Fundamentalist feminists spar with the patriarchy: Interpretive strategies of Israeli rabbinic court pleaders

Abstract

This chapter describes how women who work as pleaders in the Israeli rabbinic courts try to decipher the dissonance between their canonical texts and their modern sensibilities, dividing the interpretive strategies that the pleaders employ to that end into three different categories. The chapter then explores the implications of these findings with respect to theories of agency, feminist consciousness, how law is read, and identity politics (multiculturalism), as well as with respect to issues of value, power, and divorce reform.

Citation

Weiss, S. (2008), "Fundamentalist feminists spar with the patriarchy: Interpretive strategies of Israeli rabbinic court pleaders", Texler Segal, M. and Demos, V. (Ed.) Advancing Gender Research from the Nineteenth to the Twenty-First Centuries (Advances in Gender Research, Vol. 12), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 173-196. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1529-2126(08)12010-0