[1] After earning her doctorate at Yale University, she taught at Manhattan College for thirty-two years before becoming a professor emerita.
[2] Growing up, Plaskow was a part of a classical Reform congregation and completed twelve years of Hebrew school.
"[2] Her rabbi was opposed to allowing women to be ordained and disagreed with both bar and bat mitzvahs, wanting children to continue Hebrew school until confirmation in the ninth grade.
[1] Her dissertation was written at Concordia University while she was an adjunct and it was later published as Sex, Sin, and Grace: Women’s Experience and the Theologies of Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich.
[2] She relished her time at Wichita because of the institution's robust religious and women's studies departments, but feared ending up stuck in Kansas and began to look elsewhere.
She finally found a long term home at Manhattan College, where she ended up teaching for thirty two years and earned the title of professor emerita.
[2] After a long period of mainly focusing on Christian theology, Plaskow's sights gradually turned back to Judaism.
Mary Daly relayed her first ideas for Beyond God the Father at this meeting and also gave her position as co-chair of the group to Plaskow.
A few years later, the group became an official section of the AAR after successfully arguing that they were creating a new field of religious study and needed the space and authority to do so.
She gave several lectures through the 1970s questioning if a woman could truly be a Jew, concluding that Judaism is passed down by women, but it's never truly received or owned by them.
It was one of the first of its kind and its success would later lead to the pair releasing another anthology, Weaving the Visions: New Patterns in Feminist Spirituality in 1989.
This opportunity was a personal breakthrough for Plaskow; she finally felt all of the aspects of her identity falling into alignment after feeling so much tension between them.
[2] Riding off the joy of studying together at the National Havurah Summer Institute, Plaskow and other like-minded women formed B'not Esh ("daughters of fire" in Hebrew) in 1981 as a Jewish feminist spirituality collective which has been meeting for 36 years.
This group was indispensable to Plaskow in imagining and creating Jewish feminism; she believes she couldn't have written Standing Again at Sinai without B'not Esh.
Lilith fled Eden when she was denied sexual equality, was replaced by submissive Eve, and became a she-demon who fed on infant boys.
[10] Plaskow's work helped turn Lilith from the prototypical example of what a woman shouldn't be to an empowered figurehead for women's liberation.
[2] They are still together today but have decided never to marry, rejecting the idea that rights should be tied to marriage in support of building intimate lives on one's own terms.
They founded the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion (JFSR) together and she credits Schüssler Fiorenza's 1983 book, In Memory of Her with expanding her perception of Jewish women's history.
[1] The women of B'not Esh, including Ackelsberg, Marcia Falk, Drorah Setel, and Sue Levi Elwell also had a life-changing impact on Plaskow's development of a specifically Jewish feminist theology.
[2] Plaskow is considered to be one of the most significant and well-known feminist theologians of the twentieth century for her foundational contributions to her field.
Midrash, the act and the product of re-interpreting religious texts to understand changes in society in continuity with Jewish tradition, became very concerned with the feminist movement and how it related to Judaism.
[15] Plaskow acknowledges Standing Again at Sinai as her most influential work, but states that her greatest contribution to Jewish feminist theology is her methodology.
She has continuously insisted that it isn't enough to put women in traditionally male roles, rather we must re-imagine and rebuild the system from the ground up.
She attended a Black Lives Matter march in 2014 in protest of the decision not to indict Daniel Pantaleo for the death of Eric Garner.
She encourages Jewish feminists to engage with other social issues like Black Lives Matter and global warming.
Klein criticized Plaskow's relation of Israeli violence to the story of Esther because it perpetuated the idea that Jewish people have a "tradition of genocide"[18] enacted then against the Persians and now against Palestinians.
She says it's important that Plaskow and other feminists be careful not to fall back on anti-Judaism readings of Hebrew texts in trying to analyze their patriarchal nature.