ABSTRACT
Rhonda Lieberman argues that the Jewish woman has captured the imagination of a mass audience by performing the role of excessive and sublime grotesque, adept at “histrionics and masquerade.” According to feminist theologian and Jewish feminist theorist, Judith Plaskow, despite the androcentric nature of central Jewish texts and the patriarchal nature of Jewish law, the focus of Jewish community and spiritual life is consistent with a feminist project. Both traditions have emphasized the importance of memory and privileged the narration of personal episodes and stories that accompany political and philosophical thought. Second-wave consciousness-raising, though legitimizing personal experience as politically significant, assigned to feminism a therapeutic function as the cure for the disease of patriarchal psychic colonization. Consciousness-raising set out to expose the phallocentric nature of Western institutional, cultural, and political power structures, as well as to discover and reclaim the history, values, and experiences of women that have been suppressed by the same structures.
