Jewish Women

Jewish life seems to revolve around food: eating it or avoiding it. Feast or Fast as it could be said. For every holiday there is a food. For every food there is a blessing. For Jews everywhere, religious or cultural, even those who are born Jewish but have little participation in Jewish life cycle events, it’s all about the food. There seems to always be an abundance of food at celebrations, Shabbat dinners, and gatherings. Many women today still have the primary responsibility of planning meals, shopping for foods and preparing meals. This is true also in the Jewish community. Unlike the general population however, there seems to be an extremely higher incidence for eating disorders among girls and women. While identification of girls and women with eating disorders in the general population seems common place, in many Jewish communities it is less so: it is present, it just isn’t recognized, reported or treated as readily. This is a multifactorial problem. There is limited research regarding causative factors in the Jewish female population in this regard, although there are many theories. There are many treatment and prevention programs that have been recently developed that specifically are for Jewish girls and young women. The Orthodox Union, United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism ,the Union for Reform Judaism and the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College have all published information addressing the problem of eating disorders. An important question is why? What is the interaction of Jewish tradition, assimilation, body image and eating disorders? An important documentary created by the outreach initiative of the Orthodox Union was produced in 2013.

When female intellectuals become celebrities in America, much of their notoriety seems to derive from their sex. The female intellectual is packaged as a personality. Publicists and the public feel no shame in gossiping about such women's lives, condescendingly slighting their intellectual accomplishments. Hannah Arendt became such a celebrity in the United States in the second half of her life. But however fascinating her life story was, it was not at all easy to neglect her work. She was just too formidably serious. Taking her seriously was therefore hard work. To be sure, in part this was because her contributions could not be easily pigeonholed. Her writings created classificatory dilemmas for specialized scholars, if not for the general public. Had she been a philosopher? A historian? A political theorist? Her ideologies were as hard to pin down as was her intellectual discipline. Had she been a conservative? An anarchist? A Zionist? A "self-hating" Jew? A feminist?

The fact that Sophie Weil Browne (1854–1936) was married to a rabbi undoubtedly enhanced her ability to be a role model for the Jewish women of Columbus, Georgia. It did not define her role, however, because her leadership there had barely begun when her mercurial husband left Columbus to travel and serve briefly in numerous congregations elsewhere. While accompany-ing him in most cases, she continued as a doer and motivator for public issues from her home base in Georgia,
leading and inspiring women whose grandchildren even today remember her as a legendary icon and speak of her with awe. Her experience, at a time when Jewish women were just beginning to venture outside their social milieu, offers a case study of the journey that many of the economically privileged took from “ladyhood,” that idealized state of feminine gentility, to personhood, a term implying independent action and identity. The journey was traveled largely through participation in women’s clubs, a movement that blossomed during Sophie’s lifetime.

Öz
Osmanlı İmparatorluğu’nu şekillendiren belirleyici unsurlardan biri, millet sistemidir. Sistem içinde yer alan her cemaat kendine has dini ve kültürel özelliklerini koruma serbestliğine sahipti ve böylelikle her bir cemaat, Osmanlı kültürel zenginliğine katkı sağladı. Bu cemaatlerden biri de Yahudi cemaatiydi. Cemaatin erkekleri kadar kadınları da Osmanlı toplumsal yaşamında aktif rol oynadı. Özellikle Osmanlı kadınları arasında gelişimini ileri bir düzeye taşıma fırsatını yakalayan da Yahudi kadınları oldu. Bu ilerlemeyi, 16. ve 19. yüzyıl sürecinin öne çıkan isimleri ya da olayları gözler önüne sermektedir. Dolasıyla bu makale genel hatlarıyla evde eş ve anne; haremde kira; pazarda tüccar; şıklığıyla Kamondo ya da fabrikada çeyizi için çalışmak zorunda kalan tütüncü kız yani işçi olan Yahudi kadınlarının Osmanlı sosyoekonomik yaşamındaki yeri ve gelişimini ortaya koymayı amaçlamaktadır.
Anahtar Kelimeler: Yahudi Kadını, Osmanlı Kadını, Osmanlı Yahudileri, Sefarad Kadını.
Abstract
One of the defining characteristics that shaped Ottoman Empire was its millet system. Any community that was in this system had the freedom to maintain its religious and cultural characteristics and therefore; each community made a contribution to the richness of Ottoman culture. One of these communities was Jewish community. The women, as well as men, of this community played an active role in Ottoman social life. Among all Ottoman women, it was Jewish women who had the most opportunity to improve their status. This development is clearly visible by the prominent figures and events of 16th and 19th century. Therefore, the objective of this study is to determine the status and development of Jewish women, who in general were wives and mothers in their home, kiera (kira) in harem, saleswoman in markets, who could match Kamondo with their beauty and had to work in factories in order to earn their dowries, in Ottoman socio-economical life.
Keywords:  Jewish woman, Ottoman woman, Ottoman Jews, Sephardic woman.

