Bais Yaakov Centennial Webinar and Learnathon

100 years ago, Sara Schenirer founded the first Jewish girls school, "Bais Yaakov." This began a movement to support and encourage educating Jewish women for the next century!

On November 30th at 6:00 PM EST, JOFA is celebrating the centennial of Bais Yaakov by hosting a webinar with two women who have done research on the movement: Naomi Seidman and Talia Weisberg. The webinar will feature a discussion of these women's research, the significance of 100 years of Bais Yaakov, and its connection to the Orthodox feminist movement. Tune in on the JOFA Page for the Facebook Live webinar!

Naomi Seidman is a graduate of the Bais Yaakov of Boro Park, Bais Yaakov Academy, Michlalah, Brooklyn College, and the University of California, Berkeley. She is a 2016 Guggenheim Fellow and the Koret Professor of Jewish Culture at the Graduate Theological Union, in Berkeley, CA. She has published three books, most recently "The Marriage Plot, Or, How Jews Fell in Love with Love, and with Literature." Her history of Bais Yaakov in the interwar period, "Sarah Schenirer and Bais Yaakov: A Revolution in the Name of Tradition," is forthcoming from Littman Library. In this research, she explores the character of Bais Yaakov in the interwar period, in which the movement drew from modern cultural influences (socialism, German neo-Orthodoxy, Zionism, feminism, youth culture) even as it claimed only to be combatting these influences.

Talia Weisberg discovered feminism just before her freshman year at a Bais Yaakov-type high school, and she hasn't looked back since. She graduated from Harvard in May 2017, where she concentrated in Religion with a secondary field in Women, Gender, and Sexuality. She wrote her senior honors thesis about how the Bais Yaakov movement figures into the history of Orthodox Jewish girls' formal religious education and its engagement with contemporary feminisms. On campus, she was also a leader within several feminist and Jewish groups. In addition to working as the Director of Academic Affairs at the Consulate General of Israel to New England, she volunteers as the Ritual Chair on her shul's board. She lives in Cambridge, MA with her husband Evan. She is honored to have spoken on panels at the JOFA Conference of 2013 and Un-Conference of 2014. In 2013, she was named as one of the Jewish Week's 36 Under 36 in recognition of her feminist advocacy work.

In honor of the centennial, we are also having a learnathon! Please share with us what you are learning and any meaningful stories of Jewish education and/or female empowerment: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdVC0j_P_XzIotclDazv3Hc-pPacA1WfuqnkaH2Ea_47KA1Yg/viewform