For Women and Girls Only: Reshaping Jewish Orthodoxy Through the Arts in the Digital Age. Jessica Roda. New York, NY: New York University Press. 2024.

Reviewed by Miranda Crowdus

In this book, Jessica Roda explores a recently emergent phenomenon enabled to a large degree by the possibilities of the digital age. Roda explores Orthodox Jewish women’s musical and theatrical performances for women and by women, drawing on years of recent fieldwork including participant observation and in-depth interviews. Roda’s book is a holistic tour-de-force representing the networks, relationships, spaces and venues – human, digital, geospatial, and other – through which these performances are created, rehearsed, and broadcast. This investigation includes a sensitive and honest reflection on the author’s own positionality and enmeshment, not only within the communities and in relation to the individuals under focus but also more broadly to the state of belonging to the Jewish community and being a woman in North America in the twenty-first century. In these dense and detailed portrayals, the results of a wealth of engaged, detailed, and multifaceted fieldwork, the emergence of the kol isha (the voice of a woman) “industry” to its current proliferation, and rich descriptions of the women’s and others’ negotiations with halacha (Jewish law) are explored in detail. It should be noted that such negotiations are normative in Judaism across denominations. But, as the book clearly explains, what differentiates the Hasidic and Haredi communities is their adherence to the authority of the rebbe (or rabbi) in these negotiations. 

The chapters are well organized, focusing on different types of performers and performances, including the private performer, the influencer, the celebrity, and others. In reading through them, one almost feels like one knows these women and can hear them speaking on their own terms. There is the musician and educator Toby in Kiryas Yoel, who seeks to inspire the women and girls in her local and transnational community. Then there is the frum woman artist Reifer, from Borough Park, NY, who carefully balances her commitment to her family and household with her artistry. Dalia uses her role as influencer to advocate for Chava who needs her husband to give her a get (divorce). Roda represents these women and many others in depth and detail. 

One of the many strengths of the book is its ability to capture the humanity of these women in a situation in which, on the rare occasions when academic research focuses on religious Jewish women, scholars tend to focus on women’s “struggles” within Orthodoxy, presenting it, if not monolithically, then with a lack of attention to how the women themselves perceive it on a day-to-day basis. Roda’s account acts as a powerful, meticulously researched counter narrative to both academic approaches and popular depictions of Orthodox Jewish women in the media in recent years. The latter arguably represents a fixation in the Christo-secular oriented media constituting a voyeuristic fetishization of women who leave Orthodoxy for a more secular lifestyle. Overall, this book transcends problematic stereotypes about Orthodox Jewish women in the public sphere. By introducing them as creators, healers, and entrepreneurs, and articulating their own discomfort with a “feminist” lens, it also subverts and offers an alternative to typical studies about Orthodox Jewish women. 

New York and Montreal and their surrounding areas are logical and natural geospatial points of inquiry given the proliferation of such initiatives in these spaces. Moreover, while Roda puts the spotlight on the particularly North American, but also transnational nature of the music and performances, she also clearly presents the nuanced differences between New York and its surroundings and Montreal, particularly regarding attitudes of the dominant culture vis-à-vis religious minorities. The only omission here is a discussion of the involvement of religious Sephardic women in Montreal in these networks of creative and entrepreneurial religious Jewish women. Such activity flourishes in Montreal at Sephardic religious institutions and serves to build bridges between Sephardic and the Ashkenazi women explored in this book in an unprecedented way, reflecting broader social and religious connections between the groups. It may be that these connections are very recent and therefore did not come under the author’s purview during fieldwork; as someone involved in these groups in a personal rather than research-oriented way, I am privy to new developments via technologies such as Whatsapp and Instagram, both apps that Roda explores as technology through which music and musical activities can be easily and appropriately disseminated. It could also simply be that not everyone can be included in these discussions, which are already dense. Indeed, Roda’s decision to not include the efforts of Ba’alei Teshuvot (Jewish “returnee” to religious observance) is clearly explained and justified.

There are few weaker points of this book, and the majority of the omissions stem from the author’s choice of focus, rather than a lack of knowledge. There is some discussion of the musical aesthetic, particularly vocals. But perhaps more in-depth looks at a particular performance from a music and sound perspective, or even a chordal analysis to demonstrate the rapprochement of the music with modern pop, might have been of interest and served to lighten the relatively dense descriptions of human interaction at the forefront of the chapters. Roda starts to explore this in detail in Chapter 3, but then reverts to the middle-ground description of the interactions which characterizes most of the text. Moreover, the practitioners’ choice of music – and genre – is significant, not least because of the pop idiom’s clear differentiation from sacred or liturgical Jewish music; throughout the centuries, in diasporic conditions, Jewish people have integrated the local musics into their musical idiom and sometimes repurposed them for their own uses. 

Likewise, a few theoretical frameworks in this book are developed in detail, such as the similarities and differences between depictions of Muslim women post-9/11 and Hasidic women, imagining these initiatives as counterpublics, and Kieffer’s idea of capitalism that is considered feminine, among others. Regarding the former, as Roda points out, the differences between media depictions between Muslim and Orthodox Jewish women may have to do with the Jewish women being viewed as (relatively) white and North American. But I suspect that there might be a more theological reason related to Judaism’s relationship to Christianity, as well as a secularism that is heavily influenced by Christianity that sees Jews as potential Christians (or secularists) and therefore more easily converted and assimilated. These frameworks work very well to elucidate how the rich ethnography figures into broader ideas about religious minorities and narratives that contradict the status quo. Other mentions of theoretical frameworks are not developed so well and come across almost as throwaway comments, as if they have been mentioned only because that is expected in an academic book. It is not clear, for instance, what Stern’s concept of female inheritance within human rights discourses, or Shelemay’s tripartite rubric on community building bring to the discussion (pp. 136-137) – not because they are not useful and dynamic frameworks, but because they are not fully explained and developed. 

Recent years have seen a small but emergent focus in the works of both established scholars and PhD students on Hasidim and Haredi communities, with some focusing on religious Jewish women. One hopes that this will lead to explorations as detailed and as well-researched and thorough as this one, which is likely to become a central resource on this topic. This book will be useful for academics doing any sort of investigations on musical, or even interpersonal or small-scale entrepreneurial, relationships in religious communities. Likewise, its language is accessible enough for both advanced undergraduate and graduate students. It would make an important addition to any course on Modern Judaism, Ethnomusicology, Women and Religion, and others. As an educator in Jewish and musical topics, I am very grateful to Roda and plan to assign a chapter of this book for my forthcoming “Introduction to Judaism” course.

Miranda Crowdus is a professor at the Department of Religions and Cultures at Concordia University and holds the Research Chair in Canadian Jewish Studies. Crowdus’ research interests lie at the intersection of ethnomusicology and Jewish Studies. She was a research associate at the European Centre for Jewish Music in Hanover, Germany, from 2016 – 2021, before coming to Concordia.