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Feminism has also "provoked strife" among American Jews, who can't seem to agree about women leading worship, women studying Talmud, women giving traditional liturgy a feminist twist. For a taste of that strife, Freedman takes us to the Library Minyan, in Los Angeles, a Conservative congregation whose members are traditional in their public prayer and observance of the Sabbath (many, for example, refrain from driving on Shabbat) but where, in contrast to an Orthodox minyan, men and women sit together, and women lead prayers, chant from the Torah, and wear the prayer shawls and skullcaps that have traditionally been the garb of men. In 1987, Rachel Adler, while leading the congregation in the Amidah, the central prayer of Jewish public worship, added a mention of the Imahot—the matriarchs, Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, and Leah—to the passage of the prayer that refers to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Adler hadn't dreamed up this innovation on her own—it had been popular among Jewish feminists for a decade. But it was the first time anyone had added the Imahot at the Library Minyan.
The reaction was swift. Who told Adler she could add the Imahot? Had she discussed it with the Ritual Committee? Could anyone add whatever she felt like to the traditional Jewish liturgy? For weeks, the minyan debated the issue: someone would preach a d'var Torah (homily) arguing for the inclusion of the Imahot, and the next week another congregant would follow with an argument against. Those opposed to mentioning the Imahot weren't hostile to women or egalitarianism, but they didn't want the Library Minyan's liturgy to differ from that of Jews all around the world. Amy Rabin, then a Library Minyaner, believed that "once her minyan spoke words no other congregation did, she was cut adrift from Klal Yisrael."
Two years after Adler first added the Imahot to the Amidah, the Library Minyan took a vote: should prayer leaders be allowed to add the Imahot, and if so, should it be mandatory, or optional? When the votes were tallied, the Rabins knew they would have to leave the minyan. The congregation had decided, by a large margin, to allow the leader of prayer to add the Imahot if he or she saw fit. Within a year, the Conservative Rabbinical Assembly followed suit; now, Conservative Jews across the country are officially allowed to pray to the God of the matriarchs if they wish. Amy Rabin and her family joined a nearby Orthodox shul.
A decade later, Freedman's portrait of feminist fissions among Conservative Jews seems dated. You won't find many congregations ripped apart by the Imahot in 2001. Freedman fails to discuss, in Jew vs. Jew, what he acknowledged in an interview is the feminist issue that will bring about fissure in this century: ordination of female Orthodox rabbis. "It will come up," he told me. "I don't know if it will be in 20 years or 40 years, but it will happen." Freedman is right. Already many Orthodox women are dissatisfied with the rules that forbid them to lead worship, be ordained, or render halachic decisions.
But these women are not leaving Orthodoxy to become Conservative rabbis: they are studying and teaching at the Drisha Institute, a top-notch all-women's beit midrash (institute of Talmud study) in New York. They are, like Haviva Ner-David—who applied to the ordination program at Yeshiva University, America's modern Orthodox university and seminary, and was rejected on the basis of sex—getting Ph.D.'s in rabbinics at Bar-Ilan University. They are, like Julie Stern Joseph and Sharona Margolin Halickman, serving as "congregational interns" at Orthodox shuls. Halickman and Joseph, who, in 1998, pioneered the role, weren't on par with rabbis, but they taught classes, visited the sick, gave homilies, and counseled women about the laws of family purity. And they got a lot of attention in the press.
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