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Reviewed by:
  • Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia
  • Deborah Greniman (bio)
Paula E. Hyman and Dalia Ofer (eds.) Alice Shalvi (associate ed.) Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical EncyclopediaJerusalem: Jewish Women's Archive–Shalvi Publishing, 2006. Electronic publication on CD-ROM. $200

The publication of a well conceived new encyclopedia is a cause for celebration. Under the skillful coordination of editors and publishers with a vision, an encyclopedia brings together hundreds of contributors to sum up "what we know" about the world and about human cultural production, in general or in a given field. How much more may we be joyful when the encyclopedia is in a field that lies as close to our hearts and minds as that of Jewish women, and when the result brings such credit to the over 1,000 contributors and the powerful team of publisher, editors and staff who brought the project to fruition!

In their Preface to the Encyclopedia of Jewish Women (EJW), editors Paula E. Hyman and Dalia Ofer write:

Believing that knowledge empowers, we were particularly eager to provide this and future generations of Jewish women the tools to become, as much as possible, agents of their own situations. We also recognized the importance of this knowledge for Jewish men.

These words are as descriptive of the project itself as of its contents. "Women's leadership"—the subject of two recent conferences in Israel (sponsored, respectively, by the Israel Association of Feminist and Gender Studies and the Schechter Institute of Jewish Studies)—can have many expressions. One [End Page 244] of the finest of them is the ability to bring people together and elicit the best of their talents, individually and as a group, for the sake of making a lasting contribution to humanity and to the community within which they live and work. That is the accomplishment of the EJW and those who created it.

The Encyclopedia of Jewish Women is the brainchild of publisher Moshe Shalvi, who cut his encyclopedic teeth on the first edition of the Encyclopedia Judaica (EJ, 1972) and the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust (1990). Through prolonged exposure to and partnership in the feminist activity of his spouse, Israel Prize laureate Alice Shalvi, he became aware of the shortcomings of such projects in their coverage of the histories, biographies and cultural production of women. As he is fond of pointing out, only about 400,000 of the 15,000,000 words in the EJ were devoted to women and women-related topics.1 In the EJW, he begins to redress this imbalance with some 3,300,000 words devoted entirely to Jewish women, about two thirds of them in biographical entries and the remaining third in topical essays.

How does one review a project of this magnitude? Surely not by reading it all; I expect to be doing that for the rest of my life, as I dip into the richly detailed entries for needed information—or to browse for the simple pleasure of it. And pleasure there is, for the EJW bears the mark of Alice Shalvi's expert styling, and of Moshe Shalvi's devoted assembling of a wealth of illustrations, exploiting to the hilt the electronic medium's freedom from space limitations. Indeed, the EJW doubles as an archive of photographs of Jewish women and reproductions of their works. By contrast, a recent review by Shnayer Leiman of the new edition of Encyclopedia Judaica (NEJ), on the site "Seforim blog," points out that it has many fewer illustrations than the first edition—whose illustrations editor was Moshe Shalvi.

Any discussion of particular articles or contributors will only slight the rest. For a random example, then, I began at the very beginning, with the comprehensive article by Billie Melman of Tel-Aviv University on Sarah Aaronsohn, one of the leaders of the NILI espionage organization, which was established by a small circle of Jews in Palestine during World War I to report on Turkish activities to the British. Aaronsohn, who took her own life at the age of 27 after being discovered and tortured by the Turks, lives on in Israel's collective memory as a cultural heroine. Nevertheless, the NEJ devotes but a...

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