Devoted Resistance

David Sperber is an Art Historian, Curator, Art Critic, and Rabbi. He previously served as a Postdoctoral Associate at the Institute of Sacred Music, Yale University, a David Hartman Center for Intellectual Leadership research fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute, Jerusalem, and the head of the Curatorial Studies Program at the Schechter Institute, Jerusalem. In 2012, he co-curated the international exhibition “Matronita: Jewish Feminist Art” at the Mishkan Le’Omanut Museum of Art, Ein Harod, in Israel.

• AcknowledgmentsList of FiguresIntroduction1 “Matronita”: the Emergence of a Field2 A Consciously Incomplete Narrative3 Jewish Feminisms: between the USA and Israel4 Is Contemporary Religious Art an Oxymoron?5 The Artworks – from Object to Subject6 Creating a Transnational Jewish Feminist Art Field: Overview of the Book1 “Mikva Dreams”: Mierle Laderman-Ukeles1 Ukeles’s Mikvah Works in the 1970s and 1980s2 Mikva Dreams and the Feminist Spirituality Movement3 Ukeles’s Mikvah Works and American Jewish Feminist Art4 “The Personal Is Political”: the Mikvah Works in the Context of Maintenance Art2 “Tikkun Olam”: Helène Aylon’s Ecofeminist Ritual Art1 Jewish Mysticism: Process Art in the 1970’s2 “Tikkun Olam”: Ecofeminist Ritual Art in the 1980s3 “Holiness Embedded in Matter”: the “Sand Carrying/Sand Sacs” Performance4 Conflicted Land: the Haifa Performance5 “Nation Shall Not Lift Sword against Nation”: the “Earth Ambulance”6 Searching for the Matriarchs: the Great Goddess Discourse7 A Call to Be Reborn as Jewish Feminists8 The Erasure of Judaism3 “The Liberation of G-d”: Helène Aylon’s Dialogical Aesthetics1 Turning the Gaze Inward: Art Based on Dialogue2 Cumulative Revelation3 The Illuminated Pink Dash: What’s Missing4 “You Shall Walk in Virtuous Ways”: Nechama Golan1 Golan’s Critique of the Religious Jewish Text2 “Genizah”: Tempered Radicalism and Orthodox Jewish Feminism3 Radical Art in the Jewish Orthodox World5 The Pornography of the Jewish Laws of Modesty: Andi Arnovitz1 “Gloo-Ya” (Uncovered): Exclusion of Women from the Public Space in Jerusalem2 “The Male Gaze”: Covering and Uncovering3 A Course of Correction4 Nomos and Narrative6 “De Facto Feminism”: Body and Sexuality in the Works of Young Religious Israeli Women Artists1 “Studio of Her Own”: Images of the Female Body2 Vaginal Art3 De Facto Feminism7 “Not Prepared!”: Hagit Molgan1 Precedents of Molgan’s Works in Israeli Art2 The Reception of Molgan’s Works in Her Community: The Religious Kibbutz3 The Reception of the Works in Orthodox Feminism4 The Art World as an Arena for Innovation8 “A Tale of a Woman and a Robe”: Nurit Jacobs-Yinon1 “Inclusion”: Internal Halakhic Criticism2 The Orthodox Academic Feminist Conversation: Radical Criticism3 Challenging Patriarchy4 Exposing Sexual Harassment in the Mikvah5 The Reception of the Exhibition among the Orthodox Rabbinical Establishment6 Feminist Activist Art9 Conclusion: the Art of Breaking Conventions1 The Contribution of Jewish Feminist Art to the Jewish Religious Worlds in the USA and Israel2 Between the USA and IsraelBibliography