User:Sarah Silberman/Paula Hyman

Paula Ellen Hyman (September 30, 1946 - December 15, 2011) was a social historian and the Lucy Moses Professor of Modern Jewish History at Yale University. She served as the president of the American Academy for Jewish Research from 2004 to 2008. She also was the first female dean of the Seminary College of Jewish Studies at the Jewish Theological Seminary (link) from 1981 to 1986. Hyman was a pioneer for gender equality in Jewish religious practice, helping push for women's ordination as Conservative rabbis.

During her time, Hyman was one of the most prominent Jewish women’s activists and her work is still widely read and cited today in the field of Jewish Studies. Jewish Historian Hasia Diner credits Hyman as the originator of the study of Jewish women’s history.

Early Life and Career (1946-1986)
Hyman was born in Boston, Massachusetts on September 30, 1946 to Ida Hyman (née Tatelman) and Sydney Hyman, two first generation Jewish-Americans from Eastern Europe. Ida was of Russian descent and Sydney of Lithuanian. Hyman was the first of three daughters. Her mother worked as a bookkeeper and was in charge of the home while her father was an office manager. In her childhood household, Jewish culture was integral to family life. Starting in high school and continuing in early college, Hyman studied Hebrew and classic Jewish works at Hebrew Teachers College in Boston, where she earned a Bachelors of Jewish Education in 1966. In 1968 she graduated summa cum laude with a B.A. from Radcliffe College, which was then the sister school of Harvard. While at Radcliffe, Hyman was mentored by Jewish historians Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi and Isadore Twersky.

In 1971 Hyman helped found Ezrat Nashim, a Jewish activist group whose goal was the ordination of women as Conservative rabbis, a foreshadowing of her later position as a champion of gender equality in religious Jewish life. After Radcliffe, Hyman went on to do post-graduate work at Columbia University starting in 1972, where she would later be a professor, and earn her Ph.D. in History in 1975. While at Columbia, Hyman and other Jewish feminists wrote a manifesto to call for the ordination of women rabbis in Conservative Judaism, which they then delivered to hundreds of conservative rabbis at a Rabbinical Assembly. The title of this manifesto was “Jewish Women Call for Change.”

Hyman’s Columbia doctoral dissertation was titled “From Dreyfus to Vichy: The Remaking of French Jewry, 1906–1939” and was published by  Columbia University Press in 1979. The content of her dissertation focused on Eastern European Jews immigrating to France up until World War II and how that changed French Jewry. This book was a finalist in the National Jewish Book Award competition in History. While in graduate school, Hyman co-authored a book titled The Jewish Woman in America with Charlotte Baum and Sonya Michel. After graduating from Columbia, Hyman was a professor there and later at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. There, she was the first female dean of the Seminary College of Jewish Studies. She served in  this position until 1986, when she moved to Yale University.

Later Life and Death (1986-2011)
Over the years Hyman became known as a prominent advocate for gender equality in Jewish religious life, both in her professional and personal lives. At Yale, Hyman was the Lucy Moses Professor of Modern Jewish History and served as the chair of the Program in Judaic Studies for over 10 years. This appointment made her the first woman to head a Jewish Studies program at a prominent university. Over the course of her career Hyman authored ten books and sixty articles.

Additionally, Hyman was the President of the American Association for Jewish Research from 2004 to 2008, the co-chair of the academic council of the National Foundation for Jewish Culture from 1995 to 2002, a member of the executive board of the Association for Jewish Studies and the Leo Baeck Institute, while being on the editorial board for various journals including Association for Jewish Studies Review, Jewish Social Studies, Journal for the Feminist Study of Religion, andYIVO Annual. Additionally, she received the Lifetime Achievement Award in Historical Studies from the National Foundation for Jewish Culture. For over two decades she edited The Modern Jewish Experience from the Indiana University Press.

She was the recipient of various honors and awards: a 1999 National Jewish Book Award, a 2004 Achievement Award in Historical Studies from the National Foundation for Jewish Culture, and honorary degrees from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in 2000, the Hebrew Union College in 2002, and the Hebrew College in 2010.

