Lori Hope Lefkovitz brings her own subversive feminist sensibility to In Scripture: The First Stories of Jewish Sexual Identities (Rowman & Littlefield, $49.95) where she proposes to apply psychoanalytic and gender theory to selected biblical narratives from Genesis to the Book of Ruth. Her goal is to look at “a set of first stories particularly for their power to have set in motion definitions of the body, the sexual body, and the Jewish sexual body that developed over time.”