Women of Valor: Orthodox Jewish Troll Fighters, Crime Writers, and Rock Stars in Contemporary Literature and Culture, by Karen E. H. Skinazi, explores the representation of orthodox Jewish womanhood in a variety of popular genres: memoirs, crime novels, short fiction, music, and film. Women of Valor asks, how do orthodox women in North America represent themselves both internally and to the general public? In a century so ambivalent about secularism, why do we “hold on to the same old or old-world images of orthodox Jewish women in the pages of our fiction and on the screens of our cinemas?” (4). Skinazi's book attempts to read orthodox women's experiences in popular media on its own terms, eschewing mainstream representations of orthodox Jewish women in order to “educate readers, viewers, and listeners; to revise misconceptions; and to explore the possibilities of ‘the woman of valor’” (29). Drawing upon the work of contemporary transnational feminists and colonialist theory, Skinazi, throughout her book, explores Gayatri Spivak's simple yet profound question: “can the subaltern [i.e. the orthodox Jewish woman] speak?” (18). She calls upon her reader to contemplate orthodox women's voices as articulations of diversity and difference, “to be acknowledged and respected” (218), not pitied, written off, or dismissed. Skinazi's guiding principle throughout the book is that “what is lost in the mainstream media representation is this: Orthodox girls and women were (and are) not all sitting silently in their dun-colored, floor-length, appropriately fastened clothing at the back of the bus or locked in their homes, despairing their helpless fate. Many enjoy very satisfying lives” (20). Written in dialogue with the famous poem “Women of Valor” found in Proverbs 31, Skinazi explores women as businesswomen, as artists, as mothers, as wives, as change agents, as spiritual beings, and as rebels within the parameters of the biblical ideal.

I loved this book and I hated this book, for the same reason that I love and hate Jewish orthodoxy. Having grown up in the orthodox Jewish day-school system in a mainstream American Jewish community for twelve years, I call myself a “post-orthodox” Jewish feminist. I will forever be a recovering “orthodox” Jewish woman insofar as I can't break away from the fluencies and the songs, from the love of textual discussion and community loyalty that characterized my orthodox education. I am “post-orthodox” because I continue to live in fear of overstepping the bonds of hubris and pride by placing my own needs, spiritual, intellectual and ideological, over the bonds of history and tradition. A grandchild of Holocaust survivors who still knows the liturgy and can walk into any synagogue on earth and share a language with the members of that congregation, the need to transmit that kind of literacy, that kind of memory, to my children keeps me from forfeiting not only my Jewish commitments, but my orthodox Jewish commitments. Nevertheless, there is something so awfully backward in the gendered dynamics of orthodox American Judaism, in being a grown woman who has achieved the highest level of education but who is regarded as unqualified to sit on the synagogue board, or to say blessings on my own behalf.

Skinazi's approach to the different texts and ideas she introduces in Women of Valor is nuanced and complex. Much of her narrative, for better or for worse, is constituted by summaries of novels – well-known mainstream novels by authors such as Anne Roiphe, Faye Kellerman, and Naomi Ragen which represent orthodox Judaism from an “outsider's” perspective, and lesser-known novels from “inside” the orthodox community (both modern and ultra-orthodox) authored by those such as Libi Astaire and Rochelle Krich. Despite an overreliance on summary, however, Skinazi navigates “inside” and “outside” astutely in her theorization of “women of valor.” Having assiduously avoided many of these works all my life, for fear that they would force me to make a choice – between orthodoxy and secularism – reading Skinazi's fine analyses has convinced me to reapproach an entire body of work with the potential to speak powerfully and personally to a “post-orthodox” woman like me, someone who navigates the world of orthodoxy from both an insider's and an outsider's perspective. Women of Valor provides a breath of fresh air, for popular audiences as well as for orthodox audiences interested in the voices of orthodox Jewish women within their culture, or on their way out.