"Singer seems to be responding favorably to the feminist challenge, at least on the level of official pronouncement. At a public lecture in New York City last fall, he went so far as to say that Judaism had made an "historical mistake" in not teaching women Torah, that the denial of women's rights had contributed to assimilation, that he welcomed giving Jewish women full religious rights in the synagogue (including aliyoth and ordination), and that a reversal of these inequities would be "wonderful for religion and justice." (JTA, 11/8/78). As encouraging as such remarks may be, they nonetheless stand in stark contrast to Singer's most recent fictional writings, which continue to present the male/female dichotomy in unchanged sexist terms. While it is possible to explain this gap between the written and the spoken word as the result of the time lag between the two media, it seems more likely that this discrepancy is exactly what it appears to be-an unresolved contradiction."