Why write a book on early modern Jewish women

This month of learning is sponsored by our dear friends Matt and Mollie Landes of Riverdale for the neshama of Dovid Yehonatan ben Yitzchak Yehuda.

In this episode of the 18Forty Podcast, we speak with Professors Elisheva Carlebach and Debra Kaplan, scholars of early modern Jewish history, about women’s religious, social, and communal roles in early modern Jewish life.

In this episode we discuss:

• How have women’s prayer and shul-going habits changed over time? 
• When did the women’s chevra kadisha become a Jewish institution? 
• How did Jewish emancipation alter the structure of Jewish life and its implications for women? 

Tune in for a conversation about how women shaped—and were shaped by—the structures of the early modern kehillah.

Interview begins at 9:13.

Elisheva Carlebach is the Salo Wittmayer Baron Professor of Jewish History, Culture, and Society at Columbia University and Director of its Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies. A specialist in Early Modern European Jewish history, her work explores Jewish–Christian relations, religious dissent, conversion, messianism, and communal life. She is the award-winning author of The Pursuit of Heresy, Divided Souls, and Palaces of Time, and has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and honors including Columbia’s Lenfest Distinguished Faculty Award.

Debra Kaplan teaches early modern Jewish history at Bar-Ilan University. A social historian, she is the author of Beyond Expulsion (2011) and The Patrons and their Poor (University of Pennsylvania 2020; winner of the Rosl und Paul Arnsberg-Preis).

References:

“Notes Toward Finding the Right Question” by Cynthia Ozick

A Woman Is Responsible for Everything: Jewish Women in Early Modern Europe by Debra Kaplan and Elisheva Carlebach

Women and the Messianic Heresy of Sabbatai Zevi, 1666 - 1816 by Ada Rapoport-Albert

Mothers and Children: Jewish Family Life in Medieval Europe by Elisheva Baumgarten

Coming of Age in Medieval Egypt: Female Adolescence, Jewish Law, and Ordinary Culture by Eve Krakowski

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