Hyman died of breast cancer on December 15, 2011. She is survived by her husband, Dr. Stanley Rosenbaum, her two daughters, Judith and Adina, two grandchildren, Ma’ayan and Aviv, her mother Ida, and her two sisters, Merle and Toby. After her death, Hyman was commemorated by the commencement of the Paula Hyman Oral History Project, created in part by the Women’s Caucus of the Association of Jewish Studies (AJS). Hyman was part of this caucus until the time of her death. The goal of this oral history was to conserve the reflections of the founding members of the caucus.

Research Interests
Hyman's research interests included topics in modern European and American Jewish history, with a special emphasis on the history of women and gender. Her work can be summed up as the interaction of Judaism and feminism in various countries. Some of her particular interests are the way in which French Jewry changed from the Dreyfus Affair to the present, and how Eastern European Jewish women immigrants interacted with work outside the home. On the latter topic, Hyman is known for her works on Jewish women in New York as activists in events such as the kosher meat boycott in 1902 and the New York rent strike of 1907.Her interest in such activism finds its base in her growing up in the 1960s, an era known for its social changes including a widely-fought feminist movement.

Various Works

 * “Immigrant Women and Consumer Protest: The New York Kosher Meat Boycott of 1902.” American Jewish History (1980); 91–105
 * “From City to Suburb: Temple Mishkan Tefila of Boston.” In The American Synagogue: A Sanctuary Transformed, edited by Jack Wertheimer, 85–105. Cambridge and New York: 1987
 * "Joseph Salvador: Proto-Zionist or Apologist for Assimilation?" Jewish Social Studies Vol. 34, No. 1, January 1972
 * "The History of European Jewry: Recent Trends in the Literature" The Journal of Modern History Vol. 54, No. 2, June 1982
 * “The Modern Jewish Family: Image and Reality.” In The Jewish Family: Metaphor and Memory, edited by David Kraemer. New York and Oxford: 1989; 179–193
 * “The Ideological Transformation of Modern Jewish Historiography.” In The State of Jewish Studies, edited by Shaye J. D. Cohen and Edward L. Greenstein, 143–157, Detroit: 1990
 * "The Dreyfus Affair: The Visual and the Historical," The Journal of Modern History Vol. 61, No. 1, March 1989
 * “The Dynamics of Social History.” Studies in Contemporary Jewry 10 (1994): 93–111;
 * “The Jewish Body Politic: Gendered Politics in the Early Twentieth Century.” Nashim 2 (1999): 37–51
 * “National Contexts, East European Immigrants, and Jewish Identity: A Comparative Analysis.” In National Variations in Modern Jewish Identity, edited by Steven M. Cohen and Gabriel Horenczyk, 109–123. Albany: 1999
 * “The Transnational Experience of Jewish Women in Western and Central Europe after World War I.” In European Jews and Jewish Europeans between the Two World Wars, edited by Raya Cohen, 21–33 (Michael, vol. 16, 2004)
 * “Interpretive Contest: Art Critics and Jewish Historians.” In Text and Context: Essays in Modern Jewish History and Historiography in Honor of Ismar Schorsch, edited by Eli Lederhendler and Jack Wertheimer, 74–94. New York: 2005.
 * "Recent Trends in European Jewish Historiography," The Journal of Modern History Vol. 77, No. 2, June 2005
 * The Jewish Woman in America, co-authored with Charlotte Baum and Sonya Michel. New York: 1976
 * From Dreyfus to Vichy: The Remaking of French Jewry, 1906–1939. New York: 1979
 * The Jewish Family: Myths and Reality, edited with Steven M. Cohen. New York: 1986
 * The Emancipation of the Jews of Alsace: Acculturation and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century. New Haven: 1991
 * Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History: The Roles and Representation of Women. Seattle: 1995
 * Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, co-edited with Deborah Dash Moore, 2 vols. New York: 1997
 * The Jews of Modern France. Berkeley and Los Angeles: 1998
 * My Life as a Radical Jewish Woman: Memoirs of a Zionist Feminist in Poland, by Puah Rakovsky, edited with an introduction and notes. Bloomington: 2001 Jewish Women in Eastern Europe, co-edited with ChaeRan Freeze and Antony Polonsky. Polin, Volume 18, 2005.