This is an alphabetical list of Jewish feminists.
Jewish feminism is a movement that seeks to make the religious, legal, and social status of Jewish women equal to that of Jewish men in Judaism. Feminist movements, with varying approaches and successes, have opened up within all major branches of the Jewish religion.
Lilith is an independent, Jewish-American, feminist non-profit magazine that has been issued quarterly since 1976. The magazine features award-winning investigative reports, first-person accounts, entertainment reviews, fiction and poetry, art and photography. Topics range from rabbinic sexual misconduct, to new rituals and celebrations, to deconstructing Jewish-American stereotypes, to understanding the Jewish stake in abortion rights.
Tova Hartman is the Dean of Humanities at the Ono Academic College.
Women of the Wall is a multi-denominational Jewish feminist organization based in Israel whose goal is to secure the rights of women to pray at the Western Wall, also called the Kotel, in a fashion that includes singing, reading aloud from the Torah and wearing religious garments. Pew Research Center has identified Israel as one of the countries that place "high" restrictions on religion, and there have been limits placed on non-Orthodox streams of Judaism. One of those restrictions is that the Rabbi of the Western Wall has enforced gender segregation and limitations on religious garb worn by women. When the "Women of the Wall" hold monthly prayer services for women on Rosh Hodesh, they observe gender segregation so that Orthodox members may fully participate. But their use of religious garb, singing and reading from a Torah have upset many members of the Orthodox Jewish community, sparking protests and arrests. In May 2013 a judge ruled that a 2003 Israeli Supreme Court ruling prohibiting women from carrying a Torah or wearing prayer shawls had been misinterpreted and that Women of the Wall prayer gatherings at the wall should not be deemed illegal.
Judith Plaskow is an American theologian, author, and activist known for being the first Jewish feminist theologian. After earning her doctorate at Yale University, she taught at Manhattan College for thirty-two years before becoming a professor emerita. She was one of the creators of the Journal for Feminist Studies in Religion and was its editor for the first ten years. She also helped to create B'not Esh, a Jewish feminist group that heavily inspired her writing, and a feminist section of the American Academy of Religion, an organization of which she was president in 1998.
The Israel Religious Action Center also known as IRAC, was established in 1987 as the public and legal advocacy arm of the Israel Movement for Progressive Judaism. It is located in Jerusalem, Israel. IRAC aims to defend equality, social justice, and religious pluralism within Israel, through the Israeli legal system, lobbying and publications. Author Elana Maryles Sztokman calls IRAC "the preeminent civil and human rights organization in Israel," advocating for a broadly inclusive democracy and promoting social justice. Recent campaigns include an effort to ban gender segregation on Israeli public buses, a successful public campaign for the abolition of income guarantees to kollel students, and a lobbying campaign in defense of human rights organizations operating in Israel.
Gender and Jewish Studies is an emerging subfield at the intersection of gender studies, queer studies, and Jewish studies. Gender studies centers on interdisciplinary research on the phenomenon of gender. It focuses on cultural representations of gender and people's lived experience. Similarly, queer studies focuses on the cultural representations and lived experiences of queer identities to critique hetero-normative values of sex and sexuality. Jewish studies is a field that looks at Jews and Judaism, through such disciplines as history, anthropology, literary studies, linguistics, and sociology. As such, scholars of gender and Jewish studies are considering gender as the basis for understanding historical and contemporary Jewish societies. This field recognizes that much of recorded Jewish history and academic writing is told from the perspective of “the male Jew” and fails to accurately represent the diverse experiences of Jews with non-dominant gender identities.
Orthodox Jewish feminism is a movement in Orthodox Judaism which seeks to further the cause of a more egalitarian approach to Jewish practice within the bounds of Jewish Law. The major organizations of this movement is the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance (JOFA) in North America, and Women of the Wall (WOW) and its affiliates in Israel and internationally, known as The International Committee for Women of the Wall (ICWOW). In Israel, the leading Orthodox feminist organization is Kolech, founded by Dr. Chana Kehat. In Australia, there is one Orthodox partnership minyan, Shira Hadasha, in Melbourne.
In modern Rabbinic Judaism, the traditional method of determining Jewishness relies on tracing one's maternal line. According to halakha, the recognition of someone as fully Jewish requires them to have been born to a Jewish mother. A person who is born to a non-Jewish mother and a Jewish father is regarded as Zera Yisrael and will only be accepted as ethnically Jewish and not as religiously Jewish. Thus, being Jewish through the paternal line typically necessitates conversion to Judaism to validate one's identity as a Jew in the fullest sense.
The Jewish Women's Archive (JWA) is a national non-profit organization whose mission is to document "Jewish women's stories, elevate their voices, and inspire them to be agents of change."
Feminist Jewish ethics is an area of study in Jewish ethics and feminist philosophy.
Ritualwell is a website that allows users to find, create and share Jewish rituals. It was initially launched in 2001 and was nominated for a Webby Award in the Religion & Spirituality category in 2003. The site was redesigned and relaunched in 2005. It seeks to "increase the number of rituals available for holidays, Shabbat and traditional lifecycle events.
U'Bizchutan is an Israeli political party formed in early 2015 by social activist Ruth Colian. It is the first political party in Israel focused on Orthodox Jewish women. The two previously existing Haredi Israeli parties, Shas and United Torah Judaism, do not allow female candidates to run on their election slates. Colian says the party will represent all women who are dissatisfied with the current state of Israel's religious establishment. In the 2015 election, the party failed to pass the electoral threshold necessary to win seats in the Knesset, receiving only 1,802 votes (0.04%).
Adina Bar-Shalom is an Israeli educator, columnist, and social activist. She was the founder of the first college for Haredi students in Jerusalem, and has spent years working to overcome gender discrimination in the Orthodox Jewish community. She was awarded the Israel Prize for lifetime achievement and special contribution to society in 2014. A daughter of Ovadia Yosef, she is a member of the prominent Yosef family.
The Anonymous Was A Woman Award is a grant program for women artists who are over 40 years of age, in part to counter sexism in the art world. It began in 1996 in direct response to the National Endowment for the Arts' decision to stop funding individual artists.
Sexism in Israel manifests differently in different categories of Israeli population and culture.
Kolech, also known as Kolech: Religious Women's Forum, is an Israeli women's organization associated with Orthodox Judaism. The group's stance is aligned with Orthodox Jewish feminism and religious Zionism.