Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History: The Roles and Representations of Women (review)

Book Reviews 153 highest point-a worthy rival of philosophy. He took the quarrel between . reason and revelation most seriously. Orr's penetrating analysis of the essay "Jerusalem and Athens" provides an excellent example of Strauss's philosophic way of reading the author of Genesis and the prophets on the one hand and on the other the poets and the philosophers, particularly Hesiod and Socrates. By applying Strauss's hermeneutics, she shows that many of the great concerns of political philosophy-the human place in the universe, the need for politics, the thirst for justice, the confrontation with evil-all hinge on whether reason (Socrates) or revelation (Yahweh) is the ultimate guide for humanity. Orr's commentary on Strauss makes the fundamental point that the moderns were incorrect in their simple denigration of the sacred and that Strauss tips the scales a bit toward Jerusalem by coming to the "exigetical defense ... ofthe God ofAbraham, Isaac and Jacob." Orr offers a strong challenge to those Straussians who present him as the cautious nihilist rather than the reluctant believer. She shows that Strauss also keeps the philosopher as the one who is searching in order to preserve the possibility offaith. Reason and revelation are alternatives, they are beyond synthesis, yet each alternative .remains attractive. Indeed Orr's lucid, careful, scholarly, and engaging book. reveals that Strauss never allows Athens to triumph over Jerusalem. The book reprints "Jerusalem and Athens" as well as Strauss's "On the Interpretation of Genesis," an essay which has previously been difficult to find until the publication of this book. Kenneth L. Deutsch Department of Political Science State University of New York at Geneseo Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History: The Roles and Representations of Women, by Paula E. Hyman. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995. 197 pp. $30.00. This important study examines the different ways in which Jewish women and men have responded to the socioeconomic and ideological challenges of modernity in Western and Central Europe, Eastern Europe, and the United States in the past one hundred and fifty years. In so doing it also explores the ways in which varying conceptions of gender have shaped Jewish identity in the modern period. Arguing the centrality of 154 SHOFAR Winter 1997 Vol. 15, No.2 women's experiences as part of any understanding ofJewish accommodations to modernity, Paula E. Hyman persuasively shows that the processes of acculturation and assimilation have been quite different for women and men in the various Jewish milieux under consideration, and that modern Jewish identity has been wrought on the battleground of sexual politics. Professor Hyman begins her study with the Jews of Western and Central Europe, and with nineteenth-century emigrants from these communities to the United States. Many scholars have characterized the Jewish acculturation which took place in these countries, followed in some cases ·by dissolution of minority ties through conversion and/or intermarriage , as a uniform process for men and women. Few, however, have considered the ways in which gender limited· the assimilation of Jewish women, rendering their progress to integration far more halting and incomplete in comparison to Jewish men. Confined to the domestic scene, restricted in their educational opportunities, and prevented from participating in the public realms ofeconomic and civic life, Jewish women had far fewer contacts with the non-Jewish world. We learn from sources such as memoirs, diaries, and personal correspondence that women tended to be observant ofaspects ofJudaism even after their husbands had abandoned any Jewish practices. In fact, Hyman argues, such domestic Judaism not only reflected traditional Judaism's preferred positioning of women in the private realm ofhusband and family, but was also, ironically, a form ofJewish conformity to the bourgeois model of female domesticity which put religion in the female sphere. The Jewish press of the late nineteenth century described theJewish woman as the "guardian angel of the house," "mother in Israel," and "pric;stess of the Jewish ideal," and assigned to her primary responsibility for theJewish identity and education of her children. This was a significant indication of acculturation in an ethnic group in which men had historically fulfilled most religious obligations, including the Jewish education of their sons. Moreover, this...