The Great Neck Choral Society

PROFILE

Emily Taitz:
She put women in
the history books
8-27-05

Brooklyn-born, Emily Taitz grew up in a musical family in St. Albans, Queens, studied violin from age 8, was concertmaster of her high school orchestra, and sang in the chorus. She got a college degree, quickly married, and after a short period of working as a secretary settled in as a homemaker. In 1969, though, pregnant with her fourth child, she saw the women's movement begin to take off. "I realized," she says, "that I had spent the first 30 years of my life in a semi-coma. I never thought of considering my own personal development."

That was the beginning of a new way of life. A decade later that new way had led to the publication of a book that broke new ground by drawing attention to overlooked women in history. The book, titled "Written Out of History" and co-authored with Sondra Henry, was about Jewish women, but its publication helped kick off a round of scholarship that illuminated further the role of all women over the past 2,500 years. In 2004, exploiting the fruits of that scholarship, Emily and two collaborators updated the 25-year-old pioneering book with "The JPS Guide to Jewish Women: 600 BCE to 1900 CE," published by the Jewish Publication Society to critical acclaim.

A writing career was far from Emily's mind during her early years. At Queens she majored in social anthropology and minored in languages, chiefly French, and sang in the Queens College Choral Society. During that time she also studied piano and guitar, and sang folk songs. Still a student, she was playing and singing folk songs at a party when she met Isaac Taitz, an Israeli student at Brooklyn College majoring in political science and economics. When they married, she had graduated but he had not. "I toyed with the idea of going for a PhD in anthropology," she recalls, "but the field work would have taken me away from my husband for months at a time." They lived together first in Brooklyn, then in Kew Gardens, where her first son was born, and then in Baldwin for nine years, where, as Isaac forged a career in real estate, the rest of her four children were born.

The 11-year trek from "semi-coma" to published author began when Emily, then living in Baldwin, joined a local "consciousness-raising" group. The discussions led to a desire to become more involved, and she began to attend meetings at the Women's Center in Hempstead. Soon she was asked to become a speaker and a starter for new consciousness-raising groups. That led to a position in public relations for the Jewish Feminist Organization (no longer extant) and to invitations to speak to Jewish women's groups.

"Then," she says, "I started to find out about Jewish law--what it did and did not say about limits on women." She began to be invited to speak at synagogues that were considering giving women more ritual rights. She also started writing articles for local papers and small, special magazines. When in 1971 the Taitz family moved to their present house on Sycamore Drive in Great Neck, Emily became active in Temple Israel and soon became program chair of the Sisterhood.

It was then that Emily became interested in a further study of Judaism. She tried to enroll as a nonmatriculated student at Manhattan's Jewish Theological Seminary, but it had only a small graduate program and would not accept her. The school did, however, give her a lengthy reading list--dozens of books. "I went on to read everything on the list," she says, "and several hundred since."

A neighbor had a problem

In 1975, Sondra Henry, who lived around the corner, was asked to write a script for a Friday evening service on the topic, "Jewish Women Through the Ages." Sondra, says Emily, "was a lawyer and a good researcher." She went to the library and found there were no women in history books and "got very upset." She finally identified a few and decided to put together a small booklet. She wanted help in writing, and a librarian put her in touch with Emily.

"I was grabbed onto the project," says Emily, and together they did further research. Finally they had a fair amount of information and "I said, let's do a book," recalls Emily. Emily did most of the writing--on a typewriter in those days. She put the resulting sheaf of papers in a Waldbaum's plastic bag and took it to Bloch Publishing in Manhattan. "You could have knocked me over," she says, when Charles Bloch took a quick look and said, "I'll take it." It seems that he had lost out on an earlier manuscript on the same general topic when he delayed a decision too long.

The book, well footnoted, "made quite a stir in the market," Emily says. It went to five more editions, with a different publisher, Biblio Press, and was still selling in the 1990s.

That was the beginning of Emily's book-writing career--using a computer, no longer a typewriter--in collaboration with Sondra Henry. Dillon Press, in Minneapolis, commissioned a series of young-adult books, starting with a biography of Gloria Steinem, then a book on Israel, then a biography of Levi Strauss. Meanwhile, Emily and Sondra were teaching a continuing-education course at Hofstra University called "Women Don't Have to be Footnotes." And the two women were "team teaching" teacher-enrichment courses at BOCES on a variety of women's history topics.

In 1980, Emily went back to re-investigate the Jewish Theological Seminary, which now had a larger graduate program. "Now that I had a book in print," she says, "they were quite willing to enroll me." Several years later, at the age of 45, Emily got a master's degree in Jewish history.

After a year off, Emily started thinking about a PhD, and, with encouragement from a teacher, Sondra, and her husband, she decided to go for it. The course work and much of the language requirements were done at Jewish Theological Society and across the street at Columbia University, and it took three years. During that time she was teaching basic medieval history at JTS. For her dissertation, she spent several months of field research in France and eventually produced a monograph titled, "The Jews of Medieval France: The Community of Champagne." Published by Greenwood Press, it was, she says "one of the first monographs to give equal time to women." After eight years of work, Emily was awarded a PhD in 1992.

That eight-year period was not all about a PhD. During that time Emily and Sondra also turned out young-adult biographies of Betty Friedan and Coretta Scott King, and Emily wrote serveral articles for academic journals.

After 25 years, a total rewrite

After getting her PhD, Emily took a job as an adjunct professor at Adelphi University teaching women's history. In the 1990s, she and Sondra were asked to do a young-adult version of their first book, which was published by Jewish Publication Society as "Remarkable Jewish Women." Then they were asked to rewrite the adult version. By that time, she says, "women's history had come into its own, and women had come into the history books." All sorts of documents were now considered fair game--diaries, rent rolls, tax registers, etc. "There was so much available that we didn't have when we wrote 'Written Out of History' 25 years earlier."

This time Emily and Sondra enlisted the aid of a Toronto woman, Cheryl Tallan, who was maintaining a comprehensive bibliography about Jewish women on the Internet. The three women spent three years on the project, keeping in touch with the help of a busy email link between Great Neck and Toronto. The resulting book "is still the only overall book on the subject," says Emily. It garnered uniformly positive reviews, with Publishers Weekly calling it "a jewel," and in 2003 it won an award from the National Jewish Book Council.

While working on the book, Emily retired from Adelphi after a 10-year stint. Then she got a call from a professor at Ithaca College who was editing a multi-volume work on the world's religions and wanted her to do the volume on Judaism--in just six months. Initially reluctant, she agreed, finished on time, and enjoyed it. At the time of our interview, she was expecting to see the "proofs" any day. Meanwhile, her editor at Greenwood Press has commissioned her to do another book, this one to be the collected stories of 600 Holocaust survivors--some now dead, some still alive--whom she would select. For the first time in her career she will be doing interviews rather than relying solely on research. At the age of 68, she seems undaunted by the prospect.

In addition to child-rearing, studying, teaching, and writing, Emily has also found time for travel, theater, concerts, family and friends. Since 2001, when she joined the Great Neck Choral Society as an alto, she has added singing to the mix. We hope she'll be with us for many years to come.

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