Stanford Humanities Center
Chana Lanter is a senior from Los Angeles studying Philosophy and Religious Studies with minors in Linguistics and Translation Studies. She is pursuing an Honors Thesis through the interdisciplinary program in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Chana has a broad range of interests, from scientific realism to feminist social epistemology to the Late Antique Middle East. Chana is a SLE Resident Tutor for Structured Liberal Education and loves connecting frosh to opportunities in the humanities. In her spare time, she enjoys baking, embroidery, and checking her emails.
SHC Project
The Yoetzet and Her Halakha: Discursive Practices of Female Experts in Jewish Law
Advisor: Ari Y Kelman, Graduate School of Education
What is the focus of your current research?
The focus of my research is yoatzot halakha (female Orthodox Jewish experts in menstrual purity law). In a broad description of their role, a yoetzet halakha communicates community women’s legal questions to rabbis, where the yoetzet and the rabbi work toward an answer, and then the yoetzet brings said answer back to the woman in a way that she can understand. I am studying how yoatzot manage the different discursive environments of the rabbinic sphere and the public sphere.
What drew you to this topic?
I am very interested in different tensions in contemporary Orthodoxy, especially change versus tradition. I am exploring said tension and how it interacts with gender in my honors thesis.
How are you conducting your research?
I am conducting interviews with yoatzot halakha about their work and trying my best to incorporate some digital humanities elements into my project.
What would people be surprised to learn about the topic you are working on?
Communal change does not always happen through a conscious and covert “trying to break free.” Many Jewish feminist theorists see an emerging egalitarian picture with the yoetzet halakha, with the hope that this is the next step to ordaining female rabbis in the Orthodox community. But the yoatzot themselves express a high fidelity to legal and communal tradition. They are explicit in not wanting to be rabbis, and are satisfied with the opportunities of their role. This is not due to a failure of imagination on their part; it likely has much more to do with the values of the Orthodox community (humility, anonymity, cooperation), which can at times be at odds with feminist values like public recognition and personal agency. My aim in this project is to propose an analysis of the yoetzet halakha that understands her work in its context.
How is your honors thesis impacting you academically and/or personally?
It has been very special to speak to so many female Torah scholars and hear from them directly about the work they do and how they impact their community. I have learned about humility, being that the academic work I read before conducting interviews was sometimes misguided in its portrayal of the yoetzet. Hearing from yoatzot in their own voices and scrapping my original thesis showed me how important it is to bring in the experiences of a project’s subjects as often as possible.
How do you anticipate the fellowship will be able to support your research?
I’ve benefitted a lot already from the camaraderie among the other fellows as we pursue our projects. And the SHC’s tea collection is unrivaled, in my opinion.
