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Women’s associations (hevrot) tended to the sick, clothed the needy, dowered indigent brides, and perhaps most prominently, prepared the dead for burial. These sororities provided women with a formal communal setting in which they could express leadership, independent management and piety. The enterprise and efficiency women introduced into their organized communal labor occasionally produced outbursts of resentment from the parallel men’s societies. This talk will explore the women’s work and the tensions it aroused.

Elisheva Carlebach is Salo Baron Professor of Jewish History, Culture and Society, and Co-Director, Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies, Columbia University. Her books include The Pursuit of Heresy; Divided Souls: Jewish Converts to Christianity; Palaces of Time: Jewish Calendar and Culture in Early Modern Europe and Confronting Modernity: 1750-1880, volume 6 in The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization. She has held fellowships at the New York Public Library Center for Scholars and Writers, the Katz Center at University of Pennsylvania, and the Tikvah Center at NYU Law School. She served as Editor of the AJS Review and as President of the American Academy for Jewish Research. In 2017 she was awarded the Lenfest Distinguished Faculty Award of Columbia University, and in 2024, the Gender Justice award of the Association for Jewish Studies. Her teaching and research interests include Jewish-Christian relations, messianism, Jewish communities and Jewish women’s history in early modern Europe. In Fall, 2025, her new book on Jewish women in early modern Europe, co-authored with Debra Kaplan, will be published by Princeton University Press.