Within the specific world of female Jewish-American writers, there seems to be a recurring theme among those who attain the loftiest heights. While there is no shortage of groundbreaking Jewish-American male authors—some of the biggest names in literature apply here—it must also be admitted that they are ultimately outweighed by a longer list of authors not quite considered heavyweights. Among the company of female Jewish-American writers, however, it can almost seem like an impossible task to not find a genuinely revolutionary figure whose rise the top of the class is based at least in some part upon works often seemed subversive.
From Emma Lazarus, almost universally deemed the titanic figure among 19th century Jewish-American women of letters, to Fran Lebowitz can also arguably be added the ideological expanse that nevertheless links important immigrant who did their most important writing while in America, the divide existing between Ayn Rand at one extreme and Emma Goldman on the other (extremes not just politically, but artistically, many would argue.) Added to any serious list of powerfully influential Jewish-American women writers who made their reputation through fighting against conventions, traditions and conventional wisdom is theologian Judith Plaskow. Through a series of books, she has become the dominant figure in American standing for the fight against patriarchal oppression of women in general and Jewish women within the construct of that particular religion. But it is Standing Again at Sinai which remains her definitive statement of purpose and intent.
Published in 1991, Plasko had commenced writing this revolutionary and subversive all-out assault on the patriarchal inequality of Judaism sometime in the mid-1980’s when that inequality was brought home in flashing epiphany on one particular day upon realizing that her presence in a particular act of worship was superfluous. In this moment was frozen the reality that this quality of not being necessary to her religion was hardly limited to just one particular ritual; it was systemic. Even more troubling, as her research would eventually reveal, was this systemic marginalization of women from the most fundamental aspects of Judaism was not the result of political machinery or weaving of a social fabric: it was a direct result of the history of the religion itself. Judaism’s “woman issue” was not a secular problem, in other words, it was a theological problem built into the religious text and rituals itself. Why? Well, if the problem is patriarchal, then the answer to that question is simplicity itself.
The sacred texts and rites and rituals all the male-centered mishigas that worked together to position women as outsiders looking in on the very faith which spiritually bound them to the men in their lives they loved were all written by men and edited by men and translated by men and interpreted by men and philosophically analyzed by men and conducted by men. What Standing Again at Sinai shone a light on through the filtered lens of post-1970’s feminist empowerment rather than revealing for the first time was that when it came to millennia of Jewish history, it is truly a man’s man’s man world and that women are welcome into it only at the pleasure of those men.
Of course, one book rarely has the power to alter traditions and a mindset established over the course of several thousand years. The truth is that Judaism is today hardly a religion any less patriarchal than Islam or Christianity. What has changed—what the effect of Plaskow’s book has been—what her influence has wielded is an explosion of feminist critical thought within the world of female Jewish writers. In an interview with the author published in 2015, she herself analyzed the impact Standing Again at Sinai has had over the preceding quarter-century since publication better than anyone, remarking that the sheer volume “of feminist work transforming the Torah has been very impressive…commentaries, midrashim, essays, and novels written by feminists, the artwork and the dance that have explored the meaning of Torah from feminist perspective, the new feminist history that have expanded and reconfigured our sense of the Jewish past.”
And that, really, is the true work of a critical thinker intent on challenging the ways things have always been. The focus should not be on changing the world yourself, but on inspiring and influencing the legion of followers that will be required over an unknown quantity of time to bring about that change.
