Women and Judaism Books

A Jewish Woman's Prayer Book

Aliza Lavie

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Subjects -> Religion & Spirituality -> Judaism -> Jewish Life

Editorial Review:

A beautiful and moving one-of-a-kind collection that draws from a variety of Jewish traditions, through the ages, to commemorate every occasion and every passage in the cycle of life, including:

Special prayers for the Sabbath, holidays, and important dates of the Jewish year
Prayers to mark celebratory milestones, such as bat mitzva, marriage, pregnancy, and childbirth
Prayers for companionship, love, and fertility
Prayers for healing, strength, and personal growth
Prayers for daily reflection and thanksgiving
Prayers for comfort and understanding in times of tragedy and loss

On the eve of Yom Kippur in 2002, Aliza Lavie, a university professor, read an interview with an Israeli woman who had lost both her mother and her baby daughter in a terrorist attack. As Lavie stood in the synagogue later that evening, she searched for comfort for the bereaved woman, for a reminder that she was not alone but part of a great tradition of Jewish women who have responded to unbearable loss with strength and fortitude. Unable to find sufficient solace within the traditional prayer book and inspired by the memory of her own grandmother’s steadfast knowledge and faith, Lavie began researching and compiling prayers written for and by Jewish women.

A Jewish Woman’s Prayer Book is the result—a beautiful and moving one-of-a-kind collection that draws from a variety of Jewish traditions, through the ages, to commemorate every occasion and every passage in the cycle of life, from the mundane to the extraordinary. This elegant, inspiring volume includes special prayers for the Sabbath and holidays and important dates of the Jewish year; prayers to mark celebratory milestones, such as bat mitzva, marriage, pregnancy, and childbirth; and prayers for comfort and understanding in times of tragedy and loss. Each prayer is presented in Hebrew and in an English translation, along with fascinating commentary on its origins and allusions. Culled from a wide range of sources, both geographically and historically, this collection testifies that women's prayers were—and continue to be—an inspired expression of personal supplication and desire.

Golda

Elinor Burkett

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 5 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

The first female head of state in the Western world and one of the most influential women in modern history, Golda Meir was a member of the tiny coterie of founders of the State of Israel, the architect of its socialist infrastructure, and its most tenacious international defender. Her uncompromising devotion to shaping and defending a Jewish homeland against dogged enemies and skittish allies stunned political contemporaries skeptical about the stamina of an elderly leader, and transformed Middle Eastern politics for decades to follow.

A blend of Emma Goldman and Martin Luther King Jr. in the guise of a cookie-serving grandmother, Meir was a tough-as-nails politician who issued the first prescient warnings about the rise of international terrorism, out-maneuvered Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger at their own game of realpolitik, and led Israel through a bloody war even as she eloquently pleaded for peace. A prodigious fundraiser and persuasive international voice, Golda carried the nation through its most perilous hours while she herself battled cancer.

In this masterful biography, critically acclaimed author and Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist Elinor Burkett looks beyond Meir's well-known accomplishments to the complex motivations and ideals, personal victories and disappointments, of her charismatic public persona. Beginning with Meir's childhood in virulently anti-Semitic Russia and her family's subsequent relocation to the United States, Burkett places Meir within the framework of the American immigrant experience, the Holocaust, and the single-mindedness of a generation that carved a nation out of its own nightmares and dreams. She paints a vivid portrait of a legendary woman defined by contradictions: an iron resolve coupled with magnetic charm, an utter ordinariness of appearance matched to extraordinary achievements, a kindly demeanor that disguised a stunning hard-heartedness, and a complete dedication to her country that often overwhelmed her personal relationships.

To produce this definitive account of Meir's life, Burkett mined historical records never before examined by any researcher, and interviewed members of Meir's inner circle, many going on record for the first time. The result is an astounding portrait of one of the most commanding political presences of the twentieth century—a woman whose uncompromising commitment to the creation and preservation of a Jewish state fueled and framed the ideological conflicts that still define Middle Eastern relations today.

Miriam's Kitchen: A Memoir

Elizabeth Ehrlich

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Total reviews: 30 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Food memoirs often delve into the meaning of life. This hardly surprises--memories are as essential to daily life as the food that sustains us. Miriam's Kitchen blends recipes and food reminiscences with family narratives and observations about the author's personal evolution as a Jew. Ehrlich weaves the stories from four generations of family life, punctuated with powerful and often tragic memories. While her mother-in-law, Miriam, is teaching her to make chicken livers with noodles, Ehrlich unexpectedly learns how Miriam, her mother, and husband survived a Nazi labor camp in Poland during the Holocaust. Using vivid and bare yet discreet words, she graphically tells what they suffered and the nightmares that still haunt them.

