Jane Kanarek is Professor of Rabbinics and Dean of Faculty at Hebrew College. She is author of Biblical Narrative and the Formation of Rabbinic Law and coeditor of Mothers in the Jewish Cultural Imagination.
“Kanarek’s insightful feminist reading of Bavli Sotah traces how a disturbing ritual designed to expose and humiliate women accused of adultery is transformed, through rabbinic legal and narrative discourse, into an opportunity to articulate the values and practices of a pious society. Kanarek persuasively models a new way of reading rabbinic literature that assumes that women played a role in the world of the rabbis and impacts our understanding—from individual passages to the corpus writ large.” -- Sarit Kattan Gribetz, Yale University “A deeply persuasive argument for reading Bavli Sotah as a cohesive tractate that subverts and reframes the brutality of the biblical and Mishnaic accounts of the sotah ritual. With scholarly insight, Kanarek integrates Talmudic and feminist methodologies to illuminate a rabbinic turn away from female transgression and toward shaping the ideal male. A critical resource for investigating the sotah ritual."" -- Marjorie Lehman, Jewish Theological Seminary