Research

Books & Book Projects

Scholarly work on the halakhic system as a living legal tradition: on the dormant resources within rabbinic law that might yet free chained women, on the ethics of Jewish sovereignty, and on the rabbinic constructions of gender that underpin all of this.

Current Book Project

Silent Revolutions: Halakhic Shifts and the Empowerment of Jewish Women

A history, and an argument, for the role of modest, “silent” halakhic reforms in the expansion of Jewish women’s agency. Inspired in part by Saba Mahmood’s Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject, the project is purposefully focused on the quiet, incremental, and often unintentional legal adjustments — within inheritance law, vows, business practice, and marital institutions — whose cumulative effect has been the strengthening of women’s agency within the family and community.

Open manuscript siddur showing the repeated morning blessings. — *Siddur with morning blessings, including “who has made me a woman and not a man”* (שעשני אשה ולא איש) — the feminist variant, copied by Abraham Farissol for an anonymous female patron. Italy, 1471.Jewish Theological Seminary Library, New York.

The project bifurcates into two lines of inquiry. The first is historical: a reconstruction of specific halakhic reforms that resulted, however modestly or unintentionally, in female empowerment. The second is constructive: building on those historical precedents, an investigation of how Jewish law has previously adapted to societal changes by implementing legal mechanisms that, while seemingly contravening explicit biblical prohibitions, addressed the community’s evolving needs — the paradigm case being the heter iska, a rabbinic construct that permits interest-bearing loans among Jews while leaving the Torah’s prohibition against usury formally intact. The project asks what analogous mechanisms might be marshalled for contemporary reforms, particularly concerning the status of women within marriage and the predicament of agunot.

Seventeenth-century etching of an Amsterdam Jewish wedding: a circular tasseled chuppah patterned with stars hangs above the assembled guests; at the center, the bride veiled in a long mantle stands beside the groom, both flanked by parents and witnesses; musicians play a lute and viol at left, a smoke-bearer with two children stands at right by a doorway, and the legend “Joodsche Bruiloft” (Jewish Wedding) is engraved at bottom. — Jan Luyken (1649–1712), engraving from a Dutch translation of Leone Modena’s *Historia de’ riti Ebraici* (History of the Jewish Rites). A Jewish wedding in Amsterdam: groom and bride stand under the *ḥuppah*.

The work is in dialogue with Laura Shaw Frank, Ayelet Hoffmann Libson, Elana Stein Hain, and David Novak, each of whom has addressed adjacent themes. It aims to contribute both a historical account and a forward-looking perspective on how Jewish law can evolve to meet contemporary ethical standards and social realities without sacrificing the rigor and coherence of the halakhic framework.

Two stacked eighteenth-century engravings on one plate: the upper, ‘CEREMONIE NUPTIALE des JUIFS PORTUGAIS,’ depicts a Sephardic wedding indoors beneath a swagged canopy with attending women, musicians and ring-bearer; the lower, ‘CEREMONIE NUPTIALE des JUIFS ALLEMANDS,’ shows an Ashkenazi wedding in a courtyard with the bride veiled in a long head-cloth, the groom breaking the glass, and a violin-and-drum band at right; both panels labeled in alphabetic legend keys. — Bernard Picart, *Cérémonie Nuptiale des Juifs Portugais* (Sephardi wedding, top) / *Cérémonie Nuptiale des Juifs Allemands* (Ashkenazi wedding, bottom). Engraving in *Cérémonies et coutumes religieuses de tous les peuples du monde*, vol. 1, pl. 12 (Amsterdam: J. F. Bernard, 1723).

Detailed nineteenth-century watercolor of a Hungarian Jewish wedding: nine figures pose against a stone wall, the bride in a high-waisted blue and white gown with a long lace veil receiving a gold ring from the groom in a black tailcoat and tricorne; a robed rabbi reads from a book at left; the parents and bridesmaids stand to either side in striped silk and brocade Hungarian regional dress; a small page-boy in a brown velvet suit kneels in the foreground holding two silver kiddush cups on a tray, and a fringed crimson velvet ḥuppah is held aloft by two relatives. — Hungarian Jewish wedding, nineteenth century.

Doctoral Dissertation

Title page of the dissertation ‘Rabbinic Conceptualization of the Male Body as Reflected in the Halakhic System of Male Genital Emissions’ by Ágnes Vető — display title set in dark serif caps with maroon ‘Male Body’, an open Talmud volume below showing facing pages of densely set Hebrew with a marbled fore-edge, and the imprint ‘Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies, New York University, September 2015’.

Open PDF

Ph.D. Dissertation · NYU, 2015

Rabbinic Conceptualization of the Male Body as Reflected in the Halakhic System of Male Genital Emissions

Ágnes Vető

Advisor: Jeffrey L. Rubenstein · Readers: Adam Becker, Alex Jassen, Lawrence Schiffman, Michah Gottlieb, Elliot Wolfson

The foundation of the Fluid Masculinity book. Seeks to understand how rabbinic impurity legislation of shikhvat zera and zivah contributes to the construction of gender, and concludes that although rabbinic impurity law uses the same taxonomies as biblical law, it redefines the emissions in ways that bring impurity, sexuality, and moral defilement increasingly into alignment — a development that makes visible the rabbinic construction of the male body as a gendered entity.

