equal ownership of property, equality of all men ¹. Logically, there-
fore, should not feminist goals be embraced by Judaism today as a
means of achieving equality for men and women in the eyes of
God and the community?

Oddly enough, Jewish society -- in which many pioneer feminists
were nurtured -- was one of the last groups to grapple with the
challenges of feminism. True, Reform Judaism has taken many
steps in this direction, beginning with the call by the Breslau Con-
ference in 1846 for full equality of men and women in all areas of
religion. This equalization remained largely formal, however, for
little of substance and leadership was given to women. Reform
Judaism made fewer religious demands upon both men and women,
and the changes it internalized tended to flow more from a simple
adoption of liberal or modern values than from Jewish considera-
tions. Neither Reconstructionism, which pioneered in bat mitzvah
and in calling women to the Torah, nor Reform accepted women
for rabbinic training until the women's movement pushed them
across the line in the last decade. Even within these groups there is
still significant lay resistance. Basically, then, the response of the
Jewish community can be characterized as follows: the more tradi-
tional the Jewish community has been -- or the more conserving its
nature (including elements within Reform) -- the more likely it
tends to resist challenges from feminist ideology. This is as true of
women in the Jewish community as it is of men.

There are several explanations for this response. First, Jewish
women, on the whole, have been treated well by Jewish men, with
strong cultural values sanctioning such behavior. As a result, they
have been content to live within the traditional religious and social
roles that have been assigned to them. In practice these meshed
rather well: freedom from communal religious responsibilities, such
as synagogue prayers, enabled women better to fulfill the familial
role that Jewish society had ordained for them.

The second reason -- and here we confront a factor more funda-
mentally resistant to change -- is the halakhic model of Judaism.
Halakhah, the body of Jewish religious law, includes the religious
institutionalization of sexual and social status. In other words, what
was a sociological truth about women in all previous generations --
that they were the " second sex " -- was codified in many minute

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