In Scott's Ivanhoe, the character of Rebecca refuses to be circumscribed by the discourses of Orientialism, anti-semitism, and idealism. Rebecca's specifically Jewish female sexuality escapes the binary oppositions of East/West, past/present, Christian/alien, subject/object, and pure/tainted that would seek to contain her. Jewish female desire creates an instability in Scott's text that is only temporarily resolved through Rebecca's expulsion. This article argues that Scott uses cultural markers such as a yellow turban, a diamond earring, and a silver casket in order to render the Jewish woman reliably visible in an attempt to relieve the tension created by a character who defies categories and conventions. One way of defining the self is through negation, or, to paraphrase Hayden White, if we

The following paper by Rabbi Raymond Apple first appeared as a chapter in Matnat Eliyahu: Essays for Eliyahu Honig, Mandelbaum Studies in Judaica No. 15, published by Mandelbaum Publishing in association with Australian Friends of the Hebrew University, 2011.

Of Walter Scott's characters, one of the most enigmatic and the one that most threatens the ideological edifi ce upon which historical fi ction is built is the fi gure of the Jewess, Rebecca of York, from the novel Ivanhoe. In the novel, Rebecca is a healer; she is also beautiful, and her beauty attracts more than one Christian lover. At the end of the novel, Rebecca and the hero, Ivanhoe, do not marry, to the chagrin of many a reader. Rebecca's choice to remain with her father, to go into exile, and never to marry has been one of the main focuses in the history of the tale's reception.

Dvora Baron is recognized as the first Modern Hebrew woman writer. Nevertheless, she is largely unknown in German-speaking countries. A Tel Aviv publisher included her short story Shavririm in a collection of the same name in 1949. Yet, this story did not appear in German until 40 years later, titled Lichtschimmer, translated by Mirjam Pressler. No German commentary or analysis of this short story exists. This lack of interest is surprising, given that current fiction from Hebrew women writers appears in German immediately after publication in Hebrew, and is widely discussed. Has this writer nothing to say to us? What is the message of Shavririm? Is it a short story of inferior quality? Alternatively, is Lichtschimmer a bad translation? In this article, I discuss Baron's biography and elucidate her historical and cultural background. I explain what she has in common with and what differentiates her from contemporaneous male Yiddish and Hebrew writers. To demonstrate the quality of the story and the translation, I analyze Shavririm and Lichtschimmer. Thus, I also show the challenges of translating her texts. The main goal is to identify Baron's possible messages to the original Hebrew-speaking, but also to today's German-speaking readers.

. In legal texts, women, acting on their own olition, are actually described as indi iduals in negati e terms. This study examines clandestine betrothals and marriages ; adultery, especially the treatment of adulterous women ; the abused wife and her ability to initiate di orce proceedings against her husband ; and testaments left with Christian notaries by Jewish women.

The aim of this article is to illustrate the manner in which stories about the process of becom-ing mature in the reality of the labour camp are built, in the context of the findings of feminist criti-cism. The author of the story examined is Halina Birenbaum, known from her numerous previously published personal accounts on this subject. In an interview with Monika Tutak-Goll It’s  not  the  rain, it’s people, she evokes previously undisclosed emotions related to her stay in Birkenau. The camp events she recalls provide a significant supplement to the existing image of girls and women, attracting attention to this aspect of life in the camp. They are also proof of the relationship, recog-nized by psychologists and psychiatrists, between the experiences of life in a concentration camp and the attempt to return to the post-camp normality

Part I contains a list of Hebrew Aleph-Bet letters and their associations.

