Table of Contents

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

About the Author

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

Reviews

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 *