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7. Successful Mergers Each of the previous discussions of the public lives of Jewish American women highlighted successful mergers between Judaism and American culture. Jewish women factory workers discovered a rude mixture of the two cultures. They had to adjust their commitments to Judaism to the realities of factory life. Their devotion to justice, to prophetic truths, and their optimism that the Judaic heritage could be realized in America made them union activists. To the Jewish women radicals like Emma Goldman and Rose Pastor Stokes, both cultures had to be transcended in order to create the humane culture they desired. The Jewish women volunteer activists successfully merged middle-class American and Jewish values; they acted within the respected role definitions for women in both the Jewish and American framework. As volunteers and community workers, they fulfilled everyone's idea of the proper role and behavior for Jewish American women. The Jewish women writers examined, sometimes critically, the existing merger. Their task was to make sense, both personally and socially, of the delicate interaction between Judaism and American culture. This chapter focuses upon other varieties of synthesis, other examples from both the past and the present, of the public lives of Jewish women. In some cases, examples will be offered of Jewish women professionals who discussed the role Judaism played in their decision making, though their particular profession was not uniquely Jewish. In'other instances, Jewish women chose professional work in Jewish institutions. The continued increase in the level of education of Jewish women and the economic affluence of growing numbers of Jews enabled families to educate their daughters along with their sons. This sociological fact plays a key role in the conspicuous presence of Jewish women among American women professionals. Among the first generation of Jewish women who played public roles in America were the Yiddish actresses. Their resolution of the dilemma of how to integrate Judaism with American culture was to Successful Mergers 115 ignore the American world as much as possible. As fervent Yiddishists , they were committed to preserving a language, a literature, and a form of entertainment that were unique to Jews, wherever they lived. A Yiddish actress playing Mirele in Mirele Efros knew that she could play the same part in Yiddish theaters all over the world; the goal of her public life was to retain and embrace the Jewish culture, to maintain Yiddishkