Bar Ilan’s Speaker Line-Up for a Major Conference is All Women

When was the last time you attended a conference––or even heard about one––in which all the speakers were female and yet the conference was not about feminism, gender studies or female empowerment?

I asked myself this very question last week while looking over Bar Ilan University’s all-female speaker lineup for their upcoming conference next month titled Ink, Inc: History, Community and Text. No, this is not a “women’s conference,” nor is it a conference to bolster women’s voices or promote feminism. It’s a literary conference on how the past and present is traversed through writing, and the presenters are of Alicia Ostriker, Ilana Kurshan, Erika Meitner, Rachel Kadish and Deborah Lipstadt.