Paula Hyman, who lived in Westville and was a leading religious historian who helped bring gender “egalitarianism” to American Judaism, died Thursday. She was 65. Her funeral is set for Friday at 11:30 a.m. at Congregation Beth El-Keser Israel synagogue on Harrison Street.
Click here to read a full-length tribute to her career and life by Deborah Dash Moore published by the Jewish Forward; Moore writes: “Hyman wanted to reclaim Jewish women activists of yore for contemporary Jews as part of her lifelong mission to challenge received ideas about leadership, values and ways of doing things in the United States and Israel. Her work ultimately transformed Jewish historical scholarship by bringing gender analysis into its mainstream,” Moore writes.
And read on for a blog tribute posted by Westville writer (and fellow congregant) Mark Oppenheimer:
I don’t know if I will get around to writing anything more elegant about this, but for now you should all just know that this morning Paula Hyman died. She was one of my dissertation advisors, and a friend, and a mainstay of our synagogue. She was first diagnosed with cancer thirty years ago (or so), beat it back, then suffered a recurrence.
Paula was a leading historian of French Jewry and of Jewish women. She co-edited an encyclopedia of Jewish women, and then a CD-ROM version, and her book Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History was one of the most sophisticated, and readable, works of scholarship I know.
But for the non-scholar, Paula’s greatest importance was as a feminist activist. She was part of a remarkable cohort of Jewish women who in the late 1960s and 1970s pushed for full inclusion of women in the Conservative movement — a battle they ultimately won — and she believed, too, in full rights for LGBTQ Jews. She was a member of the New York Havurah, the urban collective in NYC in the 1970s. She never lost her activist fervor; when she was in her late fifties, and comfortably tenured, I bumped into her holding a sign at a rally in Boston for peace in Israel. She mentored numerous historians, and it’s a compliment when I say that her mentorship often included closing her office door and settling in for an hour of gossip, only late in the hour to come around to the latest dissertation chapter we were supposed to discuss — she was a rigorous scholar, and she could be intimidating, but she was not prim or self-righteous. And boy did she love talking about her daughters and her grandchildren.
As the Jews say, may her memory be for a blessing.