Through lyrical prose, Esther Goldenberg gives voice to an overlooked biblical heroine and reveals the power of female connection. 

JWA chats with Orthodox rabbi Dov Linzer and Reform journalist Abigail Pogrebin about their new book,It Takes Two to Torah. 

By creating rules that restrict banks from charging excessive fees, the CFPB is pursuing the Jewish concept oftzedek.

JWA talks to Israeli artist Andi Arnovitz about her new (JWA-inspired!) piece,What We Bring,currently on display at the Jerusalem Biennale. 

The new translation empowers readers to view the Bible with fresh eyes.

In her hugely popular fantasy series, Sarah J. Maas puts Jewish texsts and biblical women at the forefront. 

Listening for their voices has helped me find my own.

Thanks to this beautiful drawing of the biblical story of Ruth in my house, I was able to develop an appreciation for Ruth and how her journey connects to mine.

JWA talks to author Sara Lippmann about suburbia as an irresistible setting for fiction, radical retellings of the Torah, and more. 

Standing in front of my closest friends and family discussing a holy text that claimed women “do not count” taught me to pay more attention. I became a Jewish feminist.

The entire Hebrew Bible has never been translated into English without the male-centric God language—until now.

There is a point of tension for me in both being valued in the Jewish community and being devalued by the Torah’s discussion and treatment of women. Owning my own tallit reminded me that I am valued twice.

The Posen Library shares a nearly 3000-year-old figurine of a woman playing a hand-drum.

Helene Aylon was an American, New York-based, multimedia visual artist who began by creating process art in the 1970s, focused on anti-nuclear and eco-activist art by the 1980s, and subsequently devoted more than 35 years to the multi-partite installation The G-d Project. This last body of work’s often direct or indirect textuality resonates from and responds to Judaism’s traditionally male-dominated textuality as part of a larger commentary on women in Judaism.

This Chagall piece invites me to see myself as split and whole in the same moment.

The Posen Library shares an eighteenth century amulet to protect pregnant women and newborn children.

The New Testament describes Jewish women’s social roles in the late Second Temple period: in the home, in business ventures (especially textiles), in synagogues and the Temple, serving as patrons of the early Jesus movement, and as suffering from and being healed of various ailments. Despite the variety of examples of women’s agency, many Christian interpreters paint an historically inaccurate picture of a misogynistic culture in order to show Jesus, Paul, and their early movement as progressive on women’s issues. 

Lauren Tuchman, the first blind woman ordained as a rabbi, is best known for her championing inclusive Torah and disability justice. Though she is ordained in the Conservative movement, most of her work has been in community organizing and other non-congregational settings.

Second Temple discourse on women and gender is grounded in biblical interpretation and everyday life and, as such, has the potential to shed light on tumultuous debates about what different communities deemed problematic, acceptable, ideal, and anomalous with respect to a woman’s role in society. A selection of Second Temple texts envisioning Dinah, Miriam, and Sarah indicates these varied perspectives, as well as how these figures were used to promote the ideologies of the particular communities the texts represented.

In the Hebrew Bible and ancient Jewish literature, most warriors are men. However, a few women go to war or kill: Deborah, Jael, the unnamed woman of Thebez, and Judith.

Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg is a highly regarded Torah scholar and author. Her complex interpretive lens is both contemporary, in drawing from literary sources, philosophy, and psychoanalytic theory, and very traditional, in reading the Bible through the lens of classic commentaries and rabbinic midrash.

“Daughter Zion” or “Fair Zion” (in Hebrewbat tzion) is the personification of Jerusalem in poetic and prophetic literature. Initially, the city is positively likened to a daughter, protected under God’s special regard, but later, under the Babylonian siege, she is devastated, even ravaged. However, when Jerusalem is rebuilt, the daughter is forsaken no longer, returning to God’s grace in the prophecies of consolation.

Women who ministered at the entrance of the Tabernacle gathered around to donate their copper mirrors (Exodus 38:8), which were then smelted down to make the basin where the priests would wash before entering the sanctuary. The women may have served as guards, warding off evil with their mirrors. Midrash, however, conjectures that the women used these mirrors to seduce their husbands in Egypt, raising up the hosts of Israelites.

The Hebrew Bible tells six stories of barren women: three of the four matriarchs (Sarah, Rebekah, and Rachel); the unnamed wife of Manoah/mother of Samson; Hannah, the mother of the prophet Samuel; and the Shunnamite woman, an acolyte of the prophet Elisha.  Each woman suffers a period of infertility, in some cases exacerbated by the presence of a fertile, though less beloved, rival wife. Eventually, God intervenes and the woman conceives, but the beloved son is then dedicated back to God, either in service or in sacrifice.