Karen E. H. Skinazi’s Women of Valor: Orthodox Jewish Troll Fighters, Crime Writers, and Rock Stars in Contemporary Culture threads a very fine needle: the project is at once recuperative and critical of Orthodox Jewish womanhood. This monograph’s focus on the literature of Orthodox women unsettles contemporary culture’s common view of Orthodox women as mere symbols of their culture’s backwardness and oppression. Skinazi introduces and interprets numerous works created by and about Orthodox Jewish women in North America and the United Kingdom in a variety of popular genres, including memoir, the mystery novel, the graphic novel, rock music, and film. These all fit within a “feminocentric cultural canon,” which attests to a “creative tension that ensues in the nexus of Orthodox women’s artistic yearnings and a culture of gender segregation” (28). Skinazi begins with the assumption that Orthodox women are modern, postsecular agents, who are capable in their artistic production of championing as well as critiquing women’s status within Orthodoxy. This leads to what is perhaps the book’s most compelling theoretical contribution: borrowing the term allochronistic (or anachronistic) from postcolonial theory, Skinazi critiques and rejects the common representation of Orthodox Jewry as out of time, or from another historical era, and therefore “alien to the contemporary world” (5). Moreover, as Skinazi delineates, Orthodox women have an uneasy relationship to the dominant historical narrative of American Jews that supports a “secularization thesis” and a Jewish American literary canon whose key texts often frame Jewish religious tradition as a site of rejection. Skinazi therefore explains that the contemporary women who “stayed Orthodox” pose a challenge to the Jewish American literary tradition of Abraham Cahan’s Yekl (1896) or Anzia Yezierska’s Bread Givers (1925). However, as Skinazi explores in the book’s first chapter, the growing body of contemporary narratives of leaving Orthodoxy

中文翻译：

---

英勇的妇女：当代文学和文化中的正统犹太巨魔战士，犯罪作家和摇滚明星。凯伦（Karen EH）Skinazi

Karen EH Skinazi的《英勇的女人：当代文化中的东正教犹太巨魔战士，犯罪作家和摇滚明星》的主题非常细腻：该项目立刻对正统犹太人的女性形象起到了调养和批判的作用。这本专论着重于东正教女性文学，这颠覆了当代文化对东正教女性的普遍看法，这些观点仅是其文化落后和压迫的象征。斯卡纳齐（Skinazi）介绍并解释了北美和英国的东正教犹太妇女及其创作的众多作品，其中包括回忆录，神秘小说，图画小说，摇滚音乐和电影等各种流行题材。所有这些都符合“以女性为中心的文化准则”，这证明“在东正教女性的艺术渴望与性别隔离文化之间产生了创造性张力”（28）。Skinazi首先假设东正教妇女是现代的世俗后代，他们在艺术创作上有能力捍卫和批评妇女在东正教中的地位。这可能导致这本书最有说服力的理论贡献：从后殖民理论，Skinazi批评中借用同时（或不合时宜）一词，并拒绝了东正教犹太人过时或另一个历史时代的普遍表述，因此“异类”走向当代”（5）。此外，正如Skinazi所描绘的那样，东正教妇女与支持“世俗化论点”的美国犹太人占主导地位的历史叙事和犹太人的美国文学经典之举有着不安的关系，后者的主要著作经常将犹太宗教传统定性为拒绝的场所。因此，Skinazi解释说，“留着东正教”的当代女性对美国犹太人的亚伯拉罕·卡汉（Ybra）（1896）或安齐亚·耶兹卡（Anzia Yezierska）的送面包者（1925）的文学传统构成了挑战。然而，正如Skinazi在本书的第一章中所探索的那样，离开正统派的当代叙事越来越多