Next Year I Will Know More: Literacy and Identity Among Young Orthodox Women in Israel(Raphael Patai Series in Jewish Folklore and Anthropology)

In traditional Jewish societies of previous centuries, literacy education was mostly a male prerogative. Even more recently, women have not been taught the traditional male curriculum that includes the Talmud and midrashic books. But the situation is changing, partly because of the special emphasis that modern Judaism places on learning its philosophy and traditions and on broadening its circle of knowers. In this book, the Israeli anthropologist Tamar El-Or explores the spreading practice of intensive Judaic studies among women in the religious Zionist community. Focusing on the experiences of religious women who participated in a midrasha at Bar-Ilan University, the author, a secular Jew, succeeded in gaining their confidence and penetrating their world. El-Or observed these women in a learning context where they debated Jewish orthodox views of women, a process that enriched her understanding of their identity formation. She explores their own learning experience through discourse analysis and through conversations with them and their male instructors. Feminist literacy, notes El-Or, will alter gender relations and the construction of gender identities of the members of the religious community. This in turn could effect theological and Jewish legal changes. In a narrative that offers insights into a traditional society in the midst of a modern world, the author points to a community that will be more feminist - and even more religious.

About the Author :
Tamar El-Or is associate professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Her books include Educated and Ignorant: Ultra Orthodox Jewish Woman and Their World (Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1994).

Review :

In this fascinating, provocative anthropological study, young orthodox Jewish women from Israel's Religious-Zionist sector are interviewed and observed at the Midrasha--women's study institute--of Bar Illan University as they endeavor to achieve educational parity with men.

Tamar El-Or is the foremost anthropologist working on the lives of religious Jewish women. . . . In exploring the spread of intensive Judaic studies among orthodox women as an institutional, social, and cultural phenomenon, she explores one of the most remarkable developments in contemporary Judaism.