Lecture 4: Well-Behaved Women Undermining Jewish Gender I: Leah Horowitz as the Jewish Mary Wollstonecraft?
Wednesday, November 11, 2020 | 12 p.m. EDT
Online conversation via Zoom
The lecture will focus on the story of Leah Horowitz, a traditional woman, who demanded that traditional Jewish women gain cultural capital by transforming from facilitators to actors in Torah study, public prayer and performing mitzvot (commandments).
Respondent: Elisheva Baumgarten, Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
Elisheva Baumgarten is the Yitzchak Becker Professor of Jewish Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She studies the social and religious history of the Jews of medieval northern Europe (1000-1400), with a special interest in women and gender hierarchies. She is the author of Mothers and Children: Jewish Family Life in Medieval Europe (Princeton, 2000; Hebrew publication: Zalman Shazar Center, 2006) and Practicing Piety in Medieval Ashkenaz: Men, Women and Everyday Religious Observance (Penn Press, 2014).
Moshe Rosman is a Professor Emeritus of Jewish History from Bar Ilan University. He is the author of several groundbreaking and award-winning books The Lords' Jews: Magnate-Jewish Relations in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth During the Eighteenth Century (Harvard, 1990), Founder of Hasidism: A Quest for the Historical Ba'al Shem Tov (California, 1996), How Jewish Is Jewish History? (Littman, 2007). Moshe Rosman is the recipient of the National Jewish Book Award, The Zalman Shazar Prize and the Jerzy Milewski Award. His research interests include Polish-Jewish history, Jewish gender history, historiography and Hasidism.