Women in Judaism have affected the course of Judaism over millennia. Their role is reflected in the Hebrew Bible, the Oral Law, by custom, and by cultural factors. Although the Hebrew Bible and rabbinic literature present various female role models, religious law treats women in specific ways. According to a 2017 study by the Pew Research Center, women account for 52% of the worldwide Jewish population.
The views of the various different religions and religious believers regarding human sexuality range widely among and within them, from giving sex and sexuality a rather negative connotation to believing that sex is the highest expression of the divine. Some religions distinguish between human sexual activities that are practised for biological reproduction and those practised only for sexual pleasure in evaluating relative morality.
The Reconstructionist Rabbinical College (RRC) is a Jewish seminary in Wyncote, Pennsylvania. It is the only seminary affiliated with Reconstructionist Judaism. It is accredited by the Commission on Higher Education of the Middle States Association of Colleges and Schools. RRC has an enrollment of approximately 80 students in rabbinic and other graduate programs.
Blu Greenberg is an American Open Orthodox writer specializing in modern Judaism and women's issues. Her most noted books are On Women and Judaism: A View from Tradition (1981), and Black Bread: Poems, After the Holocaust (1994). Greenberg has worked to bridge Orthodox Judaism and feminism.
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.
Paula Hyman was an American social historian who served as the Lucy Moses Professor of Modern Jewish History at Yale University.
Rabbi Rebecca Trachtenberg Alpert is Professor of Religion Emerita at Temple University, and was one of the first women rabbis. Her chief academic interests are religions and sports and sexuality in Judaism, and she says that her beliefs were transformed by a Sabbath prayer book that refers to God as 'She'.
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.
Judith Margolis is an Israel-based American artist working visually in paintings, drawings, artist's books and multi-media collages. In her art and writing she "explores tensions between consciousness, feminism, and religious ritual tradition".
The first openly lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender clergy in Judaism were ordained as rabbis and/or cantors in the second half of the 20th century.
Susannah Heschel is an American scholar and professor of Jewish studies at Dartmouth College. The author and editor of numerous books and articles, she is a Guggenheim Fellow. Heschel's scholarship focuses on Jewish and Christian interactions in Germany during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Sybil Ann Sheridan is a writer and British Reform rabbi. She was chair of the Assembly of Reform Rabbis UK at the Movement for Reform Judaism from 2013 to 2015 and was Rabbi at Wimbledon and District Synagogue in south west London. As of 2020 she is part-time rabbi at Newcastle Reform Synagogue.
Phyllis Trible is a feminist biblical scholar from Richmond, Virginia, United States. Trible's scholarship focuses on the Hebrew Bible and she is noted for her prominent influence on feminist biblical interpretation. Trible has written a multitude of books on interpretation of the Hebrew Bible, and has lectured around the world, including the United States, New Zealand, Australia, Japan, Canada, and a number of countries in Europe.
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.
Jewish women in the early modern period played a role in all Jewish societies, though they were often limited in the amount that they were permitted to participate in the community at large. The largest Jewish populations during this time were in Italy, Poland-Lithuania, and the Ottoman Empire. Women's rights and roles in their communities varied across countries and social classes.
Ann Pellegrini is Professor of Performance Studies and Social and Cultural Analysis at NYU and the director of NYU's Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality. In 1998, she founded the Sexual Cultures book series at NYU Press with José Muñoz; she now co-edits the series with Joshua Takano Chambers-Letson and Tavia Nyong'o. Her book You Can Tell Just By Looking, co-authored with Michael Bronski and Michael Amico, was a finalist for the 2014 Lambda Literary Award for Best LGBT Non-Fiction.
Rachel Aberlin, or Rachel ha-Ashkenaziah, was a Jewish mystic. She is described in the Sefer ha-Ḥezyonot by Hayyim Vital. She was an influential figure of the early Sabbateanism and a spiritual leader of women.
Marion Kaplan is Skirball Professor of Modern Jewish History at New York University. She is a three-time winner of the National Jewish Book Award for her non-fiction writing about German-Jewish history, Jewish refugees, and Holocaust history. Established in 1950, these awards recognize outstanding achievement in Jewish writing and research.
Mara H. Benjamin is an American scholar of modern Jewish studies. A 2024 Guggenheim Fellow, she is the author of Rosenzweig's Bible and The Obligated Self and is Irene Kaplan Leiwant Professor of Jewish Studies at Mount Holyoke College.
