SPRING THEATER & ARTS PREVIEW

AUTHOR PHOTO BY

LINC COHEN

THE WANDERING WOMB: ESSAYS IN SEARCH OF HOME by S. L. Wisenberg University of Massachusetts Press, paperback, 248 pp., $22 95, umasspress.com at history; Wisenberg also explores what it means to be a progressive, feminist, nonOrthodox Jewish woman today. In one essay, she recounts her visit to the mikvah, a ceremonial bath that Orthodox Jewish women take for purification after their periods and before their weddings. Wisenberg muses on the tension that she feels between “the historic misogyny of Jewish law” and her desire to participate in traditional rituals. Although she has reinterpreted certain customs for herself—such as asking her rabbi to create a wedding ceremony without God or Hebrew—she wonders, “How far can you go in changing a symbol or practice to make it relevant, before it’s no longer Jewish?”