Paula Ellen Hyman was the Lucy Moses Professor of Modern Jewish History at Yale University and president of the American Academy for Jewish Research from 2004 to 2008. She also served as the first female dean of the Seminary College of Jewish Studies at the Jewish Theological Seminary from 1981 to 1986. She received a PhD from Columbia University in 1975.
Hyman's research interests included topics in modern European and American Jewish history, with a special emphasis on the history of women and gender. In addition to several books on French Jewry, she has written widely on Jewish women’s history. Among her books are The Jewish Woman in America, Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History, and the two-volume encyclopedia Jewish Women in America, which she co-edited with Deborah Dash Moore. She also edited and introduced Puah Rakovsky’s My Life as a Radical Jewish Woman: Memoirs of a Zionist Feminist in Poland. She was also one of the founders of the Jewish feminist group Ezrat Nashim in 1971.
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