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 32 years before becoming a professor emerita. She was one of the creators of the Journal for Feminist Studies in Religion and its editor for its first ten years. 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 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 wrongly punished for desiring her rightful equality with 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, Plaskow viewed ethics and activism as integral to Judaism, which influenced her contributions to feminist ethics. 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.
Early life 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, stressing that God calls the Jewish people to be the "light unto the nations," which edified 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. The rabbi's parents convinced him 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 the inconsistencies, but was too young to deconstruct what she saw.
As a child, Plaskow had a keen interest in theology and ethics, which was influenced by her Reform congregation and her natural curiosity. She attended the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom with members of her congregation and heard Martin Luther King Jr. famous "I Have a Dream" speech, which inspired an imagined 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 only grew from this point, and she became the only student in her Hebrew school who actually wanted to be there. She always hoped to learn something valuable, though she says she never did.
Throughout junior high and high school, Plaskow hoped to become a rabbi, even though women rabbis were unheard of and opposed by many, including her own rabbi. However, she had her own reservations. She aimed to be a trailblazer but felt uncertain about her belief in God. A significant turning point occurred during a Ne’ila service on Yom Kippur when she realized the possibility of pursuing a doctorate in theology. Although she recognized that becoming a rabbi would have required less effort and would have made her the country's second female rabbi, she concluded that her path as a theologian aligned with her identity.
Education 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. 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 sought out to build on Saiving's work by also analyzing Niebuhr and by attempting to reduce the article's gender essentialism, which is where she thought Saiving erred in her argument. She focused on interpreting how the Protestant doctrines of sin and grace related to women's experiences.
Academic career Plaskow's first professorship was at New York University. Unfortunately, the university's religious studies department shut down halfway through her first year there and she was sent looking for new work. She then found herself teaching at Wichita State University from 1976-79. She relished her time at Wichita because of the institution's robust religious and women's studies departments, but feared ending up stuck in Kansas and began to look elsewhere. She finally found a long term home at Manhattan College, where she ended up teaching for thirty two years and earned the title of professor emerita. The college's religious department was mostly Catholic, but this was no obstacle to Plaskow. She enjoyed learning more about Catholic theology and her position as an outsider allowed her to ask questions others may not have, including questioning her own religion.
After a long period of mainly focusing on Christian theology, Plaskow's sights gradually turned back to Judaism. She attended her first American Academy of Religion (AAR) conference in 1970 and was dismayed by the lack of women present. She didn't attend the conference in 1971, but Carol P. Christ, Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, and other women created a women's caucus, a working group on women and religion, and elected the first woman president of the AAR, Christine Downing. The working group met for the first time in 1972, marking the beginning of women's studies in religion. Mary Daly relayed her first ideas for Beyond God the Father at this meeting and also gave her position as co-chair of the group to Plaskow. A few years later, the group became an official section of the AAR after successfully arguing that they were creating a new field of religious study and needed the space and authority to do so. The section became her home base for the academic study of religion and feminism.
At the first national Jewish feminist conference in February, 1973, Plaskow gave a lecture titled "The Jewish Feminist: Conflict of Identities" and was met with a standing ovation. She gave several lectures through the 1970s questioning if a woman could truly be a Jew, concluding that Judaism is passed down by women, but it's never truly received or owned by them. In 1979, she and her longtime collaborator and friend Carol P. Christ edited Womanspirit Rising: A Feminist Reader in Religion through the Yale Women's Alliance and it became a seminal anthology on feminist spirituality. It was one of the first of its kind and its success would later lead to the pair releasing another anthology, Weaving the Visions: New Patterns in Feminist Spirituality in 1989.
She got her first chance to teach a Jewish feminism and theology class at the first National Havurah Summer Institute in 1980. This opportunity was a personal breakthrough for Plaskow; she finally felt all of the aspects of her identity falling into alignment after feeling so much tension between them. After her first class, she was inspired to write "The Right Question is Theological," partly in response to Cynthia Ozick's article, "Notes Towards Finding the Right Question." Plaskow's article was published in 1982 and it laid down her feminist criticisms of key concepts in Judaism like the Torah, God, and Israel, using feminist midrash to argue that halakhah should be taken as secondary to theology. She considers it one of her quintessential works. Riding off the joy of studying together at the National Havurah Summer Institute, Plaskow and other like-minded women formed B'not Esh ("daughters of fire" in Hebrew) in 1981 as a Jewish feminist spirituality collective which has been meeting for 36 years. This group was indispensable to Plaskow in imagining and creating Jewish feminism; she believes she couldn't have written Standing Again at Sinai without B'not Esh. She created the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion with Schüssler Fiorenza and they published their first edition in spring, 1985. Plaskow served as editor for ten years and the journal still exists today.
In her influential book Standing Again at Sinai, Plaskow wrote that the Torah, and Jews' conception of their own history, have been written by and in the language of a male patriarchy in a manner that sanctions the marginalization of women, and must be reclaimed by redefining its content to include material on women's experiences. She famously wrote "We must render visible the presence, experience, and deeds of women erased in traditional sources. We must tell the stories of women's encounters with God and capture the texture of their religious experience...To expand Torah, we must reconstruct Jewish history to include the history of women, and in doing so alter the shape of Jewish memory." Making this history visible is essential to developing feminist midrash in her eyes.
"The Coming of Lilith" (1972) continued the Jewish feminist tradition of examining female archetypes in the Bible like Queen Esther and Lilith. Lilith was Adam's original mate and was created as equal to him. Lilith fled Eden when she was denied sexual equality, was replaced by submissive Eve, and became a she-demon who fed on infant boys. Plaskow imagines Lilith as waiting for Eve to come find her outside the walls of Eden and after Eve arrives and they've bonded, they'll rebuild the world together, which Adam and God fear. Plaskow's work helped turn Lilith from the prototypical example of what a woman shouldn't be to an empowered figurehead for women's liberation.