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In recent years the Western Wall in Jerusalem has become a site of conflict and contention between liberal and feminist Jews, on the one hand, and strictly religious Jews, on the other hand, over the permissible roles for women in the religious rituals and activities that take place there. It would be easy to characterize this struggle as an effort to claim for Jewish women a larger share of a sacred space that, like an Orthodox synagogue, is currently dominated, regulated, and controlled by Orthodox men. Of course, like many religions, traditional Judaism offers rationales for different gender roles in religion, such as the supposedly higher "spiritual" nature of women, which makes certain religious obligations of men unnecessary; and women's central role in child care and the domestic realm of the family. Orthodox Judaism defends the practices at the Wall, moreover, in light of what it regards as the clear demands of Jewish law and custom. This article will challenge the unproblematic acceptance of these religious explanations by analyzing some of the unarticulated political and social functions that such gender roles serve and ways in which those functions have become further complicated by Jewish nationalism and the place of religion within Israel, both before and since the creation of a modern nationstate.Although there is little question about the strength and antiquity of patriarchal traditions in Judaism that limit female power and participation, this may not be the most fruitful starting point for a feminist analysis of this controversy, for in this case we are not confronted by a historically continuous policy of female exclusion from the activities at the Western Wall. 1 Accordingly, acknowledging the antiquity of the Wall itself does not justify any presumption of antiquity in the gender practices currently in place there; it is simply not true that Charmé: Political Transformation of Gender Traditions 72 Beneath the claims of fidelity to an unchanging past that one routinely finds among competing religious adherents, one discovers a dynamic process of construction, innovation, and change that is based on both continuity and discontinuity with the past.