Susannah Heschel and Sarah Imhoff, "The Woman Question in Jewish Studies" (Princeton UP, 2025)
July 29, 2026
AI Summary
5 min read“I felt exhilarated.” That was the word a Cornell professor used on October 8, 2023, to describe his reaction to the Hamas attacks that killed 1,200 people. For Susannah Heschel, the Eli M. Black Chair in Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College, that single word crystallized something she had been tracking for years: a rage against Jews that was already simmering before October 7 gave it a license to erupt. The celebration of murder, she says, was not a spontaneous reaction — it was an excuse for an anti-Semitism that had been planted and fertilized long before.
Heschel was speaking with the New Books Network about her new co-authored book (with Sarah Imhoff), The Woman Question in Jewish Studies (Princeton UP, 2025). The conversation ranged from 19th-century Jewish scholarship to the politics of academic publishing, but its spine was a single argument: the exclusion of women from Jewish studies is not an accident or a lagging oversight — it is a structural inheritance from the field’s founding, and it continues to distort what gets studied and who gets heard.
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What you'll learn
- 1 (00:47) **Introducing Susannah Heschel** - The guest briefly introduces her academic background and current position at Dartmouth College.
- 2 (02:46) **The Core Intellectual Bridge: Feminist Theory and Jewish Scholarship** - Heschel explains how feminist theory helped her understand the politics of 19th-century Jewish scholarship within a Christian hegemonic environment.
- 3 (04:18) **Abraham Geiger’s Devastating Argument** - Heschel details Geiger’s central claim that Jesus said nothing new, which posed a major challenge to liberal Protestant theology.
- 4 (10:12) **A Key Distinction: Judaism vs. Islam in Scholarship** - Heschel highlights a significant difference in how Jewish scholars framed their research on Christianity versus Islam.
- 5 (11:35) **The Spark for "The Woman Question"** - The book was directly inspired by the 2018 publication of *Hasidism: A New History*, written by eight men with no women contributors.
- 6 (15:58) **Personal Experiences and Systemic Barriers** - The authors collected stories of how women in Jewish studies have been patronized, denigrated, and harassed at all career stages.
- 7 (17:36) **19th-Century Origins of Gendered Scholarship** - Heschel traces how the exclusion of women from 19th-century universities created a structural inequality that still affects the field.
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Show Notes
The Woman Question in Jewish Studies (Princeton UP, 2025) is a critical look at the difficulties women face in the field of Jewish studies, drawing on quantitative data, personal stories, and the gendered history of the field.
The field of Jewish studies has expanded significantly in recent years, with increasing numbers of women entering the field. These scholars have brought new perspectives from studies of women, gender, and sexuality. Yet they have also faced institutional and individual obstacles. In this book, Susannah Heschel and Sarah Imhoff examine the place of women and nonbinary people in Jewish studies, arguing that, for both intellectual and ethical reasons, the culture of the field must change. Heschel and Imhoff explore quantitative data regarding women as editors of and contributors to academic journals and anthologies, examine data regarding citations of women's scholarship, and scrutinize women's presence on panels at academic conferences. They analyze the wider context of the contemporary academy, discussing what is distinctive about Jewish studies. They trace the history of the field, its connections to traditional religious studies, and its growth in US institutions, interspersing this with stories of scholars in the field who have experienced harassment and gender discrimination. Finally, they offer suggestions for a reparative path forward.
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