It has been twenty-eight years since the publication of Blu Greenberg's On Women and Judaism: A View from Tradition. Footnote ¹ Greenberg's book is a story of the author's own journey toward interweaving Judaism and feminism, as well as a programmatic laying out of an ambitious agenda for exploration and confrontation. Greenberg's discussion includes such topics as a theoretical basis for women's equality, a call for women's obligation to adhere to fixed liturgical prayer, a reevaluation of the menstrual laws, a careful look at abortion, and a demand for change in divorce law. While at times approaching caricature of the feminist movement, Greenberg's book nevertheless still startles with the radical nature of many of its proposals.

Like Greenberg's, Tova Hartman's latest book, Feminism Encounters Traditional Judaism: Resistance and Accommodation, stems from the author's own journey within her Orthodox community. As feminism is not only, or even primarily, a theoretical construct but an ideology that emerges from lived experience, it is fitting that Hartman's experiences within her community drove her to write this book and to examine more closely the dual claims of feminism and Orthodox Judaism. Committed to both realms, she explores the ways in which feminism offers a powerful critique of traditional religion and the ways in which traditional religion offers a textured life that feminism has yet to achieve. Unlike Greenberg's journey, and telling of the years since the publication of On Women and Judaism, Hartman's quest led her to found a synagogue, Shira Hadasha, a community that has redefined the boundaries of women's public ritual expression within the modern Orthodox world.

Hartman describes her book as following a similar experimental model to that of her synagogue, an exploration of what can be learned when two compelling forms of knowledge are put into sympathetic dialogue with each other. She aims not to simplify but to present the claims of these two living visions in all their complex possibilities. Hartman begins by detailing her experiences within her modern Orthodox community and her awakening to feminism. However, Hartman's voice emerges not only through her encounters within her home community but also through her acquaintance with cross-cultural feminist writings, such as those of third-world feminists, and of social theorists, such as Michel Foucault. Through this framing, she exposes the way in which Joseph Soloveitchik's concept of Halakhic Man emerges from Kantian ethics of the autonomous individual—and not relational feminist ethics. Hartman's sophisticated analysis thus exposes the extent to which modern Orthodox ideology is as much a product of modern Western ideology as is feminism.

Fitting for her claims about Orthodoxy's location within Western ideology, Hartman draws a parallel between women's readings of Freud and feminist readings of Orthodoxy. She outlines three paradigms that women have used to read Freud—reaffirmation, reinterpretation/revision, and rejection—and then applies them to her religious canon. Hartman claims the second of these models as most useful for her project. Reinterpretation, she asserts, entails remaining with tradition as the reader reexamines and reinterprets that tradition. Reinterpreters negotiate with the tradition as they engage in dynamic dialogue with it, moving from ancient to modern and back again, adding their voices to the chain. This is a two-sided conversation lacking in easy solutions. It requires a willingness to sit with problems and to confront both dissatisfaction and an honest assessment of gain and losses in so doing.

Following her methodological outline, Hartman addresses four different areas: modesty, liturgy, niddah (menstrual laws), and backlash. She is particularly insightful in her writing about modesty and niddah. In her chapter on modesty, Hartman observes a double bind: Orthodoxy demands that women cover up and Western culture demands that they uncover themselves. Utilizing Foucault's insight that a defining aspect of modern societies is their ad infinitum discussion of sex while simultaneously claiming sex as secret, Hartman reveals that texts about modesty are themselves immodest—or even pornographic. She notes that one book has mapped “the halakhic status of the neckline's progressive plunge” (49). Hartman thus exposes the ways in which Orthodoxy in fact preserves precisely the elements it says it counters, placing the male gaze at the center and rendering women a collection of body parts to be observed and analyzed. Orthodoxy's modesty discourse, itself immodest, is bound up with Western society's constant discussion of sex. These observations do not mean that Hartman negates the category of modesty. Instead, she seeks a way to restore the female gaze, a way for men and women to walk together with the divine. Hartman does not provide an easy answer for how her community should do this, but she gestures toward a possible path for travel.

In her chapter on niddah, Hartman takes feminist theorists to task for not listening sufficiently to women's own voices about their experiences of practicing the menstrual laws, for allowing theory to silence traditional women. In examining or reinterpreting the laws of niddah, Hartman takes these women's voices seriously, arguing that the omission of their voices from feminist discourse constitutes a serious weakness. She thus turns to interviews with female practitioners of niddah that reveal a range of perspectives, from willful disobedience to engaged practice. Hartman's goal is texture, and she succeeds admirably. She sounds a cautionary note about overriding theory and flattening lived experience, particularly of those women who live within more traditional societal structures.

Hartman's chapter on liturgy is the weakest part of the book. Writing about the male terminology used for the divine, Hartman ultimately accepts the immutability of the traditional liturgy. In place of altering the grammatically male liturgical language, she argues that we reinterpret maleness. Instead of regarding the “he” of God-language as inevitably associated with traits that have come to define masculinity within a particular society, we should view maleness as more fluid. This shift is dependent on our changing the human meanings of maleness and womanhood and the relationships between the genders. “Our Father” can be a nurturing God holding maternal qualities as much as a domineering God. This perspective recognizes the insight of feminist theologians, such as Judith Plaskow, that our images of God reflect the human realm. However, it does not give enough credit to the ways in which prayer also shapes human relationships. Even with an attempt to reinterpret the meaning of maleness, it is still difficult to escape the physical maleness of the traditional liturgy. In a society in which men hold primary public ritual power, the overwhelming male grammar of the liturgy serves to reinforce that status. Hartman appears to be most constrained in this chapter, not only by halakhah but also by politics. Altering liturgy may ultimately prove to be a more visceral shock than women's participation in public synagogue ritual.

Hartman's text will be valuable not only to students of Judaism, but also to students of any traditional religious culture. Beyond the specifics of its analysis of modern Orthodoxy, this work frames a conversation between tradition and modernity. It is a powerful articulation of how and why a person can value both a traditional culture and the values of modernity—and what happens when she demands that both inform one another.