American Jewish Committee Presents Its Akiba Award To Dr. Paula E. Hyman, Outstanding Leader In Jewish Scholarship

American Jewish Committee
Friday, 7 May 1999

The American Jewish Committee today presented its Akiba Award to Dr. Paula E. Hyman, Lucy Moses Professor of Modern Jewish History at Yale University and one of the foremost scholars specializing in the study of modern Jewry, for "Judaic scholarship and community leadership."

The Akiba Award is presented by AJC for exceptional contributions to the enrichment of Jewish intellectual, cultural, and communal life in the United States.

The presentation was made during the agency's 93rd Annual Meeting, which concludes today at the Capital Hilton Hotel.

In presenting the award to Dr. Hyman, Jack Lapin, Chair of AJC's Board of Governors, described her as " a true model of a scholar's scholar and a Jewish communal leader. She has combined the highest levels of academic research with profound Jewish commitment, engagement and leadership, helping to shape Jewish communal opinion through her activities in diverse Jewish organizations. In addition, Dr. Hyman has also made invaluable contributions to Jewish feminism and to the study of Jewish women's history. We are most proud to honor her today."

Dr. Hyman is active in the Association for Jewish Studies, the American Academy of Jewish Research, the National Foundation for Jewish Culture and the Leo Baeck Institute. She has served on the editorial boards of Jewish Social Studies, the YIVO Annual and the Association of Jewish Studies Review.

Professor Hyman is a leading authority on the history of the Jews of France in the modern period. Her works have appeared in both English and French. She is the author of landmark works of research and analysis including the major volumes, The Jews of Modern France, The Emancipation of the Jews of Alsace: Acculturation and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century, and From Dreyfus to Vichy: The Remaking of French Jewry, 1906-1939. In her books and many articles on French Jewish history, she has underscored social, political and religious currents of the modern Jewish experience, showing how French Jewry is in many ways paradigmatic of the Jewish experience of the modern period. She thereby raises important questions of Jewish identity, Jewish culture and Jewish political behavior.

Dr. Hyman was a founding member of one of the most influential Jewish feminist organizations, Ezrat Nashim, and has published numerous books on Jewish women's history. She is co-editor of Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, winner of a National Jewish Book Council Award. She wrote Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History: The Roles and Representation of Women, and co-authored The Jewish Woman in America. Dr. Hyman has written important studies on the role of immigrant Jewish women and the relationship between Jewish feminism, the Jewish family and the women's movement in America.

Dr. Hyman earned bachelors degrees from Hebrew College of Boston and Radcliffe College. She received her M.A. and Ph.D. from Columbia University where she went on to serve as Assistant Professor of History. She subsequently taught at the Jewish Theological Seminary and served as Dean of the Seminary College of Jewish Studies. In 1986 Dr. Hyman moved to Yale where she is currently the Lucy Moses Professor of Modern Jewish History.

Past recipients of AJC's Akiba Award, created in 1980, have included Leslie H. Wexner, Dr. Jehuda Reinharz, Prof. Naomi Wiener Cohen, Prof. Emil Fackenheim, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, Rabbi Irving Greenberg, the Jewish Publication Society, Rabbi Harold Schulweis, Dr. Salo Baron, Rabbi Emanuel Rackman, and Dr. Louis Finkelstein.

For more information, or to contact American Jewish Committee, see their website at: www.ajc.org