Read the full dissertation PDF · Skirball Department of Hebrew & Judaic Studies, New York University · September 2015

Emerging Research Directions

New book-length work is taking shape around the halakhot of war and peace and the live tensions between synagogue and state in the modern Jewish polity.

The Halakhot of War and Peace

Research in progress

Illuminated opening page of Sefer Shoftim from a fifteenth-century Italian Mishneh Torah: at the top, two armored knights on barded horses charge with lances couched in a hilly landscape; below, a great gold initial-word שופטים on a deep blue ground patterned with white scrolling vines fills nearly the full width of the page; beneath it three young men in red and blue stand in a flowering meadow before five red-robed judges seated on a wooden bench. — Opening of *Sefer Shoftim* (the Book of Judges) — Maimonides, *Mishneh Torah*, with the laws of kings and wars. Northern Italy, last quarter of the fifteenth century.Vatican Apostolic Library, MS Vat. ebr. 14.

A reading of the rabbinic sources on war, conquest, and the ethics of Jewish sovereignty — the laws of the optional (milḥemet reshut) and obligatory (milḥemet mitzvah) war, the treatment of combatants and non-combatants, the halakhic status of sovereignty itself — in dialogue with modern debates over the ethics of the State of Israel.

Synagogue and State

Research in progress

On the live tensions between the authority of halakhah and the authority of the sovereign state in modern Israel — religious-secular conflicts over marriage and divorce, the rabbinic courts, conversion, Shabbat in the public square, and the gendered consequences of each. An attempt to think with the halakhic tradition about a problem the halakhic tradition did not originally anticipate.

Photograph of the iron-and-stained-glass arched main door of the Kazinczy Street Synagogue in Budapest: a tall semicircular fanlight glazed in a sunburst pattern of cobalt, ochre, white and green tiles set in a slate-grey leaded armature, framed by a smooth limestone arch against red brick; the doors below are heavy panelled metal with geometric maze-like reliefs and a small Star of David at the lintel. — Door of the Orthodox Kazinczy Street Synagogue, an Art Deco masterpiece, designed by Sándor and Béla Löffler and completed in 1913.Budapest, Hungary.

Color photograph of the same Kazinczy Street Synagogue exterior taken from across the cobblestone street: a dozen men in tallitot — most wrapped over the head — stand and pray on the stone steps and sidewalk in front of the closed doors, two leaning into the wall, others holding siddurim, one young man in a white shirt looking back over his shoulder toward the camera. — Taken over in 2023 by Chabad, a heterodox sect. Members of the Orthodox community, locked out of the building, pray on the steps. Read

From the Dissertation · Under Contract, SUNY Press

Under contract · SUNY Press

Fluid Masculinity: A New Approach to Rabbinic Constructions of Gender

Two-tier illuminated miniature from a fifteenth-century Ashkenazi liturgical miscellany: above, a crowned man with a forked beard reclines in a high canopied bed under a pink coverlet, holding a candle, with a small dark-robed servant at the bedside; below, a long-haired woman with bare breasts is shown half-immersed in a wavy blue-and-cream mikveh, her hands together in prayer; the whole framed in pale rose-and-cream borders. — A man lies in bed holding a candle as he waits for his wife, who immerses in the *mikveh* below. *Liturgical Miscellany* (the Hamburg Miscellany), Germany, possibly Mainz, c. 1427.Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Hamburg, MS Cod. Heb. 37, fol. 79r (detail).

Developed from her doctoral dissertation, Fluid Masculinity reads the laws of ritual impurity — specifically the two male genital emissions of Leviticus 15, shikhvat zera and zivah — as a site where the rabbis constructed masculinities and, ultimately, gender itself. Building on Daniel Boyarin’s Carnal Israel but moving beyond its aggadic focus into the halakhic substance, the book argues that rabbinic law restructured the biblical impurity hierarchy to transform semen into a dangerous substance of far-reaching defiling power, and that this restructuring subjectivates not only men outside the rabbinic class but the rabbis themselves.

The result is a more nuanced account of the rabbinic construction of masculinity: one in which male and female bodies emerge as closer in their subjection to rabbinic legislative power than previous scholarship has recognized, and in which the construction of gender itself is revealed as more fluid than the binary framing of earlier scholarship has allowed.

Chapter synopsis

One · Scholarship and Theory

Sets the groundwork for understanding impurity in Judaism from biblical through Mishnaic legislation, and surveys the previous and current scholarship on the topic — extending in both theoretical and textual-philological directions.

Two · Restructuring the Hierarchy

Argues that rabbinic law restructured the impurity hierarchy between the male fluids, transforming semen into a dangerous substance of far-reaching defiling power that goes exponentially beyond its biblical treatment.

Three · Metaphors of Semen

Reads the metaphors that thematize semen in rabbinic literature — metaphors that skirt the interstices between the literary and the legislative, managing simultaneously to be poetic and legalistic.

Four · Subjectivation

Argues that these laws and metaphors reveal a specific rabbinic intent to subjectivate men outside the rabbinic class — but are constructed in such a way as to extend even to the rabbis’ self-regulation, requiring us to distinguish a hierarchical construction of masculinities that emerges from both (self-)regulation and (imposed) regulation.

Five · Comparison with Female Subjects

Compares the level and mode of subjectivation of the rarely-studied male subjects of impurity law with that of the more commonly-studied female subjects.