About the Author

SYLVIA BARACK FISHMAN directs the program in Contemporary Jewish Life in the Near Eastern and Judaic Studies Department at Brandeis University, where she is a Professor. She is co-director of the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute. Her most recent book, Jewish Life and American Culture (2000) explored the way American Jews negotiate the Jewish and secular pieces of their lives. Her earlier books include A Breath of Life: Feminism in the American Jewish Community (1993), named a 1994 Honor Book by the National Jewish Book Council; Follow My Footprints: Changing Images of Women in American Jewish Fiction (1992); and Changing Minds: Feminism in Contemporary Orthodox Jewish Life (2000).

Reviews

A comprehensive and lively analysis of the changes created by women struggling and acquiring a place in Jewish communal life . . . A Breath of Life has excellent descriptions of the changes that have taken place and continue to take place as women struggle for equality in Jewish life. (Boston) Jewish Advocate"

A timely and important work that will bring a shock of recognition to American Jewish women and men much as Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique did to America 30 years ago. Highly recommended. Library Journal"

In this comprehensive, very readable piece of scholarship, Sylvia Barack Fishman charts how today's feminists (like turn-of-the-century Eastern European Jews or, later, Holocaust survivors) are responsible for American Judaism's freshest air . . . A germinal work. Lilith"

A comprehensive and lively analysis of the changes created by women struggling and acquiring a place in Jewish communal life . . . A Breath of Life has excellent descriptions of the changes that have taken place and continue to take place as women struggle for equality in Jewish life. (Boston) Jewish Advocate"
A timely and important work that will bring a shock of recognition to American Jewish women and men much as Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique did to America 30 years ago. Highly recommended. Library Journal"
In this comprehensive, very readable piece of scholarship, Sylvia Barack Fishman charts how today's feminists (like turn-of-the-century Eastern European Jews or, later, Holocaust survivors) are responsible for American Judaism's freshest air . . . A germinal work. Lilith"

In this broad, balanced survey, Brandeis University researcher Fishman assesses the challenges facing Jewish women and the various ways to resolve them. Based on interviews with 120 women, scholarly works, popular literature and other sources, the book offers useful background on the development of Jewish feminism and nuanced looks at dilemmas and debates about marriage, parenthood, work and sexuality. Fishman describes the emergence and growing popularity of new rituals--female equivalents of the celebrations surrounding circumcision and the bar mitzvah. Proposing that feminism must sometimes bow to tradition, Fishman argues that Jewish religion and culture require some measure of hierarchy. Sympathetic to the movements within Judaism--Reform, Reconstructionist, Conservative and Orthodox--she suggests that each branch has led the way in at least one area of feminist progress. ``Feminism is bringing newly ardent Jews--women--into the fold,'' she concludes. (May)