ABSTRACT

David was born in 1963 and came of age in seventies when feminism was very new to the Orthodox community. A Jewish marriage is legally terminated through the transfer of a gett, a writ of divorce. The point is that women in traditional Judaism, by their own actions and by the sum of community expectations of them, play a second-class role in Jewish prayer, both as to their rights and responsibilities. Jewish legal tradition ascribes greater weight and authority to laws that emanate from Scriptures than to laws developed in post-Biblical society. Compared to massive injustices on the human rights agenda, the feminist issues within orthodoxy seem like a great luxury, as indeed many judged the American feminist movement in its earliest years to be nothing more than a petulant, middle-class woman's whim. Within right-wing orthodoxy, there was broader separation of sexes, arranged marriages, a more stringent dress code, and general sense of taboo about the female persona and sexuality.