Paula Hyman Memorial Lecture
Established in 2012 by Stanley H. Rosenbaum in memory of his wife Paula Hyman, this biennial lecture features cutting-edge work in the field of Jewish history.
Paula Hyman was the Lucy Moses Professor of Modern Jewish History at Yale University for 25 years, from 1986-2011, and the director of Judaic Studies at Yale from 1989-2002. She was a scholar of French Jewish history, publishing many award-winning books, including From Dreyfus to Vichy: The Remaking of French Jewry (1979), The Emancipation of the Jews of Alsace: Acculturation and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century (1991), and The Jews of Modern France (1998). She was also a pioneering historian of Jewish women, co-authoring The Jewish Woman in America (1976), co-editing Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia (1997), editing My Life as a Radical Jewish Woman: Memoirs of a Zionist Feminist in Poland (2001), and authoring Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History: The Roles and Representation of Women (1995). She was the first woman to serve as President of the American Academy of Jewish Research (2004), received honorary degrees from the Jewish Theological Seminary and Hebrew Union College, and was honored with a lifetime achievement award from the National Foundation for Jewish Culture (2004).
Recent lectures in this series have been delivered by Deborah Dash Moore (“How a Kosher Meat Boycott Brought Jewish Women’s History into the Mainstream”), Beth S. Wenger (“American Jewish Men and the Anxieties of Breadwinning”), Marion Kaplan (“Lisbon is sold out! Sites of Anxiety and Hope: Jewish Refugees in Portugal, 1940-1945”), Lila Corwin Berman (“America’s Jewish Question”), Mara H. Benjamin (“Terrestrializing Jewish Thought”), and John Efron (“All Consuming: Germans, Jews, and the Meaning of Meat”).