By Leora Tanenbaum
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Whether you are an atheist or a faith loving women frustrated that your religion does not effectively coincide with your feminist values, Leora Tanenbaum’s latest book Taking Back God will speak to you. Focusing on the feminist movements in Orthodox Judaism, Evangelical Christianity, Catholicism, Protestantism, and Islam, Tanenbaum illuminates a forgotten landscape of progressive activism: religion. Taking Back God touches on everything from the religious right’s fight on reproductive rights to barriers separating women and men in mosques and temples.
Today most of what we hear about religion and politics is how religious extremism tramples human rights. Tanenbaum gives us the opportunity to remember that religion was once a bastion of progressive activism and that presence is still alive and well. Much of her focus is on feminist women carving leadership roles in conservative faiths that are traditionally less than friendly to female leadership. She details stories of individual women who traveled to Israel and back to become rabbis (and were still forced to use a different title), women who crossed the high seas to be ordained as Catholic priests, and women who a led a Muslim service in a downtown New York City gallery because no mosque would allow a woman to lead.
Tenenbaum’s personal tone that was present in her other works (including Slut and Catfight) flows throughout. Her intimate perspective is personally revealing and enormously informative. The book seems to be cathartic for her, as though she is voicing her own struggle. Yet she is also successful in creating the space for other women who feel a similar conflict an opportunity to revel in it. She takes two of the most polarizing issues, religion and feminism, and weaves individual stories together to craft a tale of people not politics. She reminds us why we wanted to believe in the first place, and that religion is cause that is far from lost.
Review by Nicole Levitz
3 comments:
well this is tough time for christianity
"Taking Back God touches on everything from the religious right’s fight on reproductive rights"
Today most of what we hear about religion and politics is how religious extremism tramples human rights."
Reproductive rights? Human rights? How can someone say that they believe and have faith in God, but not trust Him to know what is best, what gives any of us the right to believe we know better than God about anything??
I am undoubtedly too late to comment here, but I gave an interview to Ms Leora Tanenbaum and she drew faulty conclusions and gave wrong information. I did not say that all feminism is radical and Voices of Orthodox Women is not a part of or affiliated with IRD. I have ordered her book because of these two mistakes I will probably review her book. By the way I am an elder in the Presbyterian Church USA. Voices of Orthodox Women's board has several women pastors and Elders.
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