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Book dedicated to Jewish scholar wins nat'l award  

Paula Hyman z"l

By Cindy Mindell ~

Last month, two leading scholars in the field of modern Jewish history received the national Jewish Book Award from the Jewish Book Council.
“Gender and Jewish History” (Indiana University Press, 2010) did not start out as an anthology, but rather as a gift to fellow scholar Paula Hyman, a pioneer in Jewish gender studies. Hyman, a resident of New Haven and a longtime professor of modern Jewish history at Yale, died last December after fending off cancer for 25 years.
The anthology is edited by Deborah Dash Moore, the Frederick G. L. Huetwell Professor of History and director of the Jean & Samuel Frankel Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan College of Literature, Science, and the Arts, and Marion A. Kaplan, Skirball Professor of Modern Jewish History at New York University..
The idea for the anthology evolved in 2007 in Toronto, at a meeting of the Association of Jewish Studies. Hyman, the first woman president of the American Academy for Jewish Research, was stepping down from the position.
“I had this idea that it would be nice to honor Paula,” Dash Moore says. “She had been the first woman in so many things and there wasn’t the recognition I thought she deserved. She rose very quickly because she deserved to, but you also had the sense that she had all the time in the world for you. She never shut the door behind her on other women in academia. She was always supportive of women and conscious of the discrimination out there.”

Marion A. Kaplan (left) and Deborah Dash Moore

Dash Moore approached fellow academic Marion A. Kaplan, Skirball Professor of Modern Jewish History at New York University, who set wheels in motion. “Marion is so well-organized and moves very quickly,” Dash Moore says. “She got titles of papers and a prospectus, and from idea to publication took us three years.”
The finished product was to be a surprise for Hyman, but when the cancer returned in 2009, Dash Moore and Kaplan told her about the work in progress. After its publication in 2010, the book was launched by the Association for Jewish Studies at a Boston celebration honoring Hyman.
“She really did get the tribute we had hoped for,” Dash Moore says. “At that time, she seemed to be fighting off the cancer again and was at a high point.”
Building on several decades of scholarship on the history of Jewish women, the collection of original essays highlights the profound influence that feminist scholarship has had on the study of Jewish history since the 1970s, revealing the importance of gender in interpreting the Jewish past. The anthology brings together leading thinkers in the field, who are all connected to Hyman either as her former students or as colleagues and friends.
“Gender and Jewish History” examines the impact of gender on Jewish religious practices and political behavior, educational accomplishments and communal structures, acculturation, and choice of occupations. Contributors address a range of topics, including Jewish women’s creativity and spirituality, violence against women, Jews’ reactions to persecution in the Holocaust, and Judaism as lived religion and culture. “With anthologies, there are two major challenges – coherence and excellence,” says Dash Moore. “This is both coherent in terms of the overall work, and excellent in terms of the individual essays. Marion and I are most proud of that combination.”
Each essay brings something new to the theme of gender and Jewish history, Dash Moore says, from an exploration of Jewish women photographers to Jewish domestic servants, to the Jewish women who fought alongside activist and Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger for women’s reproductive rights. “With their work, these authors are either opening new areas of scholarship in this field or taking something very familiar and saying, ‘There’s a lot more here than we realize,’” Dash Moore says, as in the essay on the woman Mossad agent who helped capture Adolf Eichmann.
“Paula was an extraordinary woman,” Dash Moore says. “What made her so special was her ability to combine political activism, feminism, a deep commitment to Jewish historical research, wonderful mentoring of her students, and her personal concerns and family life,” says Dash Moore. “It was that kind of combination that everyone was aware of. You would come in to talk to her about something – some intellectual problem – and before you knew it, the conversation would come to encompass personal issues, politics in Israel or the U.S., or women. She really modeled what it meant to be a woman academic, in all the positive ways.”

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