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Innovation and Authority

syncretistic. He does not really mean to suggest that women’s Torah readings or hakafot borrow from the practices of New-Age goddess- worshippers or Christians. Instead, this category codes Schachter ’s concern that Orthodox feminists have much less rigid boundaries with their non-Orthodox counterparts than he and his constituency approve. As Erikson emphasizes, a group stigmatizes as deviant those within or upon its boundaries from whom it is anxious to distinguish itself. Conservative Jews , espe­cially the learned Conservative elite, are more like Orthodox Jews than any other group. Hence Orthodox authorities vigi­lantly reinforce the boundary with Conservatism . But the Ortho­ dox feminists who fashioned the prayer groups participate in many undertakings with non-Orthodox feminists: conferences, periodicals, research centers, and study groups, where they rub elbows with their smart-mouthed peers from“Shechter’s semi­nary.” These permeable boundaries expose Orthodox feminists to the ideas and influences that have caused massive changes in Conservative Judaism and in the broader society. Through the medium of the prayer groups, these ideas and influences perco­late through Orthodoxy.

Here, Schachter recycles the common arguments of nine­teenth century Orthodoxy’s battle to preserve its distinctness from Reform and to control the processes of acculturation. He goes on to attack feminism itself for“licentiousness,” by which he means the eradication of many gender distinctions, causing fewer differences between women and men. Some of the accusa­tions are bizarre and salacious: for example that“women’s lib” leads women to shave their pubic hair. The underlying concern, however is not about sexual license but about the effect of gender equality in secular society on the system of gender complemen­tarity that constructs and justifies different roles and statuses for men and women in Orthodoxy.*® Gender distinctions and gender discrimination were among the few plausibility structures left in Modernity that continued to mirror, however partially or irregu­larly, the naturalness of Orthodoxy’s gender distinctions.® Apol­Ogists argue that because complementarity ensures Orthodox Women distinctive roles and necessary social functions, femi­nism ig unnecessary for them. The treason of the prayer groups is to uphold Orthodoxy while belying this claim. The very exis­