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Rabbi, Your Cleavage is Showing
Rabbi, Your Cleavage Is Showing is a memoir about becoming whole while being told, again and again, to make yourself smaller. Michal Mendelsohn begins with a lonely childhood in New York, where family silence, emotional distance, books, and music shape her inner life. “Books nourished my soul, much as music did,” she writes, and that line captures one of the book’s steady currents: even when people fail her, language, learning, and song keep opening doors.
The book then widens into a vivid coming-of-age story in Israel. Mendelsohn’s arrival during wartime, her kibbutz life, her struggle to learn Hebrew, and her service as a lone soldier in the IDF all give the memoir an urgency that feels lived-in rather than polished for effect. She writes about fear, hunger, illness, homesickness, danger, and belonging with the same matter-of-fact candor, which makes those chapters some of the most absorbing in the book. Israel isn’t treated as a backdrop. It’s the place where she starts to recognize her own toughness.
At its center, though, this is the story of a woman entering the rabbinate when the room was still arranged for men. Mendelsohn doesn’t frame her path as symbolic from a distance. She brings us into interviews, classrooms, pulpits, hospital rooms, funerals, gossip-filled hallways, and board politics. The title moment, when someone tells her, “Rabbi, your cleavage is showing,” becomes more than an awkward comment. It stands in for the constant scrutiny placed on a woman whose body, voice, clothing, authority, and ambition are treated as public property.
What makes the memoir engaging is Mendelsohn’s voice. She can be blunt, funny, wounded, reflective, and argumentative, sometimes all on the same page. She’s especially strong when writing about the daily work of being a rabbi: the teaching, the rituals, the pastoral care, the strange requests, the emotional weight, and the unexpected comedy. The later chapters, especially those on Jewish women, feminism, and “firsts,” give the personal story a broader context without losing the conversational feel that runs through the book.
By the end, Rabbi, Your Cleavage Is Showing feels like a memoir of vocation as much as survival. Mendelsohn isn’t only recounting what happened to her. She’s asking what it means to build a life of service when the institutions you love don’t always know how to love you back. “This is my story, and mine alone,” she says early on, and the book honors that promise. It’s intimate, opinionated, searching, and deeply rooted in the belief that faith is most alive when it’s wrestled with honestly.
Pages: 312 | ASIN : B0GML87Y17
The Systemic Misogyny That Existed
In Rabbi, Your Cleavage is Showing, you share the hardships of your youth, your experiences in the paratroopers’ entertainment corps, and your groundbreaking ordination as one of the first female rabbis in America. Why was this an important book for you to write?
As a “first,” I don’t think many people realized the hurdles that came from within the organization-the systemic misogyny that existed. The first woman ordained by the movement in Cincinnati, had the support of the President of the Seminary who resided there so the rest of the professors and deans had to accept that fact. In New York, there was no such support at all and all were free to act on their own feelings.
The transition from Manhattan privilege to kibbutz life in Israel is dramatic. How did that shift transform your worldview?
I developed an appreciation for the life that the kibbutzniks chose- that is, the complete dedication to a socialist principle of what is good for one is good for all. The decisions were made by a vote of the members so if there was money to give tv’s -then everyone would receive it. This view, however, got tiresome after years of successes and when some families received presents, they no longer wanted to have to give them up 9expensive things such as air conditioners, refrigerators, etc. There was a rift created amongst the people who earned money by working in their profession outside the kibbutz such as professors at universities, who earned so much more. Eventually, there was a rethinking how to keep things “fair.” Watching families grapple with this taught me so much about economics, fairness and sharing.
Why was it important not to soften or sanitize the misogyny you encountered?
If I had “sanitized” the institutional misogyny, how could we learn to improve things? I strongly feel that the institution did not do enough to work with the hundreds of male rabbis serving before ordaining the first women, as the resistance within the organization was deleterious to women and hurtful. My decision was to tell my truth as to what I experienced, warts and all, but not to mention names. I did not want this book to be a revenge book, but rather, my story, recognizing that over time, there would be changes. But changes in attitudes take longer than other types of changes and many women after me still suffered.
What is one thing you hope readers take away from your experiences?
