Healing as Resistance: Reflections upon New Forms of American Jewish Healing

Throughout the 20th century, Jews had been in the vanguard of Americans utilizing conventional biomedicine and biomedically trained physicians. This chapter seeks to contextualize the still evolving Jewish healing movement both in terms of American medicine and in terms of Judaism. This exercise is particularly important because the Jewish healing movement, for the most part, does not challenge the hegemony of either mainstream medical or Jewish institutions. Practitioners insist that they are about healing rather than curing, and that they are not about miracles or superstition. In contrast to the poor interpersonal relationships said to be plaguing the male rabbinical establishment, the women involved in the Jewish healing movement stress the importance of human interactions.