This volume honors Paula Hyman, professor of modern Jewish history at Yale, who is one of the founders of Jewish gender studies. It asks how gender has influenced the lives and actions of Jewish women and the histories and stories told by scholars. What difference does a focus on gender make when we interpret the Jewish past? The wide range of articles by leading scholars extends to religious practices, politics, history, literature, and art.
Among many fascinating articles, David Ellenson explores the 19th-century writings of Rabbis Samson Raphael Hirsch and Ezriel Hildesheimer on the Jewish textual education of women; Chava Weissler discusses vernacular kabbalah and the popularization of kabbalah today as typified by the Jewish Renewal movement; and Claire Sufrin approaches the role of halakha in Jewish feminist thought by exploring the visions of Tamar Ross and Rachel Adler and the use they each make of the legal philosophy of the late Yale law professor Robert Cover, who wrote of a community’s role in shaping law and legal meaning and insisted that “no set of legal institutions or prescriptions exists apart from the narratives that locate it and give it meaning.” Shulamit Magnus asks the wonderful and important question, “How Does a Woman Write?” and looks for an answer in the work of Pauline Wengeroff, who began writing her memoirs in German in 1898 when she was 65.