Jewish Women in Historical Perspective (Revised)

The last decades have seen a growing debate over the status of women in contemporary Judaism. As the conditions of secular Western life have allowed women greater choice in their educational and vocational opportunities and society has begun to endorse female equality with men, dissatisfaction with traditional Jewish limitations on women's participation in communal, religious, and scholarly activities has increased. Whilst there have been numerous contemporary responses to traditional Jewish views of women's roles, perspectives from the past have been missing from the ongoing discussion. This collection of essays is intended to provide such a historical excursion. Each essay provides an overview of the period in question, and asks serious questions about the general situations of Jewish women and their activities in a male-dominated public and intellectual Jewish life, as well as in a larger non-Jewish cultural environment.

Portrayals of women in the Hebrew Bible /Susan Niditch --Jewish women in the diaspora world of late antiquity /Ross S. Kraemer --Image and status of women in classical Rabbinic Judaism /Judith Romney Wegner --Jewish women in the Middle Ages /Judith R. Baskin --Sephardi women in the medieval and early modern periods /Renâee Levine Melammed --Italian Jewish women /Howard Adelman --Prayers in Yiddish and the religious world of Ashkenazic women /rChava Weissler --Emancipation through intermarriage? wealthy Jewish salon women in old Berlin /Deborah Hertz --Engendering liberal Jews : Jewish women in Victorian England /Michael Galchinsky --Tradition and transition : Jewish women in Imperial Germany /Marion A. Kaplan --Women teachers of the Alliance Israâelite Universelle, 1872-1940 /Frances Malino --East European Jewish women in an age of transition, 1880-1930 /Paula E. Hyman --Daughters of the nation : between the public and private spheres in pre-state Israel /Deborah S. Bernstein --Gender and the immigrant Jewsh experience in the United States /Paula E. Hyman --Spiritual expressions : Jewish women's religious lives in the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries /Ellen M. Umansky.