Sylvia Barack Fishman was born in Phoenix, Arizona, on December 28, 1942. Her father, Nathan Abraham Barack, became the esteemed rabbi of Congregation Beth El in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. Rabbi Barack and his wife, Lillian Astrachan Barack, served a diverse Jewish community while providing their three daughters with a rich foundation of Jewish life and learning. Of her father, Fishman later wrote, “it was he who gave me the unshakeable belief that when people grow up they write books” (1993, xii).

Fishman went on to study at Stern College, where she received a BA in 1964. She married Phillip M. Fishman in 1967. Velvel Pasternak, the publisher of Jewish music whose singular efforts at transcription preserved many traditional Hasidic melodies, often recounted that his first foray into music publishing was for Fishman’s wedding, when her mother asked him to transcribe some Jewish songs for the bandleader (Berger 2019). The couple went on to have three children: Lisi, Eliot, and Joseph.

Fishman received an MA from New York University in 1973 and a PhD in English Literature from Washington University in 1980, where her dissertation explored Biblical imagery in the English poetry of Spenser, Milton, and Blake. Over the next five years, she taught English composition at the University of Massachusetts Boston, was Director of Public Relations at the Boston University Law School, and worked for the Hillel Council of Greater Boston.

Fishman’s career shifted to the study of contemporary Jewry when she came to Brandeis University in 1985 to serve as a Senior Research Associate at the Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies under the leadership of its founding director, Marshall Sklare. Sklare, the widely recognized “dean of American Jewish sociology,” became Fishman’s mentor and teacher. Her most influential study from those years used data from the 1990 Jewish Population Study to demonstrate that formal Jewish education was one of the strongest predictors of later Jewish engagement.

In 1993, Fishman and Bernadette Brooten became the first women to be appointed as professors in Brandeis University’s storied Near Eastern and Judaic Studies department. Fishman taught popular undergraduate and graduate courses in the sociology of American Jews and in Jewish literature, film, and culture until her retirement in 2018. She advised numerous graduate students and chaired the department for five years (2009-2014).

Fishman also played an instrumental role in the development of Brandeis University’s Hadassah-Brandeis Institute (HBI), an academic center with the mission of developing fresh ways of thinking about Jews and gender worldwide. HBI was founded in 1997, with Shulamit Reinharz as its founding director and Fishman as co-director. Fishman helped HBI produce and promote scholarly research, artistic projects, and public engagement. In 2000, she became the editor of the HBI Series on Jewish Women, which has published a range of books by and about Jewish women, including Fishman’s own Double or Nothing? Jewish Families and Mixed Marriage (2004) and her edited volume, Love, Marriage and Jewish Families: Paradoxes of a Social Revolution (2015).

Fishman was a pioneer in the study of gender, sexuality, marriage, and family formation among American Jews. Her research blended social science with analyses of literature, film, and popular culture in order to illuminate the American Jewish experience.

Some of Fishman’s research deals directly with gender roles and stereotypes. Her anthology Follow My Footprints: Changing Images of Women in American Jewish Fiction (1992) tells the story of the American Jewish experience, from immigration to assimilation, through changing depictions of Jewish women in short stories and novels. Fishman also documented the negative portrayal of Jewish women in film and television. She traced the growth of Jewish feminism alongside second wave feminism and was one of the first to call attention to declining interest in Jewish life among Jewish men and boys.

Fishman’s body of work also deals extensively with patterns of family formation and childrearing among American Jews. She observed that, as Jews moved away from the densely Jewish neighborhoods that once characterized American Jewish life, the family became the locus of Jewish socialization. In the 1980s, Fishman began documenting the beginnings of a retreat from marriage in the American Jewish community and a growing population of Jewish singles. Shortly thereafter, she documented that unwanted infertility was a growing concern of women who aspired to parenthood.

Fishman also conducted research on the causes and consequences of intermarriage. Her groundbreaking qualitative study of mixed married, in-married, and conversionary families, eventually published as Double or Nothing? Jewish Families and Mixed Marriage, demonstrated the importance of exclusively Jewish ethnoreligious identification and education in Jewish households. Fishman also demonstrated the deep divides in the Jewish practices of in-married and mixed-married households using data from the Pew Research Center’s 2013 Survey of US Jews.

Fishman has applied her professional expertise to advocacy within the Jewish community. She speaks about three critical challenges facing the American Jewish family in the 21^st century: late marriage and nonmarriage, late childbearing and childlessness, and intermarriage between Jews and non-Jews. Fishman has often called on the Jewish community to educate Jewish young adults about age-related fertility decline. She was also a signatory to the “Statement on Jewish Vitality,” in which 74 Jewish scholars and community leaders called for strategic responses to these trends, which they viewed as imperiling the Jewish future (“Strategic Directions for Jewish Life: A Call to Action” 2015). The statement drew criticism from many quarters, including from Fishman’s frequent critic Edmund Case, founder of InterfaithFamily.com, who argued that it alienated and devalued intermarried Jews.

Fishman maintains a longstanding relationship with the American Jewish Committee (AJC), which sponsored her research into the impact of feminism on American Orthodoxy, identity transmission in mixed-married households, and a typology of converts to Judaism. Fishman is also a member of AJC’s Jewish Religious Equality Coalition (J-REC), which advocates for religious freedom and equality in Israel. She serves on the Board of Directors of the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance (JOFA) and is a member of Congregation Shaarei Tefillah in Newton, Massachusetts.

In 1991, Fishman received the Samuel Belkin Award for Distinguished Professional Achievement from Yeshiva University, her alma mater. Her book A Breath of Life: Feminism in the American Jewish Community was a National Jewish Book Award Honor Book (1994). In 2014, she received the Marshall Sklare Award, an honor bestowed by the Association for the Social Scientific Study of Jewry to a senior scholar who has made a significant contribution to the social scientific study of Jewry. In her address upon receiving the Sklare Award, Fishman reiterated her views of the serious challenges facing Jewish life in America, but ended on a positive note: “Alarm triggers adrenalin and optimism makes it possible to act, believing that one can—that one must—make a difference” (Fishman 2015b).

“The Changing American Jewish Family in the 80s.” Contemporary Jewry 9, no. 2 (1988): 1–33.

Follow My Footprints: Changing Images of Women in American Jewish Fiction. Edited by Sylvia Barack Fishman. Brandeis Series in American Jewish History, Culture, and Life. Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press ; Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1992.

A Breath of Life: Feminism in the American Jewish Community. New York: Free Press, 1993.

“I of the Beholder: Jews and Gender in Film and Popular Culture.” 1. Working Paper Series. Waltham, MA: Hadassah Research Institute on Jewish Women, Brandeis University, 1998.

2000a. “Changing Minds: Feminism in Contemporary Orthodox Jewish Life.” New York: American Jewish Committee, 2000.

Jewish Life and American Culture. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2000.

Double or Nothing? Jewish Families and Mixed Marriage. Brandeis Series in American Jewish History, Culture, and Life. Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press; Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2004.

Love, Marriage and Jewish Families: Paradoxes of a Social Revolution. Edited by Sylvia Barack Fishman. Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press; Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 2015.

“Matrilineal Ascent/ Patrilineal Descent: The Gender Imbalance in American Jewish Life.” With Daniel Parmer. Waltham, MA: Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies and Hadassah-Brandeis Institute, Brandeis University, 2008.

“When They Are Grown They Will Not Depart: Jewish Education and the Jewish Behavior of American Adults, CMJS Research Report 8.” With Alice Goldstein. Waltham, MA: Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies, Brandeis University, 1993.