Jewish Gender Expressed: The Synagogue and Other Institutions

Join us for this lecture with Debra Kaplan and Moshe Rosman focusing on the place of women in the European—and then American—synagogue and other institutions from medieval times until the 20th century.

Kaplan is a social historian of the early modern period at Bar-Ilan University. She formerly held the Dr. Pinkhos Churgin Memorial Chair of Jewish History at Yeshiva University and is currently the director of the Halpern Center for the Study of Jewish Self-Perception at Bar-Ilan. She is the author of Beyond Expulsion: Jews, Christians, and Reformation Strasbourg (Stanford, 2011) (Hebrew edition: Strasbourg: Yehudim, Notzrim, Reformatzia by Markaz Zalman Shazar, 2016) and The Patrons and Their Poor: Jewish Community and Public Charity in Early Modern Germany (Penn Press, 2020).

Rosman is a professor emeritus of Jewish history from Bar-Ilan. He is the author of several groundbreaking and award-winning books, including 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), and How Jewish Is Jewish History? (Littman, 2007). 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.