School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
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ItemFrom knowledge to resistance: emerging themes, developments, strategies and agendas for religious Jewish women in Israel today( 2016)This study examines three areas in which religious Jewish women are challenging and changing gender-based inequality in Israel. Israeli women effectively live in two realities. The first is a liberal democracy that has championed legislative policies to advance the status of women and has pushed for gender-based equality from its formation. The second is a nation in which religious law and culturally evolving traditions of Orthodox Jewish practice are not restricted to the private sphere. Instead, such laws and behaviors hold significant power and sway in public space and everyday life. Within this reality, some view the exclusion and subordination of women as a basic tenet of religious Jewish norms. Women are removed, segregated and discriminated again. In the past thirty years, religious Jewish women in Israel have been engaged in an education revolution, gaining access to sacred knowledge and texts previously barred to women and integrating themselves into positions of religious leadership. Their demand for equality, however, has also prompted groups of these women to confront instances of gender-based discrimination on a national level; using legal appeals, public demonstrations, civil disobedience and pluralistic alliances to generate change. Such groups are working to expand ritual, social and civil rights for women in Israel. This study acts to illuminate groups of these women; their engagement with feminism and faith, their confrontation of spaces of inequality and their demand for respect as both Jewish women and Israeli citizens. Little time has been spent examining religious Jewish feminist groups in Israel. There has also been limited academic engagement with the challenges faced by these women as they relate to the Israeli landscape. To this effect, there have been significant gaps in the critical literature regarding women in Israel. Such gaps diminish academic understandings of both the place and position held by women in this country and the strains that evolving religious cultural norms have placed on Israel’s national identity. Situated from a constructionist framework and informed by the academic discipline of Jewish studies, this study utilizes a variety of resources. Previous scholarship, Israeli-based English language newspapers, group-generated publications, United Nations’ reports, NGO reports, legal petitions and rulings, interviews and presentations at a prominent transnational Orthodox feminist conference were all used to illuminate emerging themes, strategies and developments for groups of religious Jewish women in Israel. This is a new methodological approach in a small field and thus offers new perspectives on an underrepresented area of study. Doing so adds to our critical understandings of women’s rights in Israel, Jewish feminism, Orthodoxy in Israel and Israeli national identity.