Related research guides
Digital archives
Archives of Sexuality and GenderA collection of primary sources for the historical study of sex, sexuality, and gender. With material dating back to the sixteenth century, researchers and scholars can examine how sexual norms have changed over time, health and hygiene, the development of sex education, the rise of sexology, changing gender roles, social movements and activism, erotica, and many other interesting topical areas.
Queer PastsA collection of primary source exhibits for students and scholars of queer history and culture.
Sex & SexualityExplores changing attitudes towards human sexuality, gender identities and sexual behaviors from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries.
Women's Studies ArchiveFocuses on the evolution of feminism throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the archive provides materials on women’s political activism, such as suffrage, birth control, pacifism, civil rights, and socialism, and on women’s voices, from female-authored literature to women’s periodicals.
Women, reference works
Israeli Women's Studies by Publication Date: 2005This reader exposes the hidden causes of ongoing discrimination and links the restrictions that Israeli women experience to deeply entrenched structures, including colonial legacies, religious traditions, capitalism, nationalism, and ongoing political conflict. In contrast, the essays also explore how women act creatively to affect social change and shape public discourse in less ostensible ways.
Jewish Radical Feminism: voices from the women's liberation movement by Publication Date: 2018Finalist, 2019 PROSE Award in Biography, given by the Association of American Publishers Fifty years after the start of the women's liberation movement, a book that at last illuminates the profound impact Jewishness and second-wave feminism had on each other Jewish women were undeniably instrumental in shaping the women's liberation movement of the 1960s, 70s, and 80s.
Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical EncyclopediaCovers over 1,700 biographical entries, 300 thematic essays and 1,400 photographs and illustrations.
Image: German suffragette Bertha Pappenheim (1859–1936) in her riding outfit, from the Encyclopedia's entry "Juedischer Frauenbund (The League of Jewish Women)".
Jews and Gender by Publication Date: 2001Volume XVI in this well-received annual series contains an up-to-date survey of gender issues in modern Judaism. It includes original essays on Orthodox Judaism and feminism, American Jewish women, female rabbis, the impact of feminism on rabbinic study, masculinity, Jewish women in the ThirdReich, and gender and military service.
The JPS Guide to Jewish Women by Publication Date: 2003A history and celebration of Jewish women through the centuries. This is an indispensable resource about the role of Jewish women from post-biblical times to the twentieth century. Unique in its approach, it is structured so that each chapter, which is divided into three parts, covers a specific period and geographical area.
Midrashic Women by Publication Date: 2002While most gender-based analyses of rabbinic Judaism concentrate on the status of women in the halakhah (the rabbinic legal tradition), Judith R. Baskin turns her attention to the construction of women in the aggadic midrash, a collection of expansions of the biblical text, rabbinic ruminations, and homiletical discourses that constitutes the non-legal component of rabbinic literature.
The Rowman & Littlefield handbook of women's studies in religionPublication Date: 2021Offers interreligious and multicultural perspectives on women’s studies in religion in conversation with specific contextualized gender-biased justice challenges. Contributing authors address 25 current and trending themes from their diverse socio-cultural-religious backgrounds.
Women, special collections
American JewessA digital reproduction of the 8 volumes of The American Jewess, the first English-language periodical targeted to American Jewish women, covering an evocative range of topics that ranged from women's place in the synagogue to whether women should ride bicycles.
The Bais Yaakov ProjectA project dedicated to the collection, preservation, and digitization of historical material related to the Bais Yaakov movement from its founding in 1917 through today.
National Council of Jewish WomenFirst annual report 1894-1895. Access to digital copy via the Jewish Life in America c.1654-1954, Sources from the American Jewish Historical Society, New York.
Jewish Feminist Collections (Brandeis University)The Archives and Special Collections department of the Brandeis Library has a current focus on collecting material related to Jewish feminism, which has been a subject of great interest. The collections include the Lilith Magazine Records, Marcia Freedman Papers, Aviva Cantor Papers, E.M. Broner papers, among others. Image: Logo of the now-defunct Women's Party founded by Marcia Freedman in Israel in 1977.
For additional details on the Jewish Feminist Collections at Brandeis University click here.
Women, journals
Bridges: a Jewish feminist journalAvailable in print and online. First volume published in 1990.
The Jewish womanAvailable online. Published in New York by the Council of Jewish Women, 1921-1931.
Lilith: the Jewish women's magazineIndependent, Jewish & frankly feminist since 1976, Lilith magazine charts Jewish women's lives with exuberance, rigor, affection, subversion and style.
Nashim: a journal of Jewish women's studies & gender issuesProvides an international, interdisciplinary, and scholarly forum in Jewish women's and gender studies, and is the only one of its kind.
Women in Judaism: A Multidisciplinary JournalAn academic, refereed journal published exclusively online, and devoted to scholarly debate on gender-related issues in Judaism.
Women, LCSH
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH). Results updated in October 2021
- Feminism--Religious aspects--Judaism (112 catalog results)
- Jewish Woman (1,418 catalog results)
- Women in Judaism (256 catalog results)
- Women (Jewish law) (72 catalog results)
LGBTQ+
Balancing on the Mechitza by Publication Date: 2010The contributors--activists, theologians, scholars, and other transgender Jews--share for the first time in a printed volume their theoretical contemplations as well as rite-of-passage and other transformative stories.
Queer in Israel by Publication Date: 2018
Queer Theory and the Jewish Question by Publication Date: 2003The essays in this volume boldly map the historically resonant intersections between Jewishness and queerness, between homophobia and anti-Semitism, and between queer theory and theorizations of Jewishness.
