Category Books

American Jewish Women's History: A Reader »

Authors: Pamela Nadell (Editor), Pamela Susan Nadell
ISBN-13: 9780814758083, ISBN-10: 0814758088
Format: Paperback
Publisher: New York University Press
Date Published: April 2003
Edition: (Non-applicable)

Author Biography: Pamela Nadell

Pamela S. Nadell is Professor of History and Director of the Jewish Studies Program at American University. She is the author of Women Who Would be Rabbis: A History of Women's Ordination, 1889-1985, which was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award, and co-editor of Women and American Judaism: Historical Perspectives.

Book Synopsis

"It gives me a secret pleasure to observe the fair character our family has in the place by Jews & Christians," Abigail Levy Franks wrote to her son from New York City in 1733. Abigail was part of a tiny community of Jews living in the new world. In the centuries that followed, as that community swelled to several millions, women came to occupy diverse and changing roles.

American Jewish Women's History, an anthology covering colonial times to the present, illuminates that historical diversity. It shows women shaping Judaism and their American Jewish communities as they engaged in volunteer activities and political crusades, battled stereotypes, and constructed relationships with their Christian neighbors. It ranges from Rebecca Gratz's development of the Jewish Sunday School in Philadelphia in 1838 to protest the rising prices of kosher meat at the turn of the century, to the shaping of southern Jewish women's cultural identity through food. There is currently no other reader conveying the breadth of the historical experiences of American Jewish women available.

The reader is divided into four sections complete with detailed introductions. The contributors include: Joyce Antler, Joan Jacobs Brumberg, Alice Kessler-Harris, Paula E. Hyman, Riv-Ellen Prell, and Jonathan D. Sarna.

	Acknowledgments
	Introduction	1
Pt. I	Sense of Place	9
1	Portraits of a Community: The Image and Experience of Early American Jews	13
2	The Lessons of the Hebrew Sunday School	26
3	A Great Awakening: The Transformation That Shaped Twentieth-Century American Judaism	43
4	Gone to Another Meeting: The National Council of Jewish Women, 1893-1993	64
Pt. II	Worlds of Difference	75
5	Borrowers or Lenders Be: Jewish Immigrant Women's Credit Networks	79
6	"We Dug More Rocks": Women and Work	91
7	Organizing the Unorganizable: Three Jewish Women and Their Union	100
8	Immigrant Women and Consumer Protest: The New York City Kosher Meat Boycott of 1902	116
9	Zion in Our Hearts: Henrietta Szold and the American Jewish Women's Movement	129
Pt. III	A Wider World	151
10	The Jewish Priestess and Ritual: The Sacred Life of American Orthodox Women	153
11	The Women Who Would Be Rabbis	175
12	Budgets, Boycotts, and Babies: Jewish Women in the Great Depression	185
13	Angels "Rewolt!": Jewish Women in Modern Dance in the 1930s	201
Pt. IV	Fierce Attachments	219
14	The "Me" of Me: Voices of Jewish Girls in Adolescent Diaries of the 1920s and 1950s	223
15	Rage and Representation: Jewish Gender Stereotypes in American Culture	238
16	"From the Recipe File of Luba Cohen": A Study of Southern Jewish Foodways and Cultural Identity	256
17	Going South: Jewish Women in the Civil Rights Movement	281
18	Jewish Feminism Faces the American Women's Movement: Convergence and Divergence	297
	Contributors	313
	Permissions	316
	Index	319