Is it possible that Jews will expel their wives, the mothers of their children? The Jews returning from the Babylonian Diaspora were asked, according to the Book of Ezrah and Nehemia, to differentiate themselves from other people by expelling their foreign wives, thus purifying the community. This was a particularly harsh demand, quite unique in the biblical context. Yonina Dor examines this story through critical analysis of the biblical text, a historical discussion of these women's identity, and an anthropological examination of the events

Jewish women's exclusion from the public domains of religious and civil life has been reflected in their near absence in the master narratives of the East European Jewish past. As a result, the study of Jewish women in eastern Europe is still in its infancy. The fundamental task of historians to construct women as historical subjects, 'as a focus of inquiry, a subject of the story, an agent of the narrative', has only recently begun. This volume is the first collection of essays devoted to the study of Jewish women's experiences in Eastern Europe. The guest editors for this volume are Paula Hyman of Yale University, a leading figure in Jewish women’s history in the United States, and ChaeRan Freeze of Brandeis University, author of a prize-winning study on Jewish divorce in nineteenth-century Russia. Their introduction provides a much-needed historiographic survey that summarizes the major work in the field and highlights the lacunae. Their contributors, following this lead, have attempted to go beyond mere description of what women experienced to explore how gender constructed distinct experiences, identities, and meanings. Among them, Shulamit S. Magnus analyses perhaps the best-known memoir written by an east European Jewish woman—Pauline Wengeroff’s Memoirs of a Jewish Grandmother. Ellen Kellman explores the life of a prominent Jewish feminist whose activism was shaped by the devastating impact of the First World War. Moshe Rosman considers the question of whether Jewish women in eastern Europe had power. There are two chapters on the education of Jewish women in eastern Europe (Eliyana Adler, Carole Balin), and two on Jewish women who converted to Christianity (ChaeRan Freeze, Rachel Manekin). Tova Cohen considers how female authors writing in Hebrew encoded their gender concerns in their writing, while Ewa Plach demonstrates the concerns of cosmopolitan bourgeois and intellectual Jewish women. Her analysis of a Zionist women’s Polish-language feminist newspaper illustrates the heterogeneity of Polish Jewish womanhood and the hybrid nature of Jewish identity. In seeking to recover lost achievements and voices and place them into a broader analytical framework, this volume is an important first step in the rethinking of east European Jewish history with the aid of new insights gleaned from the research on gender.

This book is an attempt to explain the traditions in the Kabala which relate to the female body of G-d.

Women occupy a central place in public consciousness in our time. Changes are occurring in many areas, and are bringing women closer towards equality with men. One of the main changes occurring are in law, and especially family law, governing the activities of women in their main traditional arena. Most of the issues in family law impact the status of women directly or indirectly, but the most important are the issues that determine her marriage: polygamy and forceful divorce . The author invites the reader of this book to a journey that introduces the process of design and formulation of the protection offered by various denominations in Jewish law to the marriage status of women, while having a complex and fascinating reciprocal relationship among themselves and with the environment. Westreich manages to illuminate this complex topic from several angles. This book will interest the practical litigator and the modern reader as well as those affiliated with the traditional rabbinical seminary.

The twentieth century has been a time of great turmoil and momentous events for the Jewish people. How did Jewish women react during this period? Through the history of the International Council of Jewish Women, this work traces from its inception the course of an operation which is both far-reaching and little publicized: that of the mobilization of women who were confronted successively with the rise of anti-Semitism, migrations of persecuted Jewish populations, the destruction of European Jewry, the creation of the State of Israel, and the dissension surrounding the Arab-Israeli conflict. Basing herself on archives and historical documents, Nelly Las analyzes the structures and operating mechanisms of an international Jewish women's organization. She also discusses the humanitarian action of numerous Jewish women's associations at the local level.