ABSTRACT
Jewish feminist anthropology’s central observation has been that Jewish women’s perspective is derived from an ‘alternative reality’: a female ‘subculture’ or ‘second world’ to that of men. ‘Cross-culturally’, Susan Starr Sered observes, Jewish women who are excluded from the male systems that confer prestige have found ‘other ways of striving to be moral beings’.Women’s own religious modes, operative within the ‘little tradition’ as opposed to the sacred, written, masculine ‘great tradition’, are normative for themselves. Sered summarizes traditional Jewish women’s religiosity as being ‘more to do with love, death, and human relations, than with abstract theological concepts’ (a religiosity which she has especially begun to respect since becoming a mother herself).2 Consequently, ‘in diverse cultural situations, women . . . modify theologies that ignore the suffering of children in this world.’3
