Norma Joseph

Norma Baumel Joseph (born 1944 in Brooklyn) is an American-born Canadian professor and Jewish feminist activist. In 1990, Joseph was successful in working with the Government of Canada to pass a law that would protect Jewish women in need of a get. She currently serves as Professor of Religion at Concordia University and Associate Director of the University's Azrieli Institute of Israel Studies.

Biography Joseph was born in Brooklyn Moishe was a salesman who had emigrated to the United States as a child, and Madeline was a typist-secretary who arrived in the United States as an infant.

Joseph has published widely in scholarly books and journals as an expert in Jewish feminist thought. She serves on the editorial board of Women in Judaism, on the advisory board of the Journal of Religion and Culture, on the advisory council of JOFA, and on the international board of the Jewish Women's Archive. In 1995, she received the Leo Wasserman Prize for the best article published in American Jewish History that year for "Jewish Education for Women: Rabbi Moshe Feinstein’s Map of America" (vol. 83, no. 2, 205–222). She is a member of the advisory board of Kol ha-Isha: A Feminist House of Study in Jerusalem, sponsored by the Conservative movement. She was the 2019 recipient of the Louis Rosenberg Canadian Jewish Studies Distinguished Service Award.