No book is ever the work of a single author, and this is perhaps especially true of a Jewish feminist theology, which is necessarily grounded in a number of different communities. The community most important to this book is B’not Esh, the Jewish feminist spirituality collective I helped to found in 1981, which has been the center of my religious life for the last eight years. The work and ideas of several individuals in B’not Esh have been particularly important to me, and I acknowledge them at many points in this book. Above and beyond these special debts, however, it is what B’not Esh has accomplished as a community that has allowed me to write this theology of community.
Another group that has been crucial to my development as a feminist and a theologian is the Women and Religion Section of the American Academy of Religion. I see this work as in large measure a product of ideas and friendships sparked in the Section; and I see myself as trying to work through in a Jewish context questions and ideas that come out of and belong to a wider feminist community. The New York Feminist Scholars in Religion, which has been meeting for fifteen years, for me sustains the work of the Women’s Section in between its annual meetings, providing a place for ongoing discussion and dialogue.
Other communities important to the genesis of this book are Havurat Ha-Emek in Northampton, Massachusetts, and Havurah Aliza in New York, both of which are year-round sources of support and community. The Havurah Institutes, particularly the first Institute in 1980, but also others after that, have given me places both to test and discuss ideas and also to work with other Jewish feminists.
Many individuals and small groups have read portions of this book and have given me important comments and feedback that I have tried to attend and respond to: the New York Feminist Scholars in Religion, especially Beverly Harrison, Karen Brown, and Anne Barstow; Frederick Brandfon and other faculty at the University of Southern California, where I visited in the spring of 1986; Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Alison Jordan, Marion Klotz, Richard Meirowitz, Florence Miale, Barbara Johnson, Donna Robinson Divine, Paula Rayman, Nira Yuval-Davis, Marcia Falk, and Denni Leibowitz. Three people read the entire manuscript: my editor Janice Johnson, who made many helpful suggestions for clarifications and revisions, and Martha Ackelsberg and Carol P. Christ. Martha read as one who has shared the experience of B’not Esh and all that led up to it, and Carol as a longtime friend, colleague, and sister thealogian. Martha’s work on community, and spirituality and politics, has become part of my own thinking. Carol and I have moved in different directions in the course of the last decade, but our differences have made her work all the more important to me and her comments and questions all the more what I needed to hear.
A Mary Ingraham Bunting Fellowship in the spring of 1986 and a Manhattan College sabbatical grant for 1987–1988 allowed me to write much of this book. I am grateful for both for giving me the time to pursue my work at a point when I was ready to do so.