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Winner, 2024 Jewish Music Special Interest Group Prize
Shortlist, 2025 Religion and the Arts Book Award, given by the American Academy of Religion
A compelling look at the lives of ultra-Orthodox and formerly ultra-Orthodox Jewish women and their use of media technologies to create a new market for music and film
Mainstream portrayals of ultra-Orthodox religious women often frame their faith as oppressive: they are empowered only when they leave their community. This book flips this notion on its head. Drawing on six years of fieldwork between New York and Montreal, Jessica Roda examines modern performances on the stage and screen directed by and for ultra-Orthodox women. Their incredibly vibrant Jewish artistic scenes defy stereotypes that paint these women as repressed, reclusive to their shtetl (village), and devoid of creativity and agency.
For Women and Girls Only argues that access to technology has completely transformed how ultra-Orthodox women express their way of being religious and that the digital era has enabled them to create an alternative entertainment market outside of the public, male-dominated one. Because expectations surrounding modesty, ultra-Orthodox women do not sing, dance, or act in front of men and the public. Yet, in a revolutionary move, they are creating “women and girls only” spaces onsite and online, putting the onus on men to shield themselves from the content. They develop modest public spaces on the Internet, about which male religious leaders are often unaware. The book also explores the entanglement between these observant female artists and those who left religion and became public performers. The author shows that the arts expressed by all these women offer a means of not only social but also economic empowerment in their respective worlds.
For Women and Girls Only is a groundbreaking reversal of mainstream portrayals of ultra-Orthodox religious women, and of those who have left the community yet maintain ties to it. It is the first work to focus on the ultra-Orthodox female art scene in music, film, and dance across North America and on social media.
— Ayala Fader, author of Hidden Heretics and Mitzvah Girls
"Roda sympathetically and searchingly engages with Jewish Orthodox women performers who create audiences inside and outside their enclosed communities. The book surveys the ways that these artists and their publics test and stretch the boundaries of sanctioned activity as they shape creative lives."
— Mark Slobin, author of Fiddler on the Move: Exploring the Klezmer World
"This is good, smart, rich, provocative, and readable ethnography. Written from an avowedly feminist perspective, it nevertheless challenges stereotypes about the absence of women's creativity and critical voices within the so-called 'ultra-Orthodox' Jewish communities. It sings at the pulsing intersection of gender, religion, and media studies."
— Jonathan Boyarin, Diann G. and Thomas A. Mann Professor of Modern Jewish Studies, Cornell University
"Roda’s exemplary ethnography brings the little-known musical world of Orthodox Jewish women to a broader public largely unaware of both its existence and its dynamism. This book constitutes a major contribution to the anthropology of music and beyond."
— Kay Kaufman Shelemay, G. Gordon Watts Professor of Music and Professor of African and African American Studies, Harvard University
"Brings our attention to a completely different way of understanding the agency of women within ultra-Orthodox communities ... One of the astounding revelations of Roda’s book is that it is now possible for a frum female 'celebrity' to exist within a world that so severely delimits how and when Jewish women can be seen at all. Moreover, for many of the women, making music 'for women and girls' has engendered a quiet rebellion against rabbinic authority."
— Rokhl Kafrissen
"For Orthodox women who wanted to pursue the entertainment field, the Internet and the COVID-19 pandemic created a combination of factors that significantly expanded their opportunities for artistic expression. That notion is brilliantly detailed in For Women and Girls Only... a fascinating and engaging work."
"Feminist that she is, Roda disagrees with much of Western liberal feminism. She is very knowledgeable of ultra-Orthodox Jewish culture, and apparently feels very close to a number of the ultra-Orthodox Jewish women she studied for this book."
"A rich and captivating ethnography elucidating a field of research that is both under-researched and not easy to access. Making use of a broad array of tools that an anthropologist of religion has at her disposal, Roda brings out a many-sided and multi-coloured picture of a world that many are accustomed to viewing as rather uniform and monochrome: Jewish female ultra-Orthodoxy."
"For Women and Girls Only is a groundbreaking reversal of mainstream portrayals of ultra-Orthodox religious women, and of those who have left the community yet maintain ties to it. It is the first work to focus on the ultra-Orthodox female art scene in music, film, and dance across North America and on social media."