In Diamant’s version, Dinah willingly goes to Shechem to help her aunt Rachel, a respected midwife. The Torah does not tell us what happened to Dinah. Jacob rebuked his sons (mildly?) for their act of vengeance. The Book of Genesis relates that Jacob’s sons requested that the men of Shechem be circumcised after the royal family had arrogantly stated their intention to appropriate Dinah, and that, led by Shimon and Levi, they exploited the recuperation period to slaughter the Shechem males. The miniseries sparked an entire new literature on what remains a “Red Tent phenomenon.” It tells the story of Dinah, the daughter of Jacob and Leah, who is briefly mentioned in the Bible as having been raped by the prince of Shechem. EARLY IN THE CURRENT TV season, the most read “underground novel” in American Jewish life, Anita Diamant’s The Red Tent (1997), was made into a movie on the Lifetime Network.
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