present diverse and complex female characters.
To substantiate this claim, Skinazi marshals a plethora of sources, including novels, Orthodox female writers and filmmakers, and an all female Hasidic indie rock band.
She also explores the burgeoning field of ex Orthodox female memoirs,
Skinazis work has the rare quality of being highly thoughtful and sophisticated while also being engaging and entertaining and at time hilarious!.
Anyone interested in the study of Orthodox Jewish society and the place of women in its literature and culture, will find this book deeply rewarding.
Honorable Mention for theRobert K, Martin PrizeMedia portrayals of Orthodox Jewish women frequently depict powerless, silent individuals who are at best naive to live an Orthodox lifestyle, and who are at worst, coerced into it.
Karen E. H. Skinazi delves beyond this stereotype inWomen of Valorto identify a powerful tradition of feminist literary portrayals of Orthodox women, often created by Orthodox women themselves.
She examines Orthodox women as they appear in memoirs, comics, novels, and movies, and speaks with the authors, filmmakers, and musicians who create these representations.
Throughout the work, Skinazi threads lines from the poem Eshes Chayil, the Biblical description of an Orthodox Woman of Valor.
This proverb unites Orthodoxy and feminism in a complex relationship, where Orthodox women continuously question, challenge, and negotiate Orthodox and feminist values.
Ultimately, these women create paths that unite their work, passions, and families under the framework of an Eshes Chayil, a woman who situates religious conviction within her own power.
Women of Valor tells a fascinating story about Orthodox women in popular culture and the media, Too often, Orthodox women are portrayed as passive, boring, and one dimensional, Or not even mentioned at all with the male experience the exclusive focus, In this book, Karen Skinazi upends stereotypes and presents a fascinating and full color scholarly portrait of Orthodox women, in a writing style that's fun and engaging.
Karen E. H. Skinazi is the most Jewish person in the entire world or so many people, including the president of an Orthodox shul, repeatedly tell her.
Her interests, however, actually extend beyond the Jewish world to a multiethnic sphere, and much of her scholarly curiosity revolves, specifically, around stories of marginalized women who defy the odds in their quests for success.
Marion, the Story of an Artists Model, for instance, offers a fascinating look at the life of an ambitious young woman struggling to make it in a white mans career at the turn of the twentieth century and is based on Sarah Eaton Bosse, sister of writers Winnifred Eaton Onoto Watanna and Edith Eaton Sui Sin Far, and a Chinese English Canadian in the United States who quotpassedquot as white during the era of the Chinese Exclusion Act.
Women of Valor, Karens new monograph, explores the literature, film, and music of and about Orthodox Jewish women who, over the last quarter century, have been subject to a series of increasingly fundamentalist religious laws, leading to alarming accounts in the media and popular culture, and a feminist demand for the womens liberation from a patriarchal regime that includes modesty patrols, driving bans on women, and gendered bus segregation.
Sound intriguing Women of Valor might surprise you: Orthodox Jewish women are doing a lot than lamenting their fate at the back of the bus waiting for white Western feminists to save them.