Prologue
Chapter 1: A Hairy Subject: Approaches to Hair and Hair
Covering
Chapter 2: Covering Jewish Women: The Congregational Context
Chapter 3: Splitting Hairs: The Struggle for Community Definition
in a Small Town Orthodox Synagogue
Chapter 4: Wearing Many Hats: The Hair Covering Practices of the
Orthodox Jewish Women at Degel Israel Synagogue
Chapter 5: Letting Their Hair Down: Orthodox Women at Degel Israel
Synagogue Who Choose Not to Cover Their Hair
Chapter 6: Flipping Their Wigs for Judaism: Non-Orthodox Women Who
Choose to Cover Their Heads
Chapter 7: The Long and Short of It: A Psychoreligious
Interpretation of Hair Covering
Epilogue
Amy K. Milligan teaches women and gender studies at Elizabethtown College. Her research concentrates on the overlap of gender and sexuality with religion.
In this brilliant ethnography, Amy Milligan lets us listen in to
personal conversations and see women in and out of worship to ask a
profound question about the maintenance of tradition in a
non-traditional environment. She opens doors to places we have not
looked before—beneath hair coverings and in women’s study groups—to
make us reassess the meaning not only of orthodox practice, but of
identity driven by women’s worldview. Her groundbreaking book on a
hairy subject will surely change the way we think, and talk about,
not just Jews but the expressive body of tradition.
*Simon J. Bronner, Pennsylvania State University*
Hair, Headwear, and Orthodox Jewish Women: Kallah’s Choice is an
important contribution to the fields of Jewish studies, gender
studies, and American studies. Through her multi-disciplinary
approach, Milligan reveals the symbolic power of hair and hair
covering as a tool for negotiating the complexity of Jewish
identity among Jewish women in small-town America. While hair
covering is often read as a repressive practice in traditional
communities, Milligan shows how the choice to cover or not to cover
one’s hair is perceived among the women she
interviews as an expression of power to define their own
status in a complicated religious landscape. This very
readable ethnography is complemented by a careful analysis that
draws on a wide range of theoretical tools, including insights from
gender studies, cultural psychoanalysis, anthropology, and American
studies.
*Andrea Lieber, Dickinson College*
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.
*CHOICE*
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