Gender Roles
Engage with the gendered dimensions of Jewish life and discover lost voices of Jewish women.
Curated by Deborah Dash Moore and Noam Pianko
Gendered Ritual Roles
Jewish women had very clearly demarcated spaces in traditional Jewish rituals. All four of these visual sources illustrate examples of differentiated roles. Even while engaged in a shared ritual practice such as preparing bodies for burial, synagogue prayer, or a wedding ceremony, men and women occupied separate spaces. These images capture the gendered expectations, and efforts to preserve these customs, in a variety of ritual settings.
Jews Praying in the Synagogue on Yom Kippur
The women’s prayer section depicted in this painting gives a rare glimpse into the ways that women have asserted their agency and voices even in gender-segregated spaces.
Huppah
This glimpse into an eighteenth-century German Jewish marriage ceremony offers an opportunity to consider how gender roles have changed for this vital ritual.
Jewish Burial Society: Sewing the Shrouds and The Washing of the Body
Women played key roles in preparing the deceased for burial. This painting shows women’s involvement in the ultimate act of generosity.
Torah Binder (Munich)
This Torah binder, made for boys at birth and later brought by young men as a symbol of participation in the synagogue, illustrates the fixed nature of traditional gender expectations.
Finding Women’s Voices
Changing gender norms in the early modern period created new venues for some Jewish women to begin to take on more influential roles as communal leaders. These sources point to the evolving position of women around the globe in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. What changes can you see in these examples of Jewish women playing new roles in religious, literary, and artistic spheres?
Miriam HaNeviah
Miriam, one of the few women in the Bible to be called a prophet, provides an important opportunity for contemporary liturgists to expand the male-dominated framework of traditional Jewish prayer.
Haggadah (Frankfurt)
One of Charlotte von Rothschild’s most outstanding works is the only known nineteenth-century Hebrew manuscript to have been illuminated by a woman.
Portrait of Eva Frank
Despite gender restrictions, Jewish women played central roles as religious leaders in the early modern period. Meet the female leader of one of the most controversial cults in Jewish history.
Other Curated Collections
Jewish Resistance and the Holocaust
From armed confrontation to religious defiance, Jews fought back against the perpetrators of the Holocaust.
Jewish Gauchos in South America’s Pampas
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with the help of philanthropic organizations, many Jews escaping persecution in Russia made new lives for themselves in the South American pampas.
Jewish Perspectives on Reproductive Rights
Since Roe v. Wade was overturned in June of 2022, abortion’s political, religious, and social impact has been at the forefront of political debate in the United States.