Ehrlich's own story covers her transformation from a child whose family lit Sabbath candles but went boating on Yom Kippur, to an adult who chooses an Orthodox life marked by ambivalence about the rigors of being kosher and pride in what she is passing on to her children. Recipes for Honey Cake, Noodle Pudding, and many others are buried treasures hidden among Ehrlich's intense words. Sadly omitted is a recipe for potato kugel. Her grandmother uses this tempting pudding to good-naturedly test, taunt, and ultimately as the means for accepting her daughter Selina's non-Jewish fiancé into the family. Happily for us, 24 other tempting kosher recipes make up for this one missed dish. Miriam's Kitchen is a gripping and gratifying memoir of food, life, tragedy, and family survival. --Dana Jacobi

Women's Lives, Women's Legacies: Passing Your Beliefs and Blessings to Future Generations

Rachael Freed

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 13 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Women's Lives, Women's Legacies - a radiant guidebook 5 out of 5 stars.
15 of 15 people found this review helpful.

I'm a woman who's been blessed with a long and varied life. I've always wanted to share my experiences with my nieces, and to offer them my hard-earned wisdom so that they might move into womanhood a little better informed than I was. I've also had an inner desire to be seen and valued by them.
The beautifully written and accessible WOMEN'S LIVES, WOMEN'S LEGACIES offers encouragement and serves as a guide so that I may begin to write my life and in the process, come to love and appreciate myself more fully. I love the personal stories and poetry in the book. As I read, I find myself moving to that spiritual place inside myself of loving my own being as well as all the women who've lived before me and those who will come after. This book is a celebration of and addition to the heritage of women.

Editorial Review:

This book shows women how to create an enduring document that expresses who they are, what they value, and how they want to be remembered. Women can use the book to reclaim the legacies their ancestors have given them; clarify and refine their own dreams and goals; and communicate their blessings, wisdom, and love to future generations.

An ideal gift for any woman documenting her family’s history and stories, or finding her place in an ever-changing world.

Around Sarah's Table: Ten Hasidic Women Share Their Stories of Life, Faith, and Tradition

Rivka Zakutinsky, Yaffa Leba Gottlieb

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 13 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Around a kitchen table in Brooklyn in 1991, a few Hasidic women started meeting every week for lunch and Torah study. Around Sarah's Table, by Rivka Zakutinsky and Yaffa Leba Gottlieb, reveals the personal stories of this diverse group of women--including Shaina, the mother of two adopted children with Down Syndrome; Klara, a high-powered lawyer; and Levana, a rebbitzen, who's the moral compass for them all. Each of the book's 10 chapters begins with a passage from Genesis and then focuses on the story of one woman. Their stories converge in their striving to "elevate the physical and actualize the spiritual." As Sarah, a school principal and the group's hostess, explains, "Our most important work is the day-to-day, minute-to-minute adjustment of our attitude to feel love towards people." Readers unfamiliar with Hasidic traditions will discover a way of life that's ordered by the Torah in every detail. Readers more familiar with Hasidism will enjoy the satisfaction of seeing these often-stereotyped people faithfully and vibrantly described. --Michael Joseph Gross

The Flying Camel: Essays on Identity by Women of North African and Middle Eastern Jewish Heritage (Live Girls Series)

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 11 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Extraordinary collection of essays--a fascinating book 5 out of 5 stars.
17 of 17 people found this review helpful.

I got the chance to hear author Khazzoom give a concert of Judeo-Arabic music and a lecture about the Judeo-Arabic experience while visiting Seattle recently. The author, raised in Palo Alto, California, is the daughter of an Iraqi-Jewish father. So she was raised, not with the more familiar Ashkenazi (European) Jewish traditions, customs and music, but with those of the Middle East. She explained about Sephardim ("Spanish" Jews who left the Mideast and returned later in history)and Mizrahim, Jews who never ever had left the Mideast. And there is strife among the groups, who engage in discrimination based on widely different cultural values and lifestyles, though all believe in the same G-d and follow the same scriptures.

The essays go into much detail about individual lives of women who experienced this discrimination or outright, terrible oppression at the hands of local people in their homelands -- Iraq, Iran and other places. Some of the stories are frightening; in one essay, the writer describes a horrifying massacre in Iraq. Her parents were then left literally stateless, their passports invalid and no land accepting them for refugee status. It's hard not to cry while reading this story. Others talk about a shameful treatment of returnees to Israel, and the division in the communities there. Some of the writers tried to "pass" as French Jews rather than Moroccan, to avoid being treated as an underclass exactly as African-Americans experience in the United States. These stories made me so angry.

