Description: "Beyond Brutality draws on feminist analysis and gender studies to examine tractate Sotah of the Babylonian Talmud as a literary unit. By interrogating how, why, and where women are invisible within Bavli Sotah, Jane Kanarek brings to light a ubiquitous female presence throughout the text"-- Provided by publisher.
Brief description: 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.
Review Quotes: "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