IT SEEMS IMPORTANT to acknowledge at the outset the unusual circumstances of my involvement with my subject-matter: I attended Bais Yaakov of Boro Park for elementary school; a Bais Yaakov high school in Brooklyn and then one in Queens; Michlalah Jerusalem College for Women (a slightly more ‘modern’ seminary or institute of higher learning for young women); and, finally, another Bais Yaakov seminary in Brooklyn. All these schools, arguably including Michlalah, are more or less direct descendants of the school system that Sarah Schenirer founded in interwar Poland. The one in Boro Park, along with its high school counterpart two blocks away, were actually among the first Bais Yaakov schools to be established in the United States. Nevertheless, this book is no natural outgrowth of my personal history: shortly after my last stint in the seminary in Brooklyn, I left the Orthodox world, and—at least in my academic research— have rarely looked back. Rather, it is the product of an unplanned encounter that took place, entirely appropriately, in Kraków, the city in which Sarah Schenirer resided nearly her entire life.

In the summer of 2010 I brought a group of students from the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, where I was teaching, on a study trip to Poland. We launched our trip with a week at the Jewish Culture Festival in Kraków. As anyone who has attended the festival knows, it is among the most interesting and vibrant Jewish cultural phenomena in the world today, and there was more than enough going on to occupy my time and thoughts. But what stayed with me from that week was the memory of a group of four or five young women I ran into in the courtyard of the famous Remuh Synagogue in the Kazimierz quarter of Kraków. It was clear to me the instant I set eyes on them that they were Bais Yaakov girls: the cut of their long skirts, their hairstyles and blouses, their gait and posture, their voices, even their faces. In that same moment of recognition, it also occurred to me that they must have been travelling back to New York or another Orthodox centre in North America after having spent a post-high-school year at a seminary in Israel, in exactly the way I had travelled with two schoolmates after my year at Michlalah.