A unique, feminist look at a little researched section of the Jewish community by the UK’s newest female rabbi

How can a demographic that isn’t necessarily marginalised, but whose practices certainly haven’t been given much academic attention in the past, live alongside and within a community with the traditional structures and practices more often seen outside of the home? Lindsey Taylor-Guthartz aims to tackle these themes in her groundbreaking new book on Orthodox women’s practice in northwest London, Challenge and Conformity: The Religious Lives of Orthodox Jewish Women. “They seek an opportunity to perform a central ritual,” she writes of women’s tefillah (prayer) groups, “in a way that does not directly confront the existing power relationships, but instead creates a coexisting alternative.”

The author explores with great sincerity and sensitivity the history, intention and impact of these practices, from public synagogue life to alternative sacred spaces, from mainstream domestic observance to ‘red threads and amulets’. “Orthodox women engage in a wide range of communal and domestic religious activities, in spite of their exclusion from an active role in worship in synagogue and areas of Torah study,” says Taylor-Guthartz, before noting that these are all rules defined by men.

By no means does she shy away from “the interplay of consent, empowerment, appropriation, negotiation, resistance and coercion” seen within the traditionally patriarchal structures of the Orthodox world. Yet her precise academic writing, interwoven with her own personal knowledge and experience of the community, gives the women represented here agency and authority, exemplifying how traditional groups and practices do not exist at odds with the modern world, or even in parallel, but rather as an integral part of it, adding rich diversity and colour to the pattern of Jewish life today. This is a timely and important treatise, reflecting modern feminist values and shining a light on a previously unexamined segment of the community.

By Noa Gendler

Papercut cover art by Jacqueline Nicholls

Challenge and Conformity: The Religious Lives of Orthodox Jewish Women is out now on Liverpool University Press.