Born: 14 March 1947, United States
Died: NA
Country most active: United States
Also known as: NA
The following bio was written by Emma Rosen, author of On This Day She Made History: 366 Days With Women Who Shaped the World and This Day In Human Ingenuity & Discovery: 366 Days of Scientific Milestones with Women in the Spotlight, and has been republished with permission.
Judith Plaskow is an American theologian, author, and activist. Plaskow is recognized as the first Jewish feminist theologian. After earning her doctorate at Yale University, she taught at Manhattan College for thirty-two years and is now a professor emerita.
Plaskow was instrumental in creating the Journal for Feminist Studies in Religion and served as its editor for the first ten years. She also helped establish B’not Esh, a Jewish feminist group that greatly influenced her writing, and a feminist section of the American Academy of Religion, where she served as president in 1998.
Her work has been pivotal in the development of Jewish feminist theology. Her most significant work, “Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism from a Feminist Perspective,” argued that the absence of female perspectives in Jewish history has negatively impacted the religion. She urged Jewish feminists to reclaim their place in the Torah and in Jewish thought. This work is one of the first Jewish feminist theological texts ever written and is considered by some to be one of the most important Jewish texts of the 20th century.
Her essay “The Coming of Lilith” was instrumental in re-imagining Lilith as a positive figure for women instead of a dangerous demon. In her interpretation, Lilith is a woman who was wrongly punished for desiring equality with Adam. Once Eve seeks Lilith out, they join together in sisterhood to build a better world.
Plaskow viewed ethics and activism as integral to Judaism from a young age, influencing her contributions to feminist ethics. She came out as a lesbian in the 1980s, and though sexuality was always a focus of hers, her article in “Twice Blessed: On Being Lesbian or Gay and Jewish,” was her most formal and popular discussion of being a Jewish lesbian.