Well-Behaved Women Undermining Jewish Gender I: Leah Horowitz As the Jewish Mary Wollstonecraft?

This 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). The lecture will feature Elisheva Baumgarten, Yitzchak Becker Professor of Jewish Studies, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, in conversation with Moshe Rosman, professor emeritus of Jewish history, Bar-Ilan University.

Baumgarten 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).

Rosman 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.