Our Post-Doctoral Fellow, Dr. Avital Ginat, presented at the 57th Annual Conference of the Association for Jewish Studies (AJS) on December 14, 2025, in Washington, DC!
Avital delivered a lecture titled "Single By Choice: Practices undertaken by Eastern-European Jewish women to remain alone in the second half of the nineteenth century and early twentieth" as part of the panel "Gender, Care, and the Cultivation of Jewish Identity within the Home and in Institutions Outside of It."
Avital's research examines the strategies adopted by Jewish women from Eastern Europe between the second half of the 19th century and World War I to remain unmarried and challenge the stigma associated with women living alone. At a time when family constituted the most fundamental social unit in Jewish life, the emergence of the Jewish Haskalah brought significant transformations
Her paper explores how increasing numbers of women achieved economic independence and resisted arranged marriages, employing strategies including emigration, divorce, higher education, conversion, and prostitution to legitimize their status outside conventional couple and family structures. Avital's research takes a holistic, cross-disciplinary approach, examining women in their personal spheres from a societal perspective and highlighting their unique experiences as they navigated and crossed cultural boundaries.