Hair, Headwear, and Orthodox Jewish Women

Amy K. Milligan teaches women and gender studies at Elizabethtown College. Her research concentrates on the overlap of gender and sexuality with religion.

• PrologueChapter 1: A Hairy Subject: Approaches to Hair and Hair CoveringChapter 2: Covering Jewish Women: The Congregational ContextChapter 3: Splitting Hairs: The Struggle for Community Definition in a Small Town Orthodox SynagogueChapter 4: Wearing Many Hats: The Hair Covering Practices of the Orthodox Jewish Women at Degel Israel SynagogueChapter 5: Letting Their Hair Down: Orthodox Women at Degel Israel Synagogue Who Choose Not to Cover Their HairChapter 6: Flipping Their Wigs for Judaism: Non-Orthodox Women Who Choose to Cover Their HeadsChapter 7: The Long and Short of It: A Psychoreligious Interpretation of Hair CoveringEpilogue

Orthodox Judaism is generally considered patriarchal and male dominated, but this insightful study on the symbolic tradition of Jewish women covering their hair reveals that under certain circumstances, Jewish women have been able to co-opt tradition and thus empower themselves. Ethnographer Milligan focuses on a small, widely divergent Orthodox community (Degel Israel Congregation) in Lancaster, PA, and for comparison, a few unconventional Jewish women unaffiliated but with other communities. She provides a myriad of complex choices these women made on whether to cover their hair and, if they did, what they wore and how, when, and why they did it. She also discovered that from a psycho-religious perspective, head covering and hair covering are not synonymous; however, both may provide the means for self-identity. Milligan found that tradition and family history rather than Jewish law (halakah) were usually the basis for female head covering choices in what she describes as an Orthodox community of practice involving learning, observance, and experience. As the novel The Red Tent (1997), by Anita Diamant, depicted little-known Jewish women's roles in biblical times, so this intriguing, factual work provides many subtleties within Judaism as practiced by women in the contemporary US. A five-page glossary of mostly Hebrew and Yiddish terms is also helpful. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels/libraries.