The first woman, according to the biblical creation story in Genesis 2–3, Eve is perhaps the best-known female figure in the Hebrew Bible, although she never appears after the opening chapters of Genesis. Most of the negative traits associated with her, including sin, seduction, and subservience, are part of Jewish and Christian post-biblical interpretations and are not present in the Bible itself. A close look at the Eve narrative in its ancient Israelite context shows Eve to be a partner with Adam as they begin their agrarian life outside of Eden.

Eve’s character is posited to be that of the original and quintessential woman. The Midrash interprets her traits as representative of the negative aspects of femininity. Eve’s punishment for her sin is also tied to the traditional ideas of the fundamentals of womanhood – childbirth, pregnancy, and male spousal domination.

Marcia Falk is a poet, translator, and liturgist whose knowledge of the Bible and of Hebrew and English literature informs the feminist spiritual vision of her work. She is widely considered one of the foremothers of, and foremost contributors to, the Jewish feminist movement.

Ritual behavior is one of the fundamental pillars of Judaism, and of all religions, whose concern is precisely with ultimate meaning and purpose. Since the 1970s, Jewish feminists have gained access to male-identified rituals, developed a wide variety of new rituals, and feminized core male rituals.

According to halakhah, women are responsible for obeying all of Judaism’s negative commandments and for observing most of the positive ones, including the Sabbath and all of the festivals and holy days of the Jewish year. In some instances, however, male and female obligations on these days differ.

Literature by American Jewish women reflects historical trends in American Jewish life and indicates the changing issues facing writers who worked to position themselves as Americans, Jews, and women.

Food and foodways are a critically important area of documenting and deciphering the evolving experience of American Jewish women from the earliest days of immigration to the present. Food is a lens into American Jewish women’s worlds of family, religion, identity, work, political action, entrepreneurship, and more as they have encountered the forces of assimilation, anti-Semitism, systemic racism, sexism, changing consumer economies, and the long women’s movement.

Until the Revolution and their acceptance as citizens, most Jews in France lived in officially recognized autonomous communities in the southwest and northeast. Within these communities, they established charitable institutions, elected a governing body, defined the curriculum of their schools, registered their births, marriages, and deaths, and adjudicated cases in their own courts.

While her career was short-lived, Ray Frank remains significant as the first Jewish woman to preach from a pulpit in the United States. Her speeches often encouraged communal cooperation and tried to heal congregational disputes, and she notably gave an address at the first Jewish Women’s Congress in 1893.