

Reading Jewish Women: Marginality as Opportunity, A SpeakChorus
(Presented at Limmud Vancouver, 2018) When I was in Rabbinic school, I took a history course on the Jewish Enlightenment/Haskalah, a movement which arose first in Western Europe (Germany mainly) and later in Eastern Europe, from the late 18th until the late 19th centuries. Required reading for the course was Iris Parush’s book Reading Jewish Women: Marginality and Modernization in Nineteenth-Century Eastern European Jewish Society (2004). It opened a new world to me. Parush’s