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Iris Parush
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Reading Jewish Women: Marginality and Modernization in Nineteenth-Century Eastern European Jewish Society (Tauber Institute for the Study of European Jewry) Paperback – April 1, 2004

by Iris Parush (Author)
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In this extraordinary volume, Iris Parush opens up the hitherto unexamined world of literate Jewish women, their reading habits, and their role in the cultural modernization of Eastern European Jewish society in the nineteenth century. Parush makes a paradoxical claim: she argues that because Jewish women were marginalized and neglected by rabbinical authorities who regarded men as the bearers of religious learning, they were free to read secular literature in German, Yiddish, Polish, and Russian. As a result of their exposure to a wealth of literature, these reading women became significant conduits for Haskalah (Enlightenment) ideas and ideals within the Jewish community. This deceptively simple thesis dramatically challenges and revamps both scholarly and popular notions of Jewish life and learning in nineteenth-century Eastern Europe. While scholars of European women’s history have been transforming and complicating ideas about the historical roles of middle-class women for some time, Parush is among the first scholars to work exclusively in Jewish territory. The book will be a very welcome introduction to many facets of modern Jewish cultural history―particularly the role of women―which have too long been ignored.
Previous page
  1. Print length
    368 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Brandeis University Press
  4. Publication date
    April 1, 2004
  5. Dimensions
    6 x 1 x 9 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    1584653671
  7. ISBN-13
    978-1584653677
  8. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"Parush's book is a serious step towards recovering a remarkable picture of Eastern European Jewish life at a turbulent point in history. It is a pioneering work that serves to integrate Jewish women's experience into the socio-cultural discussion of Jewish communities' encounter with modernity."ÑHaaretz

"This book is an extraordinarily rich and unusual window into the society of Jewish women in the nineteenth-century. With fascinating details about girls' secular and Jewish education and revealing extracts from memoirs and novels, Parush underlines the crucial role of women in spreading the spirit of the Enlightenment and modernization throughout East European Jewish society."
ÑJewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance Journal

"In this brilliant book, literary scholar Iris Parush has presented a compelling case for the central role of Jewish women in the modernization of Eastern European Jews in the second half of the nineteenth century.
Iris Parush has made a most compelling case for her thesis that in the struggle for modernization, Jewish women benefited from their own marginality, a marginality that provided them with a space to read and absorb modern ideas, and then to spread those ideas to Jewish society at large. Skillfully using references to women from the memoirs of men (and from the few written by women), she has painted a nuanced and thorough portrait of the major role played by women in the modernization of Jewish society in Eastern Europe in the nineteenth century. Reading Jewish Women is thus a very satisfying book."ÑH-Net Review

About the Author

RENÉE POZNANSKI, born in France to Holocaust survivors, graduated from the Sorbonne and the Institute of Political Science in Paris. She emigrated to Israel in 1973, where she is currently Yaakov and Poria Avnon Professor of Holocaust Studies at Ben Gurion University. This book, published in French by Hachette in 1999, received the Jacob Buchman Prize for the Memory of the Holocaust from The International Institute for Holocaust Research, Yad Vashem.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Brandeis University Press; 1st edition (April 1, 2004)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 368 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1584653671
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1584653677
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.25 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 1 x 9 inches

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Iris Parush

Iris Parush

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