Part II contains Hebrew words found in Malkah's Notebook: A Journey into the Mystical Aleph-Bet, written in Hebrew, transliteration, English translation, and page found.

Note: there is also a Read-Along version of Malkah's Notebook available April 2022.

Prayer Books for Jewish Women in Polish, Their Authors and Users: The Case of Jews in Warsaw in the Mid-Nineteenth Century In the nineteenth century, only two prayer books for Jewish women and girls were published in the Polish language: one written by Jakub Elsenberg (Warsaw 1855) and the other by Rozalia Saulson (Warsaw 1861). This small numer contrasts with the numerous editions of tkhines in Yiddish and Andachts- and Gebetbücher in German. The aim of the paper is to discuss the circumstances of the creation of both books and specificity of these editions. The origins of the users of the Warsaw’s prayer books according to the list of subscribers (and using the data of genealogical sources) are also considered.

Il mistero più grande, indagato in molti studi internazionali sull’argomento, è come sia potuto rimanere intatto il predominio maschile di gestore quasi incontrastato del culto, pur essendo state sempre le donne la maggioranza dei fedeli praticanti in tutte le denominazioni religiose.

תקופת השואה שינתה את כל מארג בהחיים היהודיים והטילה על הנשים אחריות מחודשת שלא הכירו. המאמר סוקר את התמודדותן עם הדילמות ההלכתיות שנוצרו עקב המצב הקשה, כפי שמשתקפות הן בשאלות שהופנו לרבניחם והן בשאלות בהן נאלצו הנשים להכריע בעצמן ללא פוסקי הלכה.

The Register of the Dead from the Jewish community of Lugo di Romagna is a remarkable work, encompassing the statutes and resolutions of the philanthropic organization known as Hevrat gemilut hasadim, or the Good Works or Mercy Society, along with the comprehensive death records of the community spanning from 1658 to 1825.
One noteworthy aspect is its ability to reconstruct various facets of the community's members, including women. The Register's undeniable achievement lies in its ability to vividly depict the world of women within the ghetto. It provides a captivating narrative of the daily responsibilities shouldered by women, many of which played a pivotal role in the home and family economies.

In Brief From the French Revolution to the twenty-first century, Jewish women in France have undergone radical legal, political, cultural, and religious transformations. The political emancipation of Jews during the French Revolution had a longstanding impact on Jewish women, leading to important transformations in the following decades. During the nineteenth century Jewish women adopted bourgeois gender roles and gained access to education and public visibility in French society. Starting at the end of the nineteenth century, the Jewish community in France was transformed by several waves of migration from Eastern Europe, the Levant, and North Africa. Since the turn of the twentieth century, Jewish women have made major contributions to all spheres of French society. Contents The Nineteenth Century Twentieth Century Twenty-First Century Simone Veil receives a Hagaddah from Yeshiva University President Norman Lamm at an International Student Scholarship Fund dinner.

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Este artículo aborda el estudio de las representaciones y percepciones sobre el cuerpo femenino judío que se producen en la intersección de nociones e ideas que sobre menstruación/emisión genital, maternidad e (im)pureza ritual circulaban en el occidente europeo durante la Edad Media. Para ello analiza qué aporta el concepto de (im)pureza ritual, y la legislación creada en torno a él, a las formas en que los judíos medievales definieron el cuerpo femenino, y en qué medida fueron esos discursos compartidos por las propias mujeres.

This essay explores the representations and perceptions of the Jewish female body, derived from the confluence of notions and ideas about menstruation/genital discharge, childbirth and ritual (im)purity, which circulated in the West during the Middle Ages. It analyzes how the concept of ritual (im)purity, and the legislation derived from it,  contributes to the ways in which Jews defined female body, and whether (and if so, in what measure) those discourses were shared by women themselves.

