Making Women Rabbis

Amy Stone’s article “20 Years of Conservative Women Rabbis” [Summer 2005] offered a vivid critique of the new video produced by the Jewish Theological Seminary. But one crucial point wasn’t clear enough.

Amy is too modest to note that her own groundbreaking 1977 article in Lilith, “Gentlemen’s Agreement in the Seminary,” was quite significant in pushing JTS to finally do the right thing.

In a just world, the Jewish Theological Seminary would honor all those who fought for the ordination of women as Conservative rabbis—including Amy Stone, Susan Weidman Schneider, Aviva Cantor and other early editors of Lilith, as well as Francine Klagsbrun, Judith Hauptman, and many other activists whose names aren’t widely known. In a just world, the Seminary’s new video would do the same.