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Paula Hyman

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Episode 72: Ezrat Nashim Confronts the Rabbis

Fifty years ago, a group of young Jewish women piled into two cars and drove to upstate New York to crash the annual meeting of the all-male Rabbinical Assembly of the Conservative movement. They called themselves Ezrat Nashim and they had a set of demands that included the right to be counted in a minyan, lead religious services, and attend rabbinical school. Their brief but brave action had ripple effects across American Jewish communities.

Deborah Dash Moore receives the Jewish Cultural Achievement Award

June 10, 2013

"No area offered greater freedom and challenge than American Jewish history… It has been a great voyage.” - Deborah Dash Moore

Paula Hyman

Within several months we determined that if any Jewish issue required political action, it was this one, the status of women.

Rabbi Ruth Abusch-Magder's Family

Let’s Get Real About Marriage and Parenting

Rabbi Ruth Abusch-Magder PhD

“Being a diplomat is no career for a woman who wants to have a family,” said the consul.

“By the time you’re ready to get married he’ll be married,” said my mother.

“Don’t put off having children,” said the prominent professor.

Paula Hyman, 1946 - 2011

We should hear her when we need courage to oppose sexism, whether political, historical, or unconscious; when we strive to balance family commitments with demands of career; and when we seek to follow in her footsteps to chart new paths in making and writing Jewish history.

Debbie Friedman

The Lives They Lived: Jewish women to remember in 2011

Leah Berkenwald

“[Debbie Friedman] emphasized the value of every voice and the power of song to help us express ourselves and become our best selves. As she wrote for JWA's online exhibit Jewish Women and the Feminist Revolution: 'The more our voices are heard in song, the more we become our lyrics, our prayers, and our convictions.' The woman who wrote the song that asks God to 'help us find the courage to make our lives a blessing' herself modeled for us what that looks like.”—Judith Rosenbaum.
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Paula Hyman Portrait

Honoring Paula Hyman, z"l, by continuing to ask questions

Ellen K. Rothman

Last Friday, I joined members of the Jewish Women’s Archive “family” on a sad drive to New Haven for the funeral of Paula Hyman, who died on Thursday at the much-too-early age of 65. The Lucy G. Moses Professor of Modern Jewish History at Yale for the past 25 years, Paula was, in the words of the New York Times, “a social historian who pioneered the study of women in Jewish life and became an influential advocate for women’s equality in Jewish religious practice.”

Institute for Educators 2008

Join the Jewish Women's Archive for four days of intensive professional development designed to enrich your teaching with the compelling stories of American Jewish lives, past and present. The 2010 Institute will focus on the role of Jews in the Civil Rights Movement in America.

Paula Hyman discusses publication of "The Jewish Woman in America"

April 20, 1976

When Paula Hyman, Charlotte Baum, and Sonya Michel published The Jewish Woman in America in 1976, it was a groundbreaking work.

The New York Times reports on naming ceremonies for Jewish girls

March 14, 1977

Noting that the new Reform Jewish prayerbook, published in February 1977, included a naming ceremony for baby girls for the first time, and that Ezrat Nashim a small feminist activist collective, was about to publish a booklet entitled “Blessing the Birth of a Daughter: Jewish Naming Ceremonies for Girls,” the New York Times reported on March 14, 1977, that such ceremonies were becoming common in all branches of Judaism.

Ezrat Nashim presents manifesto for women's equality to Conservative rabbis

March 14, 1972

A small New York study group, founded in 1971 to study the status of women in Judaism, presented Conservative rabbis with a manifesto for change at the Rabbinical Assembly convention on March 14, 1

Women's Studies in the United States

Jewish women were instrumental in creating women’s studies as an academic discipline and contributed significantly to its growth and evolution. They have been critical not only as political activists, administrators, and editors of the key women’s studies journals, but also as prominent thinkers in the field’s intellectual debates.

Poland: Interwar

A minority habitually ignored by scholars, Polish-Jewish women played important roles in the changing cultural and political framework of the interwar years.

Modern Netherlands

Like Jewish women everywhere, Dutch Jewish women struggled with issues of assimilation, emancipation, and equality as both Jews and women. This article summarizes the conditions and challenges facing Jewish women in the Netherlands and the paths to progress and change they sought—education, work, activism, and literature, among others—from the nineteenth century to the present, including after the particular decimation of Dutch Jewry during the Holocaust.

Deborah Dash Moore

Deborah Dash Moore is a leading scholar of American Jewish history. Her influential work has focused on both urban and visual Jewish history in locales from New York to Miami to Los Angeles. A prolific interpreter of Jewish and American culture, Moore has played a key role in making American Jewish history a recognized subfield in the academy.

Rosa Manus

Rosa Manus was a Dutch leader in international women’s movements for suffrage and equality, as well as a vocal pacifist before and during World War II. As a Jew, she at times clashed with other feminist leaders.

Anne Lapidus Lerner

Anne Lapidus Lerner is a pioneering scholar of Jewish women’s studies and was the first woman vice chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary. Lerner has established and fostered a long-lasting legacy through the teaching and mentorship of generations of students and dedication to Jewish learning. In 2017 she was awarded the Mathilde Schechter Award by the Women’s League for Conservative Judaism.

Judaic Studies in the United States

When the Association for Jewish Studies (AJS) was established in 1969 as the professional organization of scholars in the interdisciplinary field of Judaic studies, there were no women among its founders. Within the past few generations, however, a field that was traditionally dominated by men has gradually witnessed the emergence of many women scholars.

Jewish Women's Archive

Founded in 1995 on the premise that the history of Jewish women must be considered systematically and creatively in order to produce a balanced and complete historical record, the Jewish Women's Archive took as its mission “to uncover, chronicle and transmit the rich legacy of Jewish women and their contributions to our families and communities, to our people and our world.”

Historians in the United States

American Jewish women have made important contributions to historical scholarship, especially in the arenas of social history of the United States and Europe, women’s history, and Jewish history. Jewish women, sensitive to the situations of minority groups, became pioneers in these fields as they developed from the 1970s on.

Assimilation in the United States: Twentieth Century

Jewish women assimilating into a changing American society across the twentieth century navigated often conflicting gender roles. As they strove to achieve upward social mobility, they adapted Jewish assumptions of what women, especially married women, should do to accommodate American norms for middle class women. Their collective accomplishments registered in political activism, organizational creativity, strong support for feminism, religious innovation, and educational achievement in the face of antisemitism, stereotypes, and denigration.

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