Die vorliegende Arbeit untersucht die Verwandlungen der neuen jüdischen Frau von der Gründung der zionistischen Bewegung, 1897 in Basel, bis 1931 sowohl aus einer literarischen und künstlerischen als auch aus einer historischen Perspektive. Sie rekonstruiert zuerst weibliche Figuren aus den deutschsprachigen zionistischen Periodika, Lyriksammlungen und Almanachen und befasst sich mit den kulturzionistischen Darstellungen der neuen jüdischen Frau im künstlerischen und literarischen Werk in der Jüdischen Renaissance um die Jahrhundertwende. Danach erforscht sie die Position und die Aufgaben der jüdischen Frau im Jüdischen Frauenbund und ihre Wirkung auf die Vorbereitung der jungen jüdischen Mädchen aus West- und Osteuropa auf das Leben in Kolonien in Palästina. Schließlich wird ein Paradigma der weiblichen Figur in den literarischen Werken aus den deutschsprachigen zionistischen Zeitschriften Die Welt. Zentralorgan der Zionistischen Bewegung (1897-1914), Israelitische Rundschau (1901-1902), Jüdische Rundschau (1902-1919) und Ost und West. Illustrierte Monatsschrift für das gesamte Judentum (1901-1923) erstellt und untersucht.

The thesis examines the transformations of the new Jewish woman in the period from the founding of the Zionist movement in 1897 in Basel and covers the period up to 1931 from a literary, artistic, and historical perspective. The female figures are reconstructed from the German-language Zionist periodicals, poetry collections, anthologies, and almanacs. The thesis examines the Cultural Zionist representations of the new Jewish woman in artistic and literary works in the Jewish Renaissance at the turn-of-the-century. Furthermore, the position and roles of Jewish women in the Jewish Women's League and their impact on preparing young Jewish girls from Western and Eastern Europe for life in colonies in Palestine is explored. Finally, a paradigm of the female figure in literary works from the Zionist German-language periodicals Die Welt; Zentralorgan der Zionistischen Bewegung (1897-1914), Israelitische Rundschau (1901-1902), Jüdische Rundschau (1902-1919) and Ost und West. Illustrierte Monatsschrift für das gesamte Judentum (1901-1923) is established and examined.

When Betty Friedan was writing The Feminine Mystique, she had in mind the plight of women like Esther Kahn Taylor. Described in a 1965 Atlanta Constitution article as “an attractive woman with steel gray hair and a flashing smile,” Taylor had yearned to go to college yet married at eighteen to take up homemaking.  While raising her son, she channeled her intellectual gifts into music and Jewish philanthropy. At fifty-five, however, Taylor “was at a crossroads in her life” and was not one to fill the void playing mah-jongg.  In 1960, she traveled to New York to visit an old friend, some-one Taylor called an “ardent feminist.”  Their lunchtime conversation transformed Taylor’s life and improved the well-being of southern women for generations to come.

In Brief Elisabeth Badinter is one of the most well-known and controversial philosophers in France. The granddaughter of Russian-Polish Jewish immigrants, and the daughter of the founder of the first major advertising firm in France, she was born near Paris toward the end of World War II. Badinter was raised with the belief that women were worthy and capable of great achievements, and as a teen, she was deeply influenced by Simone de Beauvoir's feminist writings. A selfidentifying feminist, she has chosen to fight for women's rights, not through political and social activism, but rather through writing. Over a career spanning nearly half a century, she has published widely on gender relations and motherhood. She is also an outspoken defender of French secularism (laïcité).

A consequence of rising fundamentalism in Judaism, as in other religions, has been an outbreak of culture wars focused on women. Yet, scant attention has been paid to voices of Orthodox Jewish women themselves. This book thus highlights an emerging body of writing by and about these women, who have been doubly marginalized: by rabbinical decrees that increasingly limit their roles, and mainstream accounts that depict them as passive victims. Women of Valor reveals the ways contemporary Jewish women writers from Allegra Goodman to the all-girl Hasidic alt-rock indie band, Bulletproof Stockings, are experimenting with different iterations of the Orthodox woman and endowing her with resilience, wide-ranging capabilities, and, significantly, a voice. It analyzes a range of cultural narratives, including critically acclaimed novels, short stories, blogs, mystery series, graphic fiction, memoirs, films, television, magazines, and music. The book argues that at the heart of their narratives is the reinterpretation of the “Woman of Valor” of Proverbs 31, the passage sung every Friday night to women in Jewish households. Once considered a document of the patriarchy condemning women to domesticity, the “Woman of Valor” has come to serve as the biblical vindication for women’s agency in the intellectual, economic, communal, political, as well as domestic spheres. Contrary to the images of religious women as abject and benighted creatures, then, the new “women of valor” in today’s culture are troll fighters, crime writers, and rock stars—and also religiously observant women who light Sabbath candles, dress modestly, and never mix meat and dairy. They provide a model of contemporary womanhood. Although located, specifically, in the crossfire of Orthodox Jewish women and their representations, Women of Valor offers a framework for examining the broader landscape of women of marginal communities in liberal-democratic societies of the twenty-first century. Forthcoming, Rutgers University Press, 2018

