Judith Plaskow

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Judith Plaskow is a Jewish feminist theologian and a professor of religious studies at Manhattan College. In addition to cofounding the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, she has written and edited several significant books in the field, including one of the first feminist dissertations in religious studies, Sex, Sin, and Grace: Women’s Experience and the Theologies of Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich (University Press of America, 1980). Plaskow also wrote the first full-length Jewish feminist theology, Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism from a Feminist Perspective (Harper & Row, 1990).

As a Radcliffe Institute fellow, Plaskow will work on a progressive, constructive sexual ethics and theology written from a Jewish feminist perspective. The book, tentatively titled “Just Sex: Judaism, Sexuality, and American Culture,” will place issues of interpersonal ethics in the broader context of the contradictions surrounding sexuality in Jewish tradition and US society. In it, she will explore the relationship between traditional sexual values and larger patterns of religious and social inequality, and between a just and life-enhancing interpersonal ethic and broader social change.

Plaskow received her MPhil and her PhD from Yale University. An active member of the American Academy of Religion for thirty years, Plaskow served in the 1990s as that organization’s president. She was a Bunting fellow at Radcliffe in 1986.