Observant Feminism Across Borders: The Transnational Origins of Partnership Minyanim

This article provides a comprehensive account of the emergence of partnership minyanim at the beginning of the twenty-first century as a new social and liturgical phenomenon in contemporary Judaism. Partnership minyanim are lay-led congregations that came out of Orthodox networks; they separate the sexes similarly to an Orthodox congregation, but also adopt feminist practices that challenge Orthodox norms. In this article I explain how a milieu of observant, mostly Orthodox Jews, influenced by Jewish feminist developments, provided fertile ground for liturgical innovations. This milieu occurred in both Jerusalem and New York, and transnational communication and migration between the two national contexts was crucial to the invention of the new model. Specifically, Jewish feminism that came from the United States shaped the desire to include women in synagogue activity and prompted halachic conversations that taught founders what kinds of participation were acceptable, while the religious ecology of Israel provided the right kind of pressure for developing a new combination of ritual gender roles. The dense interaction between the two national contexts was necessary for the emergence of partnership minyanim, showing that transnational networks result in religious creativity that is more than the sum of their parts.