Table of Contents

CONTENTS 1 2 3 4 5 6

About the Author

Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Stanford University.

Reviews

"This book is of central importance in the field of Rabbinic studies and the history of Judaism in late antiquity. The originality of Fonrobert's work lies in the skill and nuance with which she brings a series of reading strategies and hermeneutical perspectives to Rabbinic texts." - Martin S. Jaffe, University of Washington "Fonrobert's analysis throughout is sophisticated and nuanced, avoiding false dichotomies between rabbis as good for or bad for women, looking instead for ways to talk about traditional texts about women and their bodies in new and productive ways that do not define women solely in terms of male-centered discourse... Challenging and illuminating ... Fonrobert's work is an important contribution to the study of an area of Jewish ritual and gender that is at once sensitive to the complexities of the traditional sources and to the contemporary significance of her inquiries." - The Forward "Among the many complex, technical and obscure topics in the study of the Bible and early Judaism and Christianity, purity remains as perhaps the most recalcitrant... [Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert's Mentrual Purity, and Jonathan Klawans's Impurity and Sin in Ancient Judaism] are thus particularly welcome - both are revised dissertations as well as co-winners of the 2001/2 Salo W. Barton Book Prize of the American Academy for Jewish Research. Both books do an exemplary job of revitalizing the study of purity in antiquity and demonstrating how the combination of careful scholarship with modern methodological approaches can create new insights into an exceedingly difficult topic." - Journal of Jewish Studies