Join Barnard College's Rennert Forum Fund and the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies at 12:00 PM on Monday, April 15, in-person at 617 Kent Hall, for a lecture with Prof. Jordan Katz (University of Massachusetts Amherst): "Roza the Midwife and Jewish Medical Women in Early Modern Europe."
Jordan Katz is Assistant Professor of Judaic Studies at University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is a historian of early modern Jewry, with a focus on Jewish cultural history, history of medicine, and women and gender in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Her current book project examines the role of Jewish midwives within communal, intellectual, and medical frameworks in the early modern Ashkenazic world. Through an exploration of Jewish midwives’ medical influences, their engagement with administrative knowledge systems, and their intellectual status in the eyes of prominent male leaders, Katz’s study offers a new understanding of the structures of knowledge and authority that undergirded early modern European society. More broadly, she is interested in the ways in which expertise and special skills created pathways for interaction between Christians and Jews, and between Jews of different socioeconomic classes, that have not yet been studied.
Professor Katz has received fellowships from the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture; the Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine; the Center for Jewish History; and the Leo Baeck Fellowship Programme. Her work has been published in Jewish Quarterly Review and Jewish Social Studies.
Supported by the Ingeborg, Tamara, and Yonina Rennert Forum Fund at Barnard College.
While all IIJS events are free and open to the public, we do encourage a suggested donation of $10.