In small villages, bustling cities, and crowded ghettos across early modern Europe, Jewish women were increasingly active participants in the daily life of their communities, managing homes and professions, leading institutions and sororities, and crafting objects and texts of exquisite beauty. A Woman Is Responsible for Everything marshals a dazzling array of previously untapped archival sources to tell the stories of these women for the first time.

Join us for this important and illuminating discussion with authors Debra Kaplan and Elisheva Carlebach about the kehillah, a lively and thriving form of communal life that sustained European Jews for three centuries. They paint vibrant portraits of Jewish women of all walks of life, from those who wielded their wealth and influence in and out of their communities to the poorest maidservants and vagrants, from single and married women to the widowed and divorced. We will follow them into their homes and learn about the possessions they valued and used, the books they read, and the writings they composed. Speaking to us in their own voices, these women reveal tremendous economic initiative in the rural marketplace and the princely court, and they express their profound spirituality in the home as well as the synagogue. Mirjam Thulin, Director of Research and Associate Director of the Institute for Advanced Research at the Center for Jewish History, will moderate. A reception will follow the program, and the book will be available for purchase and signing.

About the Speakers
Debra Kaplan holds the Samuel Braun Chair for the History of the Jews in Germany at Bar-Ilan University. A social historian of premodern Ashkenaz, she is the author of Beyond Expulsion: Jews, Christians and Reformation Strasbourg (Stanford University Press, 2011) and The Patrons and their Poor: Jewish Community and Public Charity in Early Modern Germany (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020) and with Elisheva Carlebach, A Woman is Responsible for Everything: Jewish Women in Early Modern Europe (Princeton University Press, 2025). Kaplan is on the board of directors of the Leo Baeck Institute Jerusalem and the Historical Society of Israel.

Elisheva Carlebach is Baron Professor of Jewish History, Culture and Society at Columbia University. Her books include The Pursuit of Heresy; Divided Souls: Converts from Judaism; Palaces of Time: Jewish Calendar and Culture, and Confronting Modernity, volume 6 in The Posen Library. She served as Editor of AJS Review and President of American Academy for Jewish Research. Carlebach was awarded Columbia’s Lenfest Distinguished Faculty Award, and recently, a mentorship award by the Association for Jewish Studies. Her most recent book is A Woman is Responsible for Everything, a new approach to the study of Jewish women, co-authored with Debra Kaplan. She is an officer on the Center for Jewish History’s Board of Directors.