicago Sun-Times, June 3, 1978. Blumenthal, A. “‘Our Mother, Our Ruler’ Instead of Father, King.” Jewish Post, August 13, 1976. Dujardin, Richard C. “‘Women’s Minyan’ Gives God Her Fuller Imagery.” Providence Journal- Bulletin, May 10, 1975. “Female God Used by Jews.” Florida Times-Union (Jacksonville, FL), (exact date unknown) May, 1978. Goldberg, David J. “The Spirit of Adam’s Wife Versus Jewish Orthodoxy.” Times (London), March 26, 1976. K.S. “Judaism is Not for Men Only.” Brown Alumni Monthly, February 1975.

Nemy, Enid. “Young Women Challenging Their ‘2d-Class Status’ in Judaism.” New York Times, June 12, 1972. http://www.nytimes.com/1972/06/12/archives/young-women-challenging- their-2dclass-status-in-judaism.html. Spiegel, Irving. “Jewish Students Tilt with Rabbis: Sharp Questions are Posed at Conference on Judaism.” New York Times, September 1, 1963. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9E0CE5D8153AE637A25752C0A96F9C 946291D6CF&legacy=true. Spiegel, Irving. “Students Ponder Role of Judaism: Moral and Social Issues are Weighed by Hillel Group.” New York Times, September 5, 1965. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9B04EED91F30E033A25756C0A96F9C 946491D6CF&legacy=true. Spiegel, Irving. “Equality Sought by Jewish Coeds.” New York Times, April 20, 1975. https://www.nytimes.com/1975/04/20/archives/equality-sought-by-jewish-coeds-hillel- report-asserts-they-want-new.html. Spiegel, Irving. “Rabbis Announce New Prayer Book.” New York Times, October 11, 1975. Wenig, Maggie, and Naomi Janowitz. “Women Count: Minyan at Brown University.” Jewish Student Press Service, September 1977. Wigoder, Geoffrey. “Women’s Lib and Judaism.” Jerusalem Post, December 28, 1976. “Women Only at Brown U. Hillel Services: God Addressed as ‘She.’” Jewish Post, April 11, 1975. “Women Rabbis Moving Up Rabbinic Ladder in Latest Placements; 47 Women Ordained to Date.” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, November 17, 1981. http://www.jta.org/1981/11/17/archive/women-rabbis-moving-up-rabbinic-ladder-in- latest-placements-47-women-ordained-to-date.

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Prayerbooks Congregation Beit Simchat Torah. Siddur B’Chol L’vav’cha: A Working Draft of the Order of Services for Shabbat and Yom Tov Morning. New York: unpublished, 1981. Congregation Beth El of the Sudbury River Valley. V’taher Libenu. Sudbury, MA: private publication, 1980. Congregation Sha’ar Zahav. Therefore Choose Life: Prayerbook for Rosh Hashanah. San Francisco: private publication, 1982. Congregation Sha’ar Zahav. Therefore Choose Life: Prayerbook for Yom Kippur. San Francisco: private publication, 1983. Congregation Sha’ar Zahav. Supplemental Readings and Prayers: Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. San Francisco: private publication, 1998.

Congregation Sha’ar Zahav. Siddur Le’erev Shabbat: Siddur for Shabbat Evening, 3rd ed. San Francisco: private publication, 2000. Falk, Marcia. The Book of Blessings: New Jewish Prayers for Daily Life, the Sabbath, and the New Moon Festival. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1996. Gates of Prayer: The New Union Prayerbook, edited by Chaim Stern. New York: Central Conference of American Rabbis Press, 1975. Gates of Prayer for Shabbat and Weekdays: A Gender Sensitive Prayerbook, edited by Chaim Stern. New York: Central Conference of American Rabbis Press, 1994. Havurat Shalom Siddur Project. Siddur Birkat Shalom. Somerville, MA: private publication, 1991. Janowitz, Naomi and Margaret Moers Wenig. Siddur Nashim: A Sabbath Prayer Book for Women. Providence: self-published, 1976. Kaplan, Mordechai. Sabbath Prayer Book. New York: Jewish Reconstructionist Foundation, 1945.

Kol Haneshamah: Shabbat Eve, edited by David A. Teutsch et al. 2nd edition. Wyncote, PA: Reconstructionist Press, 1993.

Kol Haneshamah: Shabbat Vehagim, edited by David A. Teutsch. 2nd ed. Wyncote, PA: Reconstructionist Press, 1995. The Koren Siddur: American Edition, edited by Jonathan Sacks. First bilingual edition. Jerusalem, Koren Publishers, 2009. Mishkan T’filah: A Reform Siddur, edited by Elyse D. Frishman. New York: Central Conference of American Rabbis Press, 2007.

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Seder Tefilot Yisrael, edited by Robert Gordis and Morris Silverman. New York: Joint Commission of the Rabbinical Assembly and the United Synagogue of America, 1946. Siddur B’Chol L’vav’cha, ed. Sharon Kleinbaum et al. New York: Congregation Beit Simchat Torah, 2008. Siddur Lev Shalom for Shabbat and Festivals: Musaf l’Shabbat, edited by Ed Feld. New York: Rabbinical Assembly, 2015. https://www.rabbinicalassembly.org/sites/default/files/assets/public/publications/sls/musa f-shabbat.pdf. Siddur Sha’ar Zahav, edited by Michael Tyler and Leslie Kane. San Francisco: Congregation Sha’ar Zahav, 2009. Siddur Sim Shalom, edited by Jules Harlow. New York: Rabbinical Assembly, 1985. Siddur Sim Shalom for Shabbat and Festivals, edited by Leonard S. Cahan and Jules Harlow. New York: Rabbinical Assembly, 1998. The Union Prayerbook for Jewish Worship: Newly Revised Edition, Part I. New York: Central Conference of American Rabbis, 1961.

Scholarly Theological Works Adler, Rachel. Engendering Judaism: An Inclusive Theology and Ethics. Boston: Beacon Press, 1998. Gross, Rita M. “Steps Toward Feminine Imagery of Deity in Jewish Theology.” Judaism 30, no.2 (Spring 1981), 183-193. https://search.proquest.com/docview/1304358756?accountid=9758. Plaskow, Judith. “The Right Question is Theological.” In The Coming of Lilith: Essays on Feminism, Judaism, and Sexual Ethics, 1972-2003, edited by Judith Plaskow and Donna Berman, 56-64. Boston: Beacon Press, 2005. Plaskow, Judith. Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism from a Feminist Perspective. New York: Harper and Row, 1990. Plaskow, Judith. “Spirituality and Politics: Lessons from B’not Esh.” Tikkun 10, no. 3 (May 1995): 31. https://search.proquest.com/docview/212288937?accountid=9758.

Other Primary Sources Ackelsberg, Martha, Sue Elwell, Judith Plaskow, Myra Rosenhaus, and T. Drora Setel. “Beyond Halacha: Jewish Feminist Spirituality: B’not Esh Jewish Feminist Spirituality Collective Founding Letter,” (March 30, 1981). Jewish Women’s Archive. Accessed March 6, 2018. https://jwa.org/sites/jwa.org/files/mediaobjects/bnot_esh_founding_letter.jpg.

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