Holy Laundry by Netty C. Gross (July 23, 2007)

(Copyright (c) 2007. The Jerusalem Report)

Does the exploding genre of religious women's inspirational 'chick-lit' reflect the flowering of a new...Orthodox feminist consciousness?

Married and the mother of five young children, Chana (Jenny) Weisberg, age 35, would not call herself a feminist - at least not in the classical sense. A graduate of Quaker schools and liberal Bowdoin College in Maine, Weisberg moved here in 1991, became Orthodox over a decade ago and lives in Jerusalem's picturesque Nahla'ot neighborhood, where she's a proud stay-at-home mom who speaks happily of performing household chores such as cooking, cleaning and doing the laundry.

Yet there's an empowering twist to her honeyed view of domesticity. Raising a family and seeing to their needs are not mere virtues, argues Weisberg, but rather "holy" experiences, steeped in tradition and bathed in Jewish female spirituality.

That faith-based message is gaining a more receptive audience among contemporary women, especially those whose lifestyles are shaped by traditional values but need a second income, as they grow weary of struggling with the multi-pronged demands of home, children, aging parents and high-powered careers, and don't find popular cultural outlets such as shopping, particularly rewarding or therapeutic.

Indeed, when Weisberg became pregnant with her first child, she was surprised that she was unable to find a book on "Jewish pregnancy" or even advice on how an Orthodox expectant mother might enhance the fetus's existence, "beyond taking blood tests and folic acid." On her own, Weisberg discovered that pious women are, for example, careful to provide "spiritual nutrition" for the baby they are carrying, putting extra effort into prayer and charitable acts during pregnancy, "in the hope of nurturing their baby's soul."

Based on what she discovered, Weisberg decided to "write the book I was looking for even though I had never written anything before in my life," and set out across Jerusalem interviewing Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox women about their pregnancies. "I was surprised at the openness. Women really wanted to talk."

In 2004, Urim Publications, a 10-year-old Jerusalem-based Jewish content publisher brought out "Expecting Miracles, Finding Meaning and Spirituality in Pregnancy Through Judaism," which tells of the spiritual feelings and thoughts on pregnancy of 15 Orthodox women in Jerusalem - including an ultra-Orthodox mother of 15, who for reasons of modesty never discussed her pregnancies with her children or even told them when she was expecting, and kept her teenage daughters ignorant about human sexuality until their own arranged marriages. The English-language book has since become a top-seller in the ever-expanding genre of religious Jewish women's literature, which now accounts for a quarter of all Urim's titles. In July, Urim will publish Weisberg's new book, "One Baby Step At a Time: Seven Secrets of Jewish Motherhood," which has a similar narrative-driven format. In the meantime Weisberg's website, www.jewishpregnancy.org gets 100,000 hits a month.

Bubbling quietly beneath the surface for some twenty years, English-language ultra-Orthodox women's writing has now become a veritable cottage industry. Following Weisberg's footsteps, more religious Jewish women are writing and publishing everything from spiritual and self-help guides to Jewish life-cycle events, including head-covering, burial practices and ritual bath immersion; Holocaust and personal memoirs; and adventure novels. Religious Jewish editors of religious books, newspapers, magazines and Internet sites tell The Report that women with an ultra-Orthodox sensibility increasingly want to read - and write - books that are in step with their life experiences, offer solutions that fall within the parameters of Jewish law; and are easy to read. Dozens of such titles are in print, and many are now for sale at trade book stores, as well as Judaica stores...

Chana Weisberg grew up in a conservative home in Baltimore, Maryland, a middle child of physician parents. Her search for spirituality, nevertheless, took her to Indonesia, where she was impressed with the religiosity of Muslim women, and eventually to Jerusalem where she studied in Neve Yerushalayim (a well-known ba'alat teshuva yeshiva) and the Pardes Institute, where she met her husband. The pair embraced Orthodoxy slowly. Today, she dons a head covering and is immersed in a "Torah life," she says, as we sit in her living room filled with religious books and child paraphernalia.

The success of her book and website appear to have fulfilled her dual spiritual and unspoken feminist needs, even providing her, she chuckles, "with something to report back to the Bowdoin College alumni newsletter." Weisberg admires Israeli ultra-Orthodox women she's interviewed for her books, "who don't have to read anything," to gain spirituality or confidence in their life path. When I tell her that my ultra-Orthodox hospital roommate, who had just given birth to her 12th child (when I had my fourth - we were the same age: 35), chirpily described herself (to exhausted me) "as the CEO of her own company," Weisberg smiled and shook her head. "Now that's empowerment."