“Where Kosher Means Organic and Union Label”

A central challenge of feminist scholarship since the 1980s has been the exploration of the full breadth of the term woman and the interaction of women's multiple identifications, including class, race, ethnicity, and nationality. While there has been a tremendous expansion of writing on gender and Judaism within the past decade, our image of Jewish women raised in the American Reform tradition still too often calls to mind an unproblematic and idealized picture of an Ashkenazi, middle-class, married woman with children. ¹ The following is an exploration of an arena of increasing importance to the Reform Jewish movement: the relationship of Jewish sexual minority women to their religion. In specific, it addresses the lives of women who identify as both Jewish and bisexual and are actively participating in American Reform Judaism or have distanced themselves from the denominations in which they were raised by forming Jewish Renewal havurot or embracing secular Jewish identities.