Judith Plaskow

Judith Plaskow (born March 14, 1947) is an American theologian, author, and activist known for being the first Jewish feminist theologian.

After earning her doctorate at Yale University, she taught at Manhattan College for thirty-two years before becoming a professor emerita.

She was one of the creators of the Journal for Feminist Studies in Religion and was its editor for the first ten years.

Judith Plaskow was born in Brooklyn, New York on March 14, 1947.

Her parents were Vivian Cohen Plaskow, a remedial reading teacher, and Jerome Plaskow, a Certified Public Accountant.

Her younger sister, Harriet, was born in 1950.

The Plaskows moved to West Hempstead, Long Island and Plaskow attended public school there.

She described her neighborhood as diverse in religions, but not in races.

As soon as she was able to start going into New York City with her friends, she began to resent her town and was increasingly focused on the city.

Growing up, Plaskow was a part of a classical reform congregation and completed twelve years of Hebrew school.

Her early religious education was universalist and stressed how God calls Jewish people to be the "light unto the nations," which motivated her view that ethics and activism are crucial to Jewish practice.

Plaskow thought her congregation was "typical in its treatment of women as second-class citizens."

Her rabbi was opposed to allowing women to be ordained and disagreed with both bar and bat mitzvahs, wanting children to continue Hebrew school until confirmation in the ninth grade.

He was convinced by parents to hold bar mitzvah ceremonies but insisted on the girls (including Plaskow) having a Hebrew recognition ceremony as a group.

Plaskow reports that she always felt that there was something wrong with all these inconsistencies, but was too young to deconstruct what she saw.

Plaskow was very interested in theology and ethics as a child due to her Reform congregation and a natural proclivity for theology.

Her dissertation was written at Concordia University while she was an adjunct and it was later published as Sex, Sin, and Grace: Women’s Experience and the Theologies of Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich. The subject was in line with her Protestant training, but she was mostly inspired by Valerie Saiving's 1960 article, "The Human Situation: a Feminist View" which echoed her concern that the lack of women in theology warped theological study.

She attended the 1963 March on Washington with members of her congregation and saw Martin Luther King Jr.'s famous "I Have a Dream" speech which inspired her to imagine a world transformed by gender equality, the way he had imagined one transformed by racial equality.

After learning about the Holocaust in school, Plaskow raised her first theological questions about good and evil.

Her interest grew from this point and she became the only student at her Hebrew school who actually wanted to be there.

She always hoped she would learn something valuable there, though she says she never did.

Throughout junior high and high school, Plaskow dreamed of becoming a rabbi, even though women rabbis were unheard of and opposed by many, including her own rabbi.

However, she had her own reservations.

She wanted to be a trailblazer but felt she couldn't as long as she wasn't certain she believed in God.

Her life changed during a Neilah service on Yom Kippur when she realized she could get a doctorate in theology instead.

She admits becoming a rabbi would've been much less work and she would've been the second ever female rabbi, but she says she was "born a theologian" and is now sure she made the right choice.

Plaskow obtained her B.A. magna cum laude from Clark University in 1968 which included spending her junior year abroad at the University of Edinburgh.

Edinburgh was her first experience of being one of very few Jewish people in a mainly Christian setting and showed her how she easily put Christian questions in the Jewish context.

It made her more comfortable applying to Protestant theology programs after she graduated, a necessity due to the dearth of Jewish programs and lack of a religion department at Clark University.

From there, she was trained in Protestant theology and earned her Ph.D from Yale Divinity School in 1975.

She came out as a lesbian in the 1980s and though sexuality was always a focus of hers, her article in "Twice Blessed: On Being Lesbian or Gay and Jewish," was her most formal and popular discussion of being a Jewish lesbian.

She also helped to create B'not Esh, a Jewish feminist group that heavily inspired her writing, and a feminist section of the American Academy of Religion, an organization of which she was president in 1998.

Plaskow's work has been critical in developing Jewish feminist theology.

Her most significant work, Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism from a Feminist Perspective, argued that the absence of female perspectives in Jewish history has had a negative impact on the religion and she urged Jewish feminists to reclaim their place in the Torah and in Jewish thought.

It is one of the first Jewish feminist theological texts ever written and is considered by some to be one of the most important Jewish texts of the 20th century.

Her essay "The Coming of Lilith" was critical in re-imagining Lilith as a positive figure for women instead of a dangerous demon.

Plaskow imagines Lilith as a woman who was wrongly punished for desiring her rightful equality to Adam.

Once Eve seeks Lilith out, they join together in sisterhood to build a better world.

Since "The Coming of Lilith," Lilith has become an important figure to Jewish feminists and became the namesake of the Jewish feminist magazine Lilith.

From a young age, she viewed ethics and activism as integral to Judaism, which influenced her contributions to feminist ethics.