Doña Gracia Nasi (Beatrice de Luna, Beatrice Mendes) and her younger sister Reina (Brianda de Luna) were affluent and philanthropic sixteenth century Portuguese New Christians. Their families had been forcibly converted to Catholicism, but they gradually returned to Judaism. Jewish historical writings about Beatrice highlight her powerful and righteous role as a heroine, while they unkindly depict Brianda, with whom she
quarreled, as an informer who betrayed her family, her people and her religion. In the course of their travels, the sisters formed alliances with many rulers, engaged with several inquisitional bodies and elicited the deliberations
of the leading rabbis of the Ottoman Empire. The accounts of these rabbis tended to favor Beatrice—who financed them. However, on the basis of supplementary and sometimes contradictory published accounts of these events from inquisitional dossiers, diplomatic correspondence
and archives throughout Europe and the Mediterranean, I argue that the conventional binary depictions of the heroic Beatrice versus the wicked Brianda are flawed. I instead offer an alternative narrative that sheds light on the complexities of these women’s roles and relationships, allowing for historical empathy as well as historiographic insight that transcends
moralizing and binary understandings of gender and human relations.

The main aim of this paper is to present the image of Jewish women participating in hostilities on the Eastern Front of World War II in the contemporary Russian-language Jewish media on the example of the online edition of the American newspaper Yevreiski Mir. An analysis of its articles proves that the fates of women of Jewish origin in the Red Army and the Soviet resistance movement are used by the authors to strengthen social ties among Russian-speaking Jews. Moreover, it is shown that the use of biographical threads of selected Jewish women helps journalists create a new narrative in which Jewish women are presented not only as victims but also as war heroines proud of their origin.

In this article, I analyse the attribution of remedies and therapeutic procedures to women, anonymous in the main, embedded in a number of texts belonging to the medieval Hebrew corpus of literature on women’s healthcare. By suggesting a classification of the ways in which both women and their healing activities are referred to, I intend to offer a framework that helps to identify Jewish (and non-Jewish) women’s health agency from medical texts. In addition to textual analysis, I compare some of the mentions with evidences found in a variety of historical and literary sources for the sake of helping to contextualise them.

