Encyclopedia of Jewish Women
Two Australian academics are members of the team which produced a new edition of the Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women.
The Jewish Women’s Archive (JWA) will launch the updated version of the work later this month.
Academics Suzanne Rutland and Hilary Rubinstein were advisors to the project.
The widely-used resource honours Israeli feminist Alice Shalvi, as well as the legacies of the late pioneering Jewish feminist historian (and one of the original editors) Paula E. Hyman and the late Moshe Shalvi, the publisher whose dedication brought the previous edition to fruition.
The Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women will go live in late June 2021 at jwa.org/encyclopedia.
To celebrate the launch, JWA is hosting a Global Day of Learning on June 27 and 28, 2021, showcasing the evolution of the Encyclopedia and providing a taste of the new content.
The launch also kicks off a year of celebrating the 25th anniversary of JWA’s founding.
Since JWA made the Encyclopedia freely available on its website in 2009, it has served as a core part of JWA’s content. Thousands of essays, biographical and topical, range from Biblical times to the 21st century and cover Jewish communities around the world. The Encyclopedia is the largest collection of well-researched and thoroughly vetted material about Jewish women.
Today, it attracts more than 1.6 million unique page views each year, from people in more than 200 countries around the world.
The launch of the Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women will unveil updated entries on contemporary figures and topics, revised entries that incorporate new scholarship, and hundreds of new entries that address previously un- or under-represented populations and topics—such as women in Sephardi and Mizrahi communities, Jewish women of colour, LGBTQ Jews, and women with disabilities.
The new edition also includes upgrades to the Encyclopedia’s design and navigation to reflect the cutting edge of digital humanities approaches. Changes were informed by research on best practices in online encyclopedias, by data collected from Encyclopedia users, and with the expertise of a User Experience (UX) designer.
“For over two decades, the Encyclopedia of Jewish Women has been the go-to place for high-quality, engaging information about Jewish women, first in North America and then around the world,” says Sartori. “Our new edition both deepens and broadens this wealth of information, with hundreds of new and updated entries that more fully represent the true diversity of the Jewish experience and new understandings of race, gender, and sexuality.”
