This is a thoroughly researched study of women’s activism in four conservative religious movements based in Israel and the Palestinian territories that ascribe to a complementarian view of gender. Righteous Transgressions, which compares the settler movement, the Shas Party, the Islamic Movement in Israel (northern and southern branches), and Hamas argues that women’s transgressive activism—that is, activism that defies traditional gender roles—is often rooted in maternal frames and justified as “righteous” and necessary for the national struggle. Lihi Ben Shitrit contends that the two movements she categorizes as “proselytizing”—Shas and the southern branch of the Islamic Movement in Israel—actually provide “liberatory narratives” to women by providing them with acceptable space in which to pursue their agency and improve their socioeconomic status (p. 31). In contrast, the activism of women in Hamas and the settler movement, even when it involves actions typically associated with men, “eventually reinforces, rather than challenges,” traditional gender roles (p. 31).

Ben Shitrit’s classification of the movements into the nationalist and proselytizing categories is based on public documents and official speeches since the 1980s, as well as 24 months of fieldwork conducted in Israel and the West Bank between 2008 and 2012, with additional two-month visits in 2013 and 2014. Her Jewish Israeli identity, Mizrahi family name, and fluency in Hebrew and Arabic facilitated her archival and field research, although at times, she notes, that identity also posed challenges with the populations she was interviewing. Specifically, she was unable to gain entry to the Gaza Strip and thus relied on existing interviews and writings from Hamas women found on social media and in official Hamas publications. Ben Shitrit justifies her case selection by the fact that all four movements are committed to the use of religious law, emphasize role complementarity for men and women, regulate interaction between the genders, and view feminism as a problematic and threatening foreign influence (pp. 33–34). By documenting the similarities between these two Jewish and two Muslim movements she “demonstrates that a socially conservative religious ideology has nothing inherently to do with Islam” (p. 34).

Each of the book’s chapters provides a theoretical or sociopolitical grounding for the topic and then explores each of the four movements studied vis-à-vis that chapter’s theme. One of the primary strengths of Righteous Trangressions is the rich descriptive detail with which Ben Shitrit draws from her extensive fieldwork to illustrate her points. For example, in discussing the manner in which women are afforded space to engage in “more transgressive forms of activism” by the Islamic Movement in Israel’s linkage of religious and communal political grievances (p. 150), she provides an extensive description of a lecture by Shaykh Jamal that she attended. She describes the scene graphically: “[T]he pollution and the sand in the air made everything dark even at two in the afternoon, and a strong wind caused the palm trees at the university’s gardens to sway violently. Female students’ skirts were flapping too and their hair covered their eyes. . . . Shaykh Jamal’s lecture echoed the fury of the weather outside with talk of calamity approaching” (p. 150). Elsewhere, Ben Shitrit quotes extensively from her interviews with women, and describes vividly their scenes of protest or social activism. Her arguments are well supported through illustrative examples of women activists in the various movements, although, as she notes, the Hamas case does not have the same depth or personal connection due to her inability to carry out fieldwork in Gaza.

The author points out the similarities across the four cases as she discusses them in each chapter. For example, in reference to women in the Islamic Movement in Israel, she notes that “Um Amer . . . constructs women’s motivational frames around the existential threat that rival Jewish women’s groups pose” (pp. 156–57). However, in the subsequent example of women’s protest in Jerusalem to “free” al-Aqsa mosque and of women praying at al-Aqsa “when the men were prevented from coming to the mosque” (p. 157), the differences in the relationship between the Israeli Jewish and the Israeli Muslim protestors and the Israeli soldiers who confront them in the various examples in the book could be deconstructed. Although a few references to power differences are made, the book does not engage in a substantial analysis of the relative power and status of the four groups studied, particularly in the case of Hamas. For example, although Ben Shitrit draws on religious authorities who note “the exceptional nature of Palestine” that provides special allowances for “martyrdom operations” that are otherwise forbidden, she discusses only the “exceptional” fact that all Israeli soldiers are to be conscripted soldiers (p. 171). She does not discuss the exceptional nature of life in the Gaza Strip, including the severe poverty, the stifling blockade, and repeated assaults on Gaza during the period of her fieldwork, including Operation Cast Lead in 2008–9 and Operation Protective Edge in 2014 when thousands of Palestinians, primarily civilians, were killed. Although the occupation and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict is not the focus of her book and is not central to her argument regarding women’s transgressive activism, it does provide background context for the women’s action, particularly in regard to the nationalist groups, who justify women’s activism using the exceptional nature of the threat posed to their cause.

Similarly, although the author does chronicle the socioeconomic activism and the outreach to marginalized populations of Shas and the southern branch of the Islamic Movement, the political context and these groups’ positionality in greater Israeli socioeconomic and political currents could be more extensively documented and compared. Figure 6.1 on page 236, for instance, is a photo of an “Unrecognized Bedouin village in the Negev.” However, the status of “unrecognized” villages and what that means for women’s activism in this context is left unexamined. Ben Shitrit does discuss some of the social and economic activism conducted by Shas and how the outreach to marginalized populations has been an important aspect of Shas’s proselytizing, but much of this discussion is left to the concluding chapter. More integration of power differentials between the four cases studied—as well as between the cases and the broader Israeli and Palestinian publics in which they are embedded—and how this affects women’s activism would further enrich the study.

Overall, Righteous Transgressions provides a solid contribution to the fields of gender studies, religious studies, and Middle East studies by carefully documenting the activism of Jewish and Muslim women on the political Right and the ways in which they justify their activism. Ben Shitrit supports her argument that “it is the other ideological commitments of the movements, which are unrelated to women and gender, that enable women to perform roles that do not accord with their movements’ complementarian ideology” (p. 181). She keeps her own feminist analysis out of her writing until the concluding chapter, when she brings in some of her own views. While her rationale for withholding evaluation of the women’s movements in the empirical chapters is explained as a means of letting the empirics and theory space proceed on their own (p. 227), in some places her argument might have been more convincing and robust if more of her own perspective and feminist questioning were applied systematically throughout the book. For example, on page 145, when discussing female settler activists who contest the attitudes of male leaders and rabbis, there is nothing on the extent to which this might pose a challenge to patriarchy and not just reinforce the gender complementarity model. While several feminist frameworks were presented in different chapters, including queer theory and a conceptual framework from drag performance, they were not all applied consistently throughout the book but, rather, brought in for select sections.

These points do not detract from the fact that the book provides a valuable contribution to the agency and dynamism of activist women in the religious right, not only highlighting activism that is often “unseen” but also illustrating common themes in women’s activism across Jewish and Muslim groups of very different political orientations.