The Rabbi’s Wife: The Rebbetzin in American Jewish Life (review)

Sometimes, the most memorable articles are the ones you end up never completing. A decade and a half ago, I set out to examine the later lives and careers of a handful of young women who were instrumental in the founding on the Lower East Side at the turn of the twentieth century of the earliest Americanized Orthodox synagogue that was attractive to the children of immigrants. Women like Frances Lunevsky, Miriam Jacobs, and Ida Mearson were board members of the Jewish Endeavor Society, and they taught in the Hebrew school of this organization that was closely associated with the Jewish Theological Seminary. History knows all about their male counterparts who were then training for the rabbinate. Fellows like Herman Abramowitz and Mordecai M. Kaplan would go on to remarkable if not monumental careers that have been well documented. But what can be said and written of the future contributions to American Judaism of their female associates? Such was my endeavor. Perhaps, I surmised, they went on to careers as educators and became important leaders of the incipient modern Talmud Torah movement. But the Seminary’s Teachers’ Institute student records—it was coeducational—from that early time period are not extant to follow their road to adulthood. Maybe, I reasoned and hoped, one or more of them married American Orthodox and Conservative rabbis and, thus, their lives might have been chronicled, if references to widows’ works turned up in necrologies and obituaries of their spouses. Remember back then, all women adopted their husband’s last names upon marriage, making the search for these women’s sagas, unless they remained single, even more difficult. But again, I had no luck. Seemingly, my ladies wed laymen whose lives too would go unnoticed in the “who’s who” of Jewish congregational or rabbinical journals. The most that I could do to keep alive the potential for someday someone else retrieving their stories was to include their names in an article on “Orthodox Judaism” that appeared in the Jewish Women in America encyclopedia. That frustrating experience sensitized me to the multiple burdens those who endeavor to write women’s history carry. First, they must face the challenge of identifying the subjects of their inquiries before ascertaining the basic facts of their lives, and only then can they place what they accomplished into their appropriate historical contexts.

I immediately remembered my acute disappointment, highly impressed as I was with Shuly Rubin Schwartz’s perspicacity when I read her worthy study of American Jewish rebbetzins. Her work truly exemplifies the problems and possibilities of writing Jewish women’s history. She faced up to the realities that although many wives of rabbis were far from silent in affecting their local communities’ lives, their voices were often lost to scholars intent on evaluating their influential roles. This chasm between contribution and commemoration was due largely to these women’s personal poor record keeping that was often a result of their unassuming—but mistaken—understanding of how really important their lives truly were. An indefatigable researcher, Schwartz dug deep into the ephemera of American synagogue documentation—often beginning with the papers of their husbands—to cobble together sufficient source material to afford us important vantages into how these clerical collaborators lived and helped define American Judaism, primarily in the twentieth century.

Understandably, Schwartz focuses on the world of high-profile rebbetzins; defined here as primarily the wives of famous Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform rabbis. Among the most notable biographies are those of early twentieth century “pioneers,” Carrie Simon, Mathilde Schechter, and Rebecca Goldstein, their sister successors Mignon Rubenovitz, Rebecca Brickner, and Tamar de Sola Pool, and in the present day, Blu Greenberg. (Perhaps the prime exception to this cohort who had important husbands is Rebbetzin Esther Jungreis, a contemporary Orthodox “outreach” expert who preaches to turn-away crowds and who has modeled herself after the renowned Christian evangelist the Rev. Billy Graham. Her spouse...