About Gila Fine
Gila Fine is a lecturer of rabbinic literature at the Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies, exploring the tales of the Talmud through philosophy, literary criticism, psychoanalysis, and pop-culture. She is the recipient of the Maimonides Award for Excellence in Jewish Education, and serves on the faculties of the Nachshon Project, Amudim Seminary, the Tikvah Scholars Program, and the London School of Jewish Studies, in addition to teaching thousands of students at conferences, campuses, and communities across the Jewish world. Haaretz has called her “a young woman on her way to becoming one of the more outstanding Jewish thinkers of the next generation.”

As editor in chief of Maggid Books, Gila worked closely with such leading scholars as Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz and Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, publishing over a hundred titles of contemporary Jewish thought, including several bestsellers and eight National Jewish Book Award winners. She is also the former editor of Azure: Ideas for the Jewish Nation. Gila’s work has been featured in the BBC, Haaretz, The Jerusalem Post, The Jerusalem Report, Tradition, Jewish News, and The Jewish Chronicle (which selected her as one of the ten most influential Brits in Israel). Her new book is The Madwoman in the Rabbi’s Attic: Rereading the Women of the Talmud.  

About the book
As the founding text of Rabbinic Judaism, the Talmud is a work written by rabbis for rabbis. On the rare occasion when we encounter a woman in its pages, she is often marginal and almost always anonymous, the wife, mother, or daughter of an eminent sage. The Madwoman in the Rabbi’s Attic explores the stories of the exceptions, the six named heroines of the Talmud: Yalta the shrew, Homa the femme fatale, Marta the prima donna, Heruta the madonna/whore, Beruria the overreacherix, and Ima Shalom the angel in the house. 

As their epithets suggest, every one of these women appears to embody an anti-feminist archetype, a derisive caricature of a bad woman. Yet in each case, a careful, sensitive rereading reveals that there is a lot more to the story than initially meets the eye; that the heroine is far more complex than she first seems; and that the rabbis had rather surprising – so as not to say proto-feminist – views of marriage, sex, childbirth, and what it means to be a woman in the world. In presenting us with archetypes that systematically break down, the Talmud imparts profound moral teachings about how to read the characters of a text and, ultimately, how to regard the people in our lives.