The essays are also a unique view inside Jewish traditions that are probably as unfamiliar to most Jews as they would be to non-Jews. It was a revelation that some Hebrew is spoken with an Arabic accent, using Arabic words. I couldn't put this book down, and I think anyone interested in the struggles in the Mideast ought to read this, and definitely, if you are Jewish, you should not pass up this book. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.

Editorial Review:

Many of us have stereotypes of what "Jewish" looks like—and for many of us that image is white and European. Yet, with the blossoming Jewish multiculturalism movement, led by the dynamic Loolwa Khazzoom, the myth of a "monolithic Jewish community" is about to be debunked. Focusing on the experiences of Jewish women of two rich and varied regions, The Flying Camel reveals the hidden worlds of Jewish women often misunderstood or maligned by both the cultures in which they live and the European-Jewish community. Stories include one woman and her family’s flight from persecution in Libya, a writer’s exploration of the category "Arab Jew," and a lightskinned, Moroccan-born woman trying to "pass" in order to gain acceptance among European Jews in Tehran. The collection includes a glossary and a foreword by best-selling author Gina Nahai.

Coming Home: A Woman's Story Of Conversion To Judaism

Linda Shires

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Total reviews: 4 Average rating: 3.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

She grew up in an upper-middle-class Protestant family in New England. She can trace her father's family back to the Mayflower. Yet, "Judaism was to be my bashert, my destiny," maintains Linda Shires - wife, mother, professor, and author. For almost twenty years, she lived the life of a Jewish wife, passing as a Jew when she participated in Jewish holiday rituals with her husband and her three step-children. When she wanted, she thought of herself as a Christian. But after deciding to ground her child in one religious tradition, Shires discovered her own. Coming Home tells the story of why a former WASP Debutante opted for a position at the margins: a Jew-by-Choice and why she became committed to a life of religious observance and questioning. Her narrative is quietly passionate, spiritual, and learned as it moves from the halls of Princeton to the Holocaust camps of Germany and back again. This richly felt story of conversion to Judaism expands our idea of what constitutes a spiritual journey and a religious practice.

The Coming of Lilith: Essays on Feminism, Judaism, and Sexual Ethics, 1972-2003

Judith Plaskow

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Editorial Review:

In this first collection of her essays and short writings, Judith Plaskow, one of the founders of feminist theology and the founder of Jewish feminist theology, documents her personal and scholarly evolution. From her early days as a graduate student at Yale to her present work on sexual ethics, the essays in this volume trace Plaskow's work in feminist theology, Jewish feminist theology, and sexuality. Covering all of her major essays, including "The Coming of Lilith" and her pioneering work on anti-Judaism in Christian feminism, this book also includes several previously unpublished essays. Intelligently arranged and edited with the help of Donna Berman, this collection is indispensable for religious studies students, fans of Plaskow's work, and those pursuing a Jewish education.

Jewish Mothers

Lloyd Wolf, Paula Wolfson, Paula Wolfson, Lloyd Wolf

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Total reviews: 4 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

There is an old Jewish proverb that goes, "God could not be everywhere so God invented Jewish mothers." Proof positive is found in the faces and stories of these exquisite Jewish mothers photographed by native son Lloyd Wolf. In assembling this loving tribute to Jewish mothers, Wolf and interviewer Paula Wolfson hoped to dispel the unflattering American myths of smothering mothers (á la Portnoy's Complaint), while elevating the honorable traditions and virtues of Jewish mothering.

Wolf's black-and-white photos offer compelling stories in and of themselves--intimate portraits that capture each woman's essence page after page. Every photo spread is accompanied by a first-person narrative in which these women peel back the layers of their life stories. Psychologist Dr. Carolyn Goodman tells of her son being killed by the Ku Klux Klan during the Civil Rights Movement. Entertainer Shari Lewis speaks of her first Chanukah special with her brainchild puppet Lamb Chop. Patricia Lunior speaks of mothering a son who contracted the HIV virus from a blood transfusion. The paths of these mothers are very different--rabbi, member of the U.S. House of Representatives, mystery writer, Auschwitz survivor, mother of triplets, puppeteer, Nobel Prize winner--but they have much in common, including an unwavering commitment to children, community, and their Jewish heritage. One would be hard-pressed to find a more loving gift book to bestow upon a Jewish mother of any generation. --Gail Hudson

Gender and Jewish Studies: A Curriculum Guide

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Editorial Review:

Published for the Jewish Women's Studies Caucus. Contains 30 syllabi and bibliographies on Jewish women by academics, community leaders and authors for use in education.