Ann VanderMeer is the Hugo Award-winning editor of Weird Tales and the founder of Buzzcity Press. She currently serves as an acquiring fiction editor for Tor.com, Cheeky Frawg Books, and Weirdfictionreview.com. She has also won a World Fantasy Award and a British Fantasy Award for coediting The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories. She is the coeditor of numerous titles, including The Kosher Guide to Imaginary Animals, Steampunk, Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded, and The Steampunk Bible. Jeff VanderMeer is a columnist, a publisher, and the author of several books, including Booklife

Like much twentieth-century feminist writing today, this book crosses the boundaries of genre. Biblical interpretation combines with fantasy, autobiography, and poetry. Politics joins with eroticism. Irreverence coexists with a yearning for the sacred. Scholarship contends with heresy. Most excitingly, the author continues and extends the tradition of arguing with God that commences in the Bible itself and continues now, as it has for centuries, to animate Jewish writing. The difference here is that the voice that debates with God is a woman's.

In The Fantasy of Feminist History , Joan Wallach Scott argues that feminist perspectives on history are enriched by psychoanalytic concepts, particularly fantasy. Tracing the evolution of her thinking about gender over the course of her career, the pioneering historian explains how her search for ways to more forcefully insist on gender as mutable rather than fixed or stable led her to psychoanalytic theory, which posits sexual difference as an insoluble dilemma. Scott suggests that it is the futile struggle to hold meaning in place that makes gender such an interesting historical object, an object that includes not only regimes of truth about sex and sexuality but also fantasies and transgressions that refuse to be regulated or categorized. Fantasy undermines any notion of psychic immutability or fixed identity, infuses rational motives with desire, and contributes to the actions and events that come to be narrated as history. Questioning the standard parameters of historiography and feminist politics, Scott advocates fantasy as a useful, even necessary, concept for feminist historical analysis.

Discusses a variety of feminist issues. Ch. 15 (pp. 375-410), "Holocaust Consciousness, " discusses attitudes of American Jews to the Holocaust. Many of them obsess and agonize about it, but do not try to analyze how and why it happened. After the war, American Jews harbored a rescue fantasy, refusing to face the fact that their government, and especially President Roosevelt, had obstructed efforts to save European Jews. From the 1960s, they have blamed their own leaders for inaction. Deplores the fact that the Holocaust is often the focus of Jewish identity in the U.S. Advocates analyzing the causes of the Holocaust and the changing conditions (e.g. economic upheaval, social desperation) that could have allowed a criminal party to attain power. Discusses the rise in antisemitic incidents in the U.S. in the 1990s. Claims that the cause of antisemitism lies in the patriarchal nature of society: pogroms and the Holocaust are examples of male violence against powerless humans, the Jews, who are seen as a personification of female values (nonviolence, compassion, altruism, cooperation) and a threat to patriarchal structures. Pp. 249-253 deal with the JAP stereotype.