Well-Behaved Women Undermining Jewish Gender II: Glikl Hamel As a Model Jewish Grandmother?

Glikl Hamel is one of the rare female voices from the premodern era thanks to the memoirs she began writing in 1691. In this lecture, Moshe Rosman, professor emeritus of Jewish history, Bar-Ilan University, will offer a new interpretation of Hamel as conventional in appearance yet subtly feminist and somewhat ambivalent about Jewish society in her day.

The lecture will also feature Ruth von Bernuth, the Seymour & Carol Levin Distinguished Term Professor and director of Carolina Center for Jewish Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Her research focuses on the literature and culture of the late medieval/early modern period—or the 15th to the 18th centuries—with a special emphasis on the 16th century. She is the author of Wunder, Spott und Prophetie: Natürliche Narrheit in den Historien von Claus Narren (Niemeyer, 2009), How the Wise Men Got to Chelm: The Life and Times of a Yiddish Folk Tradition (NYU Press, 2016), and Zwischen Ereignis und Erzählung: Konversion als Medium der Selbstbeschreibung in Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit, with Julia Weitbrecht and Werner Röcke (de Gruyter, 2016).

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.

All Fordham events in Jewish Studies are free and open to public.