I hope that readers see that maybe I had to change my outlook or what I initially wanted from life, but I was able to succeed and be happy doing many other things. I always considered myself a sort of “Renaissance woman” because I had so many interests and passions. I was executive director of 2 great non-Jewish not-for-profit organizations and then moved to leading a Master’s Program on Community Arts Management and then to a Fortune 500 company as Manager of Community and Government Programs. I loved those jobs and my training was never lost. As a published poet, I used much of my learning about Judaism and life to craft all sorts of poetry. Maybe the one thing to takeaway is flexibility. There are many unique opportunities in life if you seek them out. All was not lost.
Author Links: Amazon | GoodReads
Told through vivid storytelling and sharp humor, Mendelsohn’s memoir explores faith, feminism, and the price of independence in a world that often resisted her at every turn. Whether navigating sexism in sacred spaces, confronting personal trauma, or finding love and belonging in unexpected places, Mendelsohn reveals a life of resilience, reinvention, and courage.
At once deeply personal and profoundly universal, Rabbi, Your Cleavage is Showing is the story of a woman who refused to be defined by others—and became a rabbi on her own terms.
Rabbi, Your Cleavage is Showing
Rabbi, Your Cleavage Is Showing follows Mikki Mendelsohn’s life from a cold, silent childhood on the twenty-sixth floor of a Manhattan hotel, through a sudden flight to Israel during the 1967 war, where she served as a lone soldier in the paratroopers’ entertainment corps, to her groundbreaking ordination as one of the first female rabbis in America. It’s a story about the fierce, non-linear search for community by someone who was routinely made to feel like an outsider, whether by her own parents or by a male-dominated religious establishment. She simply didn’t fit the mold. Mendelsohn unspools her memories with a blunt, refreshing honesty, offering a rare glimpse into the grit required to shatter glass ceilings when the rest of the world is desperately trying to keep them intact.
What I liked most about the narrative is how beautifully the writing captures the raw friction of her early years without ever sliding into self-pity. Her recollections of a smoke-filled childhood, where love was a scarce commodity and locking herself in a bathroom to read War and Peace was a survival mechanism, carry a haunting, sensory resonance. There’s a sharp, rhythmic burstiness to her prose when she describes the shift from Manhattan’s relative luxury to the dusty realities of kibbutz life. The transition is jarring. I was particularly moved by her account of seeing a blue Auschwitz tattoo on a waitress’s arm in a Jerusalem café, a moment she writes about with a quiet, devastating reverence that completely sidesteps melodrama. Her style alternates between the brisk pace of a seasoned storyteller and the rich, reflective pauses of a poet, allowing the reader to feel the literal heat of a Sinai sandstorm or the terrifying silence of a trench during an unexpected mortar attack.
The ideas driving the latter half of the book are equally compelling, particularly her nuanced examination of faith intersecting with a deeply entrenched systemic misogyny. She doesn’t filter the indignities she faced as a female pioneer in the rabbinate, recounting everything from petty comments about her appearance to a harrowing assault by a senior colleague with a stark, unsettling clarity. It’s heavy material. Yet, what prevents the book from becoming an unremitting chronicle of trauma is her brilliant deployment of Yiddish humor and an unyielding devotion to the core text of her heritage. When she juxtaposes the absurdity of working as a go-go dancer or delivering singing telegrams with her ultimate desire to teach Torah, she reveals a remarkably resilient spirit. I appreciate that she acknowledges her own flaws and early naivete, making her critique of the religious establishment feel balanced, authentic, and profoundly human rather than merely bitter.
Rabbi, Your Cleavage Is Showing functions as an intimate and beautifully textured look at a life forged through sheer resilience and a refusal to be compartmentalized. Mendelsohn’s voice is assured and warm, carrying the wisdom of someone who has wrestled with both holy scriptures and the messy, often cruel realities of human nature. This book is a wonderful fit for anyone interested in feminist history, Jewish studies, or simply a beautifully told story of personal reinvention. It reminds us that spiritual leadership isn’t about conforming to a pre-packaged mold, but about having the courage to show up exactly as you are.
Pages: 295 | ASIN : B0GKZCKML3
