This stone symbolizes for me the loving feminist reclamation of our great grandmothers' folkways.

I never wanted to simply be a female rabbi. I want to be a part of a Judaism that is transformed by feminism.

As the commission delved into the issue, testimony it received from scholars showed that no Jewish legal barriers stood in the way of ordaining women.

Within several months we determined that if any Jewish issue required political action, it was this one, the status of women.

I was making a conscious decision to change my primary identity from ‘Jewish radical feminism’ to ‘feminist Jew.’

My critique was two–pronged: what Orthodoxy and feminism could learn from each other.

We who seek liberation from the oppressive structures that deny us the same economic, educational, and spiritual opportunities as the privileged among us need each other.

Like my mother and her father, my grandfather, I was both a committed Jew and a feminist.

‘How can we include you in the circle?’ replaced the boundary line keeping the ‘abnormal’ out.

The more our voices are heard in song, the more we become our lyrics, our prayers, and our convictions.

[I]t expresses the hope, the expectation even, that we will all come together to rejoice in our heritage...

I recited these blessings as though they had been written a couple of millennia ago by the rabbis, rather than the day before, by me.

Annette returned home that night with her mind ablaze and her heart pounding with excitement. A new Jewish door was opening for her.

As it turned out, in the spring of 1985, I was to be the first woman so ordained.

[T]he needs of Jewish women and girls in both the U.S. and Israel are still not high priorities for our community.

I believe that it took a group of women—including rabbis—to break through the Jewish cultural barrier that saw medical treatment as the only response to illness.

Jewish feminism provided the bridge from one shore to the other.

We knew that Jewish feminism needed to be suffused through all of Jewish practice so that it would be impossible to ignore.

I floated between moments of exaltation at what we were creating and moments of exasperation and tears at the difficulty of it all.

[T]he idea of re–writing the Haggadah seemed startling and even blasphemous. Now, 30 years later, this re–writing has itself become part of an emerging Passover tradition.

In the early years of women entering the rabbinate, many women felt were welcomed to rabbinical school on the expectation that we would act like men.

What captivated me was developing what amounted to a “unified field theory” by applying feminist methodology to explain all of Jewish history, culture, and psychology.

This is a narrative of a community that is not in isolation but reflects the polis of the time.