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  • In Memoriam: Paula E. Hyman, 1946–2011
  • Beth S. Wenger (bio)

With the death of Paula Hyman on December 15, 2011, Jewish and feminist historians lost one of their most gifted and beloved colleagues. Known for her pathbreaking scholarship as well as her political activism, Hyman was equally cherished for her intellectual rigor, tireless work in a host of organizations and institutions, unflagging support of friends and colleagues, and particularly for her encouragement of younger scholars. A distinguished historian who at the time of her death served as the Lucy Moses Professor of Modern Jewish History at Yale University, Paula Hyman was a pioneer in opening the field of Jewish Studies to the study of gender and she played a decisive role in reshaping our understanding of American Jewish experience.

Born in Boston in 1946, the eldest of three daughters to Ida Tatel-man and the late Sydney Hyman, she grew up in a family committed to education, both Jewish and secular. Through high school and college, Paula Hyman attended Hebrew Teachers College of Boston (now Hebrew College), where she gained a thorough knowledge of Hebrew language and classical Jewish texts, earning a B. J. Ed. in 1966. After completing high school at Boston’s Girls Latin School, she enrolled in Radcliffe College where she graduated summa cum laude with a B. A. in 1968.

When Paula Hyman entered Columbia University to begin postgraduate work in modern Jewish history, she studied with the leading Jewish historians of the day, including Gerson D. Cohen, Ismar Schorsch and Zvi Ankori. She earned her Ph. D. in 1975 and adapted her dissertation into her first book on French Jewish history, From Dreyfus to Vichy: The Remaking of French Jewry, 1906–1939 (1979)—a work that immediately established her as one of the leading Jewish historians of a new generation. Trained in social history, Hyman became a key figure in the scholarly movement to document Jewish history from the “ground up.” Her work on French Jewry, which also includes The Emancipation of the Jews of Alsace: Acculturation and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century (1991) and The Jews of Modern France (1998), reflects an abiding commitment to chronicle the lives of ordinary Jews. Using an array of sources, Paula Hyman’s scholarship not only invited fresh perspectives on French Jewry, but also signaled the coming of age of a new approach to the study of modern Jews. The turn to social [End Page 79] history meant both culling new sources as well as looking beyond the writings of intellectuals and elites. Such an approach shed light on the daily realities of Jewish life, spurred reconsiderations about the pace of change and the maintenance of tradition in the modern period, and resulted in attention to groups previously invisible within Jewish historical scholarship, including women.

Readers of this journal are likely familiar with Paula Hyman’s trail-blazing role in shaping the field of American Jewish women’s history. While her training began as a Europeanist, Hyman quickly developed a passion for American Jewish history and a particular commitment to documenting the lives of American Jewish women. In fact, she occupies a unique role as both a scholar of Jewish women’s history and a pivotal historical actor in the American Jewish feminist movement. In 1971, Hyman participated as a founding member of Ezrat Nashim, an activist group that pressured the Conservative movement to recognize women as equal participants in religious ritual and communal leadership, including the right to be ordained as rabbis. As a member of that organization, Hyman helped to author the 1972 “Call for Change,” a list of demands presented to the Conservative movement’s Rabbinical Assembly that is today a classic document in the history of Jewish feminism. In 1976, while still a graduate student, Hyman joined with two colleagues, Charlotte Baum and Sonya Michel, to publish The Jewish Woman in America, a first attempt to chronicle the history of American Jewish women. Written at a time when a distinct field of American Jewish women’s history had not yet been created and when only a paucity of primary or secondary sources existed, The Jewish Woman in America stands today as a primary...

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