Faculty Research Fellow
Naomi Seidman is Chancellor Jackman Professor of the Arts. Her research interests include literature and secularization, translation studies, psychoanalysis, eastern European literature and culture, Orthodox Judaism, and religion and gender. She is the author of (most notably) Faithful Renderings: Jewish—Christian Difference and the Politics of Difference (Chicago, 2006), The Marriage Plot, Or, How Jews Fell in Love with Love, and with Literature (Stanford, 2016), and Sarah Schenirer and the Bais Yaakov Movement: A Revolution in the Name of Tradition (Littman, 2019), which won a National Jewish Book Award in Women’s Studies. Professor Seidman has just completed a study of Freud and Jewish languages. She is the recipient of numerous research fellowships and awards, from such organizations as the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute, and the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Fellowship Project—Performing Orthodox Jewish Girlhood
This book explores the performance culture of Bais Yaakov, an Orthodox girls’ school system founded in Poland in 1917 by Sarah Schenirer, a divorced seamstress with an eight-grade education who sought to teach girls Torah, an education previously restricted to boys. Bais Yaakov has been an international system since 1930, and after the devastating blow to its Polish heartland in the Holocaust, it quickly rebuilt itself and now thrives with more than 1300 schools in thirteen countries (not all of them called Bais Yaakov). Music, dance, and theatre were an important part of the school experience and its affiliated summer camps, youth movements, and women’s organizations from the start, serving as a marketing tool, cementing participants’ attachment to Orthodox Judaism, and expressing Schenirer’s own passion for theatre—she wrote at least six plays for Bais Yaakov performance that were distributed by the movement. This performance culture had no real counterpart among Orthodox boys, whose time, educational curriculum, and exposure to secular culture are more strictly policed, and whose ritual performances follow a more traditionally religious template. In this sense, Orthodox girls reap what Iris Parush has called “the benefits of marginality” within a patriarchal culture that sometimes leaves them to their own devices.