Chava Weissler ist Spezialistin für religiöses Leben von jüdischen Frauen in Osteuropa im siebzehnten und achtzehnten Jahrhundert. In einem Forschungsprojekt untersuchte sie hunderte Schriftzeugnisse religiösen Lebens, geschrieben für und teilweise von jüdischen Frauen. In ihrer Untersuchung findet Weissler symbolische Geschlechtskategorien, die über die traditionelle Geschlechtsdefinition der jüdischen Halakhah (Religionsgesetz) und Midrash (rabbinische Bibelauslegung) hinausgehen. Sie findet diese im Umgang mit religiöser jiddischer Literatur, die neben der sakralen hebräischen Literatur im Mittelalter und der Frühen Neuzeit als literarisches Genre entstand. Weissler fand heraus, dass die jiddische religiöse Literatur, die auch als „Frauenliteratur“ bezeichnet wird, sich nicht nur – wie zuerst angenommen – an Frauen richtete, die dem Hebräischen nicht mächtig waren. Stattdessen adressierte religiöse jiddische Literatur dieser Zeit auch jüdische Männer, die die gleichen sozialen Merkmale wie jüdische Frauen aufwiesen. Hierzu gehörten zum Beispiel ein geringes Ausmaß an religiösem Wissen und kaum oder keine hebräische Sprachkenntnis. Weissler stellte fest: wenn die jiddische religiöse Literatur in ihren Werbetexten vornehmlich jüdische Frauen ansprach, waren jüdische Männer, die die gleichen sozialen Merkmale aufwiesen, mitgemeint. Sie beweist ihre These unter anderem durch die Analyse von jiddischer religiöser Literatur, die implizit und explizit das männliche Geschlecht mit anspricht.
Die reale Abbildung der gesellschaftlichen Zusammensetzung des Mittelalters und der Frühen Neuzeit zeigt eine Vermischung der als weiblich und männlich definierten Geschlechtsattribute bei den Geschlechtern. Diese Vermischung wich stark von der traditionellen, jüdischen Geschlechtsvorstellung einer Dichotomie zwischen Mann und Frau ab, wie sie im jüdischen Religionsgesetz (Halakhah) und der jüdischen Bibelexegese (Midrash) zu finden ist. Anhand des Aufsatzes von Chava Weissler („Men Who be like Woman“, 1989) möchte ich einen Eindruck von neuen, symbolischen Geschlechtskategorien in der jiddischen religiösen Literatur vom sechzehnten bis zum achtzehnten Jahrhundert aufzeigen. Hierfür werden die Lebenssituation der Jüdinnen und Juden sowie ihre Bildungswege in dieser Zeitperiode aufgezeigt, der Gebrauch der jiddischen und der hebräischen Sprache erläutert, traditionelle Geschlechtskategorien vorgestellt und anhand der „Frauenliteratur“ neue symbolische Geschlechtskategorien herausgearbeitet.

Celem artykułu jest zaprezentowanie wybranych fragmentów Biblii, szczególnie tych mówiących o kobietach i wskazujących na ich  role społeczne (nie tylko żony i matki) oraz na walory (np. kobiet aktywnych, przekazujących wiarę i religię oraz tradycję).

Toybe Pan (17th century) is one of the first women who left a poem signed with her own name. Before her, we find in Yiddish literature considerable quantities of texts clearly written for a feminine audience and it is very difficult to find texts written by women. It is possible to find letters, but not literary works. Rivke Tiktiner's published book of Muser changes this pattern. It was after Tiktiner's work that Toybe Pan wrote a poem on the plague in Prague, and presents the scholar with the first woman writer in Yiddish literature who tries to find her own voice. In the present paper I wish to highlight the characteristics of her writing, and to suggest that this poem should not be read univocally as a tkhine, as scholarly literature has done rather coherently to this day, but rather as an example of the so-called historical songs written in the style of the tkhine.

abstract. In legal texts, women, acting on their own vŠolition, are actually described as indiŠiduals in negativŠe terms. This study examines clandestine betrothals and marriages; adultery, especially the treatment of adulterous women; the abused wife
and her ability to initiate diŠvorce proceedings against her husband; and testaments left with Christian notaries by Jewish women. While they were limited by vŠarious laws and customs, indiŠviduals managed to use laws and social structures for their own adŠantage, negotiated space for themselŠves, and deŠvised strategies to fulfil their wishes, which could be described as the pursuit of lovŠe, by circumŠenting obstacles placed in their way by communities, families, and the law. These practices raise questions about familial control, rabbinic authority, and communal power.

In April 1968, Marilyn Shubin, president of the Atlanta section of the National Council of Jewish Women (NCJW), put a blunt question to the section’s membership. “What should be the role of the ‘middle class volunteer’ in helping to meet the Urban Crisis? That’s the real sixty-four dollar question,” she wrote in the section’s monthly Bulletin, warning that “there are certainly no pat answers.”  Shubin paused to ask this question at a heady and perplexing moment in American history, a time of unprecedented opportunity and increasing unrest both locally and nationally. President Lyndon Baines Johnson—an adroit power broker with a bedrock faith in the federal government as an engine of social progress—had translated John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier optimism into a series of liberal legislative victories in the mid-1960s after Kennedy’s assassination. Troubled by the specter of entrenched poverty despite a booming postwar economy, Johnson and his many liberal allies in the Democratic-held Congress launched a so-called “War on Poverty” in 1964.