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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.