BASKIN, JUDITH R.

BASKIN, JUDITH R. (1950– ), U.S. scholar of women in late antiquity and the Middle Ages. Baskin was born in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, the eldest child of Rabbi Bernard and Marjorie Shatz Baskin. Educated at Antioch College (B.A., 1971) and Yale University (Ph.D., 1976), she served as professor of   religious studies and director of the Harold Schnitzer Family Program in Judaic Studies at the University of Oregon from 2000, where she was named Knight Professor of Humanities in 2002. Prior to that, she led the Department of Judaic Studies at the State University of New York at Albany and taught at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She is the author of Pharaoh's Counsellors: Job, Jethro and Balaam in Rabbinic and Patristic Tradition, (1983) and Midrashic Women: Formations of the Feminine in Rabbinic Literature (2002). The editor of several volumes, including the widely used collection of essays Jewish Women in Historical Perspective. (1991, 1998), she has written dozens of articles on various aspects of Jewish life and culture in late antiquity and the Middle Ages. In 2004 Baskin assumed the presidency of the association for jewish studies . She also served as editor of the Women and Gender division for the second edition of the Encyclopaedia Judaica. (Jay Harris (2nd ed.)