Judith Plaskow

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Judith Plaskow (born March 14, 1947 in Brooklyn ) is an American emerita professor of religious studies at Manhattan College in the Bronx , New York City . Her academic work focuses on contemporary religious thinking with a specialization in feminist theology and approaches to correcting the marginalized role of women in the Torah . Your book Standing Again at Sinai. Judaism from a Feminist Perspective (1991) is considered to be the first work to establish a Jewish-feminist theology.

education

Judith Plaskow was socialized in Reform Judaism . She received her bachelor's degree from Clark University and her master's degree from Yale University , where she also received her PhD in 1975 . Her dissertation was entitled Sex, Sin, and Grace. Women's Experience and the Theologies of Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich .

Academic activity

Plaskow has a wide range of teaching and lecturing activities on Jewish feminism both in the United States and in Europe. She co-founded and was the first ten years of the show with editor of the scientific journal The Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion . In 1981 she co-founded the Jewish- feminist group B'not Esh ( Daughters of Fire ). She is a past president of the American Academy of Religion .

Plaskow wrote two monographs , Sex, Sin and Grace (1980) and Standing Again at Sinai : Judaism from a Feminist Perspective (1991), which is considered the first book ever written on Jewish feminism, and also published a collection of essays under the title The Coming of Lilith : Essays on Feminism, Judaism, and Sexual Ethics (2005).

She is co-author of four monographs: Women and Religion (1973), Womanspirit Rising: A Feminist Reader in Religion (1979), Weaving the Visions: New Patterns in Feminist Spirituality (1989) and Goddess and God in the World (2016) . She also published a variety of articles in scholarly compilations and journals, and wrote chapter 14 of Transforming the Faiths of our Fathers: Women who Changed American Religion (2004), edited by Ann Braude.

Central positions

In her influential book Standing Again at Sinai , the first book of Jewish feminist theology, Plaskow argues that the Torah and the Jewish conception of one's own history are written in the language of men and in the language of patriarchy and in a way that the Sanction the marginalization of women. The ability to read the content in such a way that the experiences of women are included must be regained.

In other words: Jewish feminists should also claim the Torah as their property. She calls for the presence, experience and actions of women that have been deleted from traditional sources to be made visible. It is necessary to tell the stories of women’s encounters with God and to grasp the texture of their religious experience. The idea of ​​what the Torah is should be broadened to include not just the five books of Moses and traditional Jewish learning in view, but all the words, teachings and actions of women that have not been seen before . In order to expand the Torah, it is the job of Jewish feminists to reconstruct Jewish history in order to take into account the history of women and thus to change the shape of the Jewish collective memory .

Plaskow explains that the rabbis in the Talmud used a midrash method in which they interpreted Jewish memory in such a way that they could see themselves in continuity with it. She quotes the Midrash, in which the rabbis of the Talmud interpreted the patriarchs in such a way that they observed all laws given at Sinai. In view of apparently contrary Bible passages, such as B. Genesis 18: 7-8, where Abraham greeted the visiting angels by slaughtering a calf and serving it boiled in milk, the rabbis, in order to bring the Bible passage into conformity with the Jewish dietary laws ( kashrut ), had this passage so reinterpreted that Abraham served the milk first and only later the meat.

In addition to supplementing the Torah with new material that reflects the perspectives of women, Plaskow pleads for a new midrash that renews the understanding of the Torah in light and in continuity with today's needs and perspectives.

Private

In the 1980s, she came out as a lesbian .

Fonts

  • Sex, Sin, and Grace . University Press of America, 1979. ISBN 0-8191-0882-0
  • Weaving the Visions. New Patterns in Feminist Spirituality . Harper, San Francisco 1980. ISBN 0-06-061383-1
  • Standing Again at Sinai. Judaism from a Feminist Perspective , Harper, San Francisco 1991. ISBN 0-06-066684-6
    • And again we stand on Sinai. A Jewish feminist theology . Translated from English by Veronika Merz, Edition Exodus, Lucerne 1992, ISBN 978-3-905575-67-5
  • The coming of Lilith. Essays on Feminism, Judaism, and Sexual Ethics, 1972-2003 . Beacon Press, 2005 ISBN 0-8070-3623-4
  • Goddess and God in the World. Conversations in Embodied Theology . With Carol P. Christ, Fortress Press 2016, ISBN 9781506401188

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Judith Plaskow . In: jwa.org .
  2. ^ Judith Plaskow - Jewish Women's Archive . In: jwa.org .
  3. ^ Feminist Theology . In: jwa.org .
  4. ↑ Table of Contents: Transforming the faiths of our fathers: . Catalog.lib.uchicago.edu. Retrieved April 14, 2015.
  5. ^ Standing Again at Sinai, pp. 28-31

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Plaskow, Judith
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American religious scholar
DATE OF BIRTH March 14, 1947
PLACE OF BIRTH Brooklyn