LimmudFest NY 2020

What is nakedness? In the Talmud it is associated with a woman's hair, voice, and thigh. However, in today's modern society, many discussions around women's bodies in Judaism feel misogynistic and irrelevant. In the first half of this session, we will focus on the differences between men and women in rabbinic Judaism as manifested in both familial and communal space. We will focus on the different Jewish responses to feminism including prayer services and ordination and how transgender people will potentially force the whole binary system to undergone significant change.  In the second half of this intensive, we will continue to use Jewish texts to understand the origin of traditional practices around dress, singing and hair covering and whether any of them can be integrated in a contemporary discourse of gender relations.