Jordan R. Katz

Home institution

University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Research project

Delivering Knowledge: Midwives and the Making of Jewish Culture in Early Modern Europe

This project examines the dynamic role of the early modern European Jewish midwife, arguing that Jewish midwives played critical roles in early modern European Jewish communities, acting simultaneously as extensions of communal authority, as municipal employees, and as agents of burgeoning medical bureaucracies.

Profile

Jordan Katz, Assistant Professor of Judaic Studies at University of Massachusetts, Amherst, is a historian of early modern Jewry, with a focus on Jewish cultural history, history of medicine, and women and gender in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. She received her PhD in History from Columbia University.

Professor Katz has received fellowships from the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture; the Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine; the Center for Jewish History; and the Leo Baeck Fellowship Programme. Prior to coming to Harvard Divinity School, she was at Yale University as the Jacob and Hilda Blaustein Postdoctoral Associate in Modern Jewish History Judaic Studies Program. Her work has been published in Jewish Quarterly Review and Jewish Social Studies.

Course

HDS 2016: Jewish and Christian Childbirth in Early Modern Europe: A Comparative Perspective (Fall 2022)