Goddess Religion, Postmodern Jewish Feminism, and the Complexity of Alternative Religious Identities

Bibliographic Data

ID20199290
AuthorsMelissa Raphael (corresponding author)
Year1998
Volume1
Issue2
Pages198-215
Publication date1998-04-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueNova Religio The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1092-6690 • E-ISSN: 1541-8480
PublisherProject MUSE (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1525/nr.1998.1.2.198
OpenAlexW1990832921
LanguageEN
Citations received6

This paper argues that Jewish Goddess feminism illustrates the complexity of alternative religious identities and their fluid, ambiguous, and sometimes intimate historical, cultural, and religious connections to mainstream religious identities.1 While Jewish Goddess feminists find contemporary Judaism theologically and politically problematic, thealogy (feminist discourse on the Goddess and the divinity of femaleness) can offer them precisely the sacralization of female generativity that mainstream Judaism cannot. And yet the distinctions between present/former, alternative/mainstream religious identities are surely ambiguous where the celebration of the Goddess can at once reconstruct Jewish identity and deconstruct the notion of religious identity as a single or successive affiliation. It would seem that Jewish Goddess feminism epitomizes how late or postmodern religious identity may be plural and inclusive, shifting according to the subject's context and mood and according to the ideological perspective of the observer

Aesthetics · Epistemology · Feminism · Identity (music) · Ideology · Jewish identity · Judaism · Mainstream · Political science · Politics · Postmodernism · Religious identity · Social science · Sociology · Theology · Biblical Studies and Interpretation · Gender Studies · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies · Jewish Identity and Society · Law · Philosophy · Religious studies

Tools

Open DOISci-Hub