Concealed and revealed: women and feminism in Islam and Judaism

Rules governing women’s behavior, definitions of gender, and anxieties regarding sexuality have shaped religious and national lives and communities for Jews and Muslims in ways that demonstrate important parallels and influences as well as distinctiveness of both Islam and Judaism from Christianity.

Feminist thinkers and their opponents in all three religions have sought to respond to the challenges of European modernity and the Enlightenment. Their efforts and the ensuing controversies – in both Judaism and Islam – have exposed weaknesses in each religion’s foundations even as they have won important religious opportunities for women in their communities.

My lecture will discuss some of the parallels between Islamic and Jewish feminist thought and suggest ways in which we might be helpful to one another.

Biography

As a scholar and author, Susannah Heschel has explored issues of Jewish feminism and 19th- and 20th-century German Jewish history. The daughter of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, Susannah Heschel is the Eli M. Black Distinguished Professor at Dartmouth College, where she chairs the Jewish Studies Program. Her 1983 edited book, On Being a Jewish Feminist, generated controversy and discussion both within the Jewish community and in the broader culture and was praised by many as their entry point into Jewish feminism. Her 1998 monograph Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus won both an award from the Abraham Geiger Rabbinical College of Berlin and a National Jewish Book Award. She has also written about Protestant theological antisemitism and support for Hitler in The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany (2008) and Betrayal: German Churches and the Holocaust (1999), which she edited with Robert Ericksen. Forthcoming is a book written with Sarah Imhoff, The Woman Question in Jewish Studies.

In 2018 she published Jüdischer Islam: Islam und jüdisch-deutsche Selbstbestimmung. In addition, she edited two collections of her father’s essays, Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity and Essential Writings of Abraham Joshua Heschel. She has received many honors, including five honorary doctorates from universities in the United States, Canada, Germany, and Switzerland. She has taught at Princeton, Edinburgh, and the University of Cape Town and was assistant professor at Southern Methodist University and associate professor at Case Western Reserve University before joining the faculty at Dartmouth College in 1998. In 2008 she received a Carnegie grant in Islamic Studies and in 2011-12 she was a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin, an institute for advanced study. In 2013 she became a Guggenheim Fellow. In 2015 she was elected a member of the American Society for the Study of Religion and in 2023 to the American Academy of Jewish Research.