The American Academy of Religion will honor past president Judith Plaskow for her lifetime of influential scholarship on Sunday, Nov. 24, during the AAR's annual meeting, being held this year in San Diego. AAR president Jin Y. Park says the idea to celebrate Plaskow came to her in March when Plaskow was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame, the first scholar of religious studies to be named to the Hall.
Ever since Plaskow' trailblazing monograph Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism From a Feminist Perspective was published in 1990 year—boldly asserting that the Torah was written by men for men and it was time to claim women's place at the mountain—Plaskow has almost always been described as the "pioneering Jewish Feminist theologian."
But, in an interview with PW, she demurs. "That isn't saying a whole lot since there are maybe three of us," she said.
That's because, even today, there's almost nowhere for anyone, men or women, to study Jewish theology, ancient or contemporary, says Plaskow, age 77.
Plaskow did her religious studies at Christian schools, completed her doctorate at Yale, then went on to become a force for Jewish women in her writing, co-writing or editing 23 books and scores of articles. The Hall of Fame citation made note of her 32 years teaching religious studies at Manhattan College, launching the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion as a co-editor in 1985, and helping found B’not Esh, a Jewish feminist spirituality collective.
This was not her original plan for her life.
"I wanted to be a rabbi," the Brooklyn-born daughter of a teacher and an accountant, tells PW. "But I was roundly discouraged by my own rabbi." She turned to theology, she says, "because I wanted to think about God all the time. I wanted to ask the fundamental questions: What is the purpose of life? Why is there evil in the world? Is there a God and if there is, what is the nature of God?"
Julia Watts Belser, Professor of Jewish Studies at Georgetown University, says Plaskow "asks us to grapple with the ways that dominant religious voices have often buttressed violence and oppressive social forces: the way that religious texts and traditions have so often shaped and strengthened patriarchy and domination. And yet she has consistently argued that religion can and should be a force for resisting injustice, for reimagining possibility..."
No retirement from curiosity
Plaskow retired from her professorship in 2013 but there's no retirement for a relentlessly curious mind. She and her partner, scholar Martha Ackelsburg, team up to lead workshops such as one last year titled, "Dealing with Difficult Texts in Difficult Times." They used painful passages from the Torah—violence, homophobia, sexism—as prompts to examine society now and to ask people to consider how to "be more ethical than our sacred texts."
She has time now, she says, for "the pure pleasure of studying," alone, but often in partnership with others, puzzling knotty topics together. And while Plaskow says there are no new books on her horizon, she frequently writes articles addressing racism, justice, and disability rights. And she is, as always, concerned that change is meager and slow when it comes to women stepping into scholarly positions and Jewish leadership roles.
Indeed, Michal Raucher, an Associate Professor of Jewish Studies at Rutgers University, recalls what happened when she tried to turn down an offer to become an editor of the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, which was co-founded by Plaskow in 1985 when Plaskow was the only Jew among the Christian scholars. "Judith said, 'You need to do this as a service to me and to the field.' And that was it for me," Raucher says.
The annual joint meeting of AAR and the Society for Biblical Literature routinely attracts 7,000 to 10,000 attendees including academics, publishers, and doctoral candidates in search jobs and book contracts. With an eye toward those emerging scholars, Park says the AAR has also established the Judith Plaskow Travel Grant of $500 to a student or independent scholar to present a paper that is "centrally informed by and/or contributing to feminist approaches to the study of religion at the November Annual Meeting."
Plaskow empathizes with the job hunters, scouring the field at a time when the number of jobs, particularly tenure track posts like the one she once held are ever more scarce.
"The fear of finding a place often keeps people from doing work that's too radical, for fear that it will keep them from getting a job. It's a legitimate fear," she tells PW.
'Writing it forward'
It happened to her. The first article she ever co-authored looked at the acknowledgments male authors cited in their books —"wife", "mother," or "wife and mother," etc. It appeared in 1973 and it killed a job interview she was seeking. "Someone actually said to me, 'What kind of person would have written this?'" she recalled.
Even so, Plaskow believes, "If you don't do the work that you love, that you went into the field to do, why bother? I would say to these young scholars, 'Be careful and be brave."
Max Strassfeld, associate professor of religion at USC Dornsife, who regularly teaches Plaskow's works says, "Judith offers us a model for intellectual curiosity and breadth that is rare in U.S. academics which prizes specialization. Judith has written about the revelation at Sinai, she has written about gender and God, and she has written about the feminist and trans politics of bathroom access, amongst numerous other topics. And each time she takes on a new area or question, she makes us think about these subjects in completely new ways."
Plaskow tells PW, "We are still reading the same Torah with all its patriarchal and ethnocentric aspects. We don't need a new Torah. We need new ways of talking about the Torah, new midrash." 'Midrash' is the Hebrew term for a kind of storytelling where one takes a problem or gap in the Torah text and fills it in.
"We could be writing it forward, telling ourselves into the story. By bringing in new rituals, telling new stories," She says. Her seminal book, Standing Again at Sinai, concludes that women must take their stand with all the world of Jews, as "part of a larger struggle toward a more just world."
