The Genesis of Jewish Gender: From the Bible to the Baal Shem Tov

Join us for “A Short History of Jewish Gender: Part 1” with Fordham Associate Professor of Theology Sarit Kattan-Gribetz and Bar-Ilan University’s Moshe Rosman.

The webinar will trace the development of myths, symbols, concepts, and identity definitions that delineated the gender boundary in Jewish theory and practice. Rosman will explore gender as conceived in the book of Genesis and applied in Europe in the medieval and early modern periods.

Kattan-Gribetz is the author of Time and Difference in Rabbinic Judaism (Princeton, 2020) and numerous articles about time in antiquity, including the use of women’s bodies as metaphors for time; the correspondence between Philo and Seneca’s philosophical approaches to quotidian time; and the recent “temporal turn” in the fields of ancient Judaism and Jewish studies. She is currently writing her second book, Jerusalem: A Feminist History.

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.