Unveiling Mysteries, Upholding Tradition: Women Rabbis-Sleuths in Contemporary American Detective Fiction

• In Event: Reading Against the Grain: New Approaches to Jewish Literary Studies

Abstract

Rabbi-sleuths first appear in the mid-1960s, most notably in Harry Kemelman’s Rabbi David Small series, the first of which, Friday the Rabbi Slept Late, was published in 1964. Women rabbi-sleuths initially debut in 1998 with Roger Herst’s Rabbi Gabrielle (Gabby) Lewyn. The emergence of fictional women rabbi-sleuths is integrally linked to historical changes in American Jewish life in general and the place of women therein in particular. A product of both second wave feminism and American counterculture, Jewish feminism considerably affected the roles of women in the family, religious institutions, and communal leadership positions. Just as feminism changed American Jewish life, so too did it change American Jewish literature which mirrored it. The emergence in the late 1990s, of women rabbis-sleuths resulted from two phenomena: first, the emergence of the feminist detective in the late 1980s, which prefigured a whole slew of such characters; and second, the opening of the possibility for women rabbis after the ordination of the first woman Reform rabbi in the United States in 1972.
This paper will focus on four women rabbi-sleuths: Roger Herst’s Rabbi Gabrielle (Gabby) Lewyn; Ilene Schneider’s Rabbi Aviva Cohen; Philip Graubart’s Rabbi Yael Gold; and Rachel Sharona Lewis’s Rabbi Vivian Green—all of them congregational rabbis, who solve mysteries. I will show how the fact that these women rabbi-sleuths are depicted as “outsiders-within” help them solve mysteries; I will analyze with which contemporary issues these novels are dealing.

Author

• Anat Koplowitz-Breier, Bar Ilan University, Israel