“Votes for Women”: The History of Equal Suffrage in Israel and America

Sunday, October 30, 2016 at 7:00pm
Rapaporte Treasure Hall, Goldfarb Library
Brandeis University

Professor Margalit Shilo of Bar Ilan University will read an excerpt from “Girls of Liberty:  The Struggle for Suffrage in Mandatory Palestine,” a masterful chronicle of the work of the Union of Hebrew Women for Equal Rights and their success in securing women’s suffrage in the British Mandate between 1917 and 1936. HBI supported this book with research and translation awards and published it in both the Brandeis Series on Gender, Culture, Religion and the Law and the HBI Series on Jewish Women.

Discussants will be Professor Melissa Klapper and Attorney Riki Shapira-Rosenberg -- Klapper, author of Babies, Ballots and Banners of Peace: Jewish Women’s Activism 1890 -1940, funded in part with an HBI Research Award, will discuss the role of Jewish women in the suffrage movement in the United States.

Riki Shapira-Rosenberg, HBI Helen Gartner Hammer scholar-in-residence, is a lawyer who acts on behalf of ultra-Orthodox women in Israel in their struggle to have a voice in the contemporary electoral process.

HBI Associate Director Dr. Lisa Fishbayn Joffe will moderate.​ RSVP recommended.

Helène Aylon​ Coming to HBI in Spring 2017

HBI Welcomes Helen Gartner Hammer Scholars

Avishalom Westreich is a Senior Lecturer at the College of Law and Business, Ramat Gan, and a Research Fellow in the Kogod Research Center for Contemporary Jewish Thought at the Shalom Hartman Institute, Jerusalem. 

Geraldine Gudefin, a Ph.D student in History at Brandeis University,  is writing a dissertation entitled "Navigating the Civil and Religious Worlds: Jewish Immigrants & Marital Laws in France and the United States,1881-1939."

Ronit Irshai is a lecturer in the gender studies program at Bar Ilan University and a research fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. She has been a visiting scholar at Harvard Divinity School during the academic year of 2007-2008.

Riki Shapira-Rosenberg is an attorney and Israeli feminist Orthodox activist. She holds a L.L.B from Bar-Ilan University, an L.L.M from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, as well as a B.A. in Jewish History and Education from the Hebrew University. 

 Learn more about the scholars from their complete bios.

Boston Agunah Taskforce Named Semi-finalist, Lippman-Kanfer Prize

Lippman Kanfer Foundation for Living Torah names the Boston Agunah Taskforce as a semi-finalist for the Lippman-Kanfer Prize for Applied Jewish Wisdom.  The Boston Agunah Taskforce is devoted to research, education and advocacy for fairness in the Jewish divorce process. The Taskforce believes that withholding a Jewish divorce is a form of domestic abuse.

HBI Bids Farewell to Summer Interns and Academic Adviser, Rachel Bernstein

After a day of presentations on their individual research projects, HBI bids farewell to both the 2016 Gilda Slifka interns and their Academic Adviser, Rachel Bernstein. After eight years, Bernstein shares her experience and memories in Thanks for All the Summers: A Love Letter to HBI, available on our blog.

HBI Partners with JOFA for Free Webinar: Love, Marriage, and Jewish Families

How do young women and men feel about sex, love, and marriage? Who gets married and when? How do couples and individuals decide about children? What are the changing faces of modern Jewish families and what do diverse families mean for American Jewish life today?

On May 12, 2016,  JOFA and HBI partnered for a free webinar with Professor Sylvia Barack Fishman, editor of Love, Marriage, and Jewish Families: Paradoxes of a Social Revolution and Dr. Michelle Shain, author of the chapter "Dreams and Realities: American Jewish Young Adults' Decisions about Fertility." Amy Powell, communications director at the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute, moderated the discussion.

This is a co-production with: 

HBI Gives $75,000 in Research Awards

Titles like “Wild, Outside, in the Night: Maurice Sendak, Queer American Jewishness, and the Child” and “Kadosh Kadosh Kadosh: All Rise for Women on a Beit Din” are just two of the 25 research awards the HBI will support over the following year.

These projects, of Golan Moskowitz and Helene Aylon respectively, and the others received a total of $75,000 after the annual Academic Advisory Committee meeting in December, 2015. The AAC, comprised of 160 experts and academics from 52 schools in eight countries, review the appropriate proposals and comment over a review period. The process culminates with a day-long meeting at HBI, this year attended by 30 members, to discuss the finalists. Final decisions are made by Prof. Sylvia Barack Fishman, HBI’s co-director and chair of the AAC along with Prof. Shulamit Reinharz, HBI’s founding director and Dr. Lisa Fishbayn Joffe, associate director of HBI and director of the Project on Gender, Culture, Religion and the Law. 

The research awards support the HBI mission of developing fresh ways of thinking about Jews and gender worldwide. Sub-categories include History, Israel and the Yishuv; Families, Children and the Holocaust; Diaspora Studies, Judaism, Gender, Culture, Religion and the Law, Biography, Film and Video and Arts. 

HBI YouTube channel

Scholarly Research

Artist-in-Residence program

Gilda Slifka Internship Program

Visit our YouTube channel for additional videos on our HBI Conversations program and the Project on Gender, Culture, Religion and the Law.

HBI in the News

Former SIR, Lori Harrison-Kahan, wins Western Literature Association's Don D. Walker Prize for research done at HBI on her paper,
Miriam Michelson’s Yellow Journalism and the Multi-Ethnic West. 

Congratulations to Julia Creet, former HBI scholar-in-residence and AAC member; Sara R. Horowitz, AAC member, and Amira Bojadzija-Dan, for winning the Canadian Jewish Book award in the category of Jewish Thought and Culture for H.G. Adler: Life, Literature, Legacy (Northwestern University Press).

HBI Board member, Talia Carner, discusses her Jewish identity in The Times of Israel.

Orit Rozin’s new book, A Home for All Jews: Citizenship, Rights, and National Identity in the New Israeli State, in the Brandeis Series on Gender, Culture, Religion and the Law, gets a rave review in The New Rambler.

Rivka Neriya-Ben Shahar, former HBI scholar-in-residence, writes about how women in two devout communities cope with the Internet, in Negotiating agency: Amish and ultra-Orthodox women’s responses to the Internet in the journal, New Media and Society.

Great review in Mooney on the Theatre on the work of former HBI Scholar-in-residence,  Katka Reszke, a Polish filmmaker for "We Keep Coming Back.”

HBI Intern, Nora Smolonsky, writes in Mayyim Hayyim’s blog, A Visit to Mayyim Hayyim: A Nondenominational Mikveh. 

HBI Board member Talia Carner speaks on her new book, Hotel Moscow. 

Janet H. Burstein publsihed  Israeli Mothers in Film:“Re-visioning” Culture, Engendering Autonomy in Project Muse. 

Rave review in Jewish Boston for The Pearl the Slipped it's Shell by Wendy Wolfe Fine, HBI 2016 artist-in-residence.

HBI founding director, Shulamit Reinharz is quoted in the Forward, The Frum Filmmakers Revolutionizing Cinema. 

Brandeis student newspaper, The Justice, writes Evolving Families about the book launch for Love, Marriage and Jewish Families: Paradoxes of a Social Revolution.

HBI's former scholar-in-residence Kathryn Hellerstein in The Daily Pennsylvanian on influential women in the Yiddish tradition.