The Coming of Lilith: essays on Feminism, Judaism and Sexual ethics, 1972-2003; Judith Plaskow (edited with Donna Berman), Beacon press, Boston, 2005
Judith Plaskow became a feminist in 1969, the year that Yale admitted women to its undergraduate college. She joined the feminist movement, together with Carol Christ, whose books we have also reviewed in Eremos. Rabbi Donna Berman persuaded her to put some of her essays into book form, and Rabbi Bermann has written the introduction. She warns that it is not for the faint-hearted.
She demands that we give up the safety of comfortable pretenses: the pretense of an objectivity that transcends our gender, race, socioeconomic location, and sexual orientation…
She lists a lot more of the pretenses that we share. Rabbi Berman also says that Judith Plaskow complicates things because she exposes the complexity we so assiduously attempt to avoid in our search for quick and easy answers and solutions. She shows, for example that there isn’t one simple entity called “women’s experience”. To privilege and universalise some women’s experience, Judith reminds us, is to echo one of the most tragic flaws of patriarchy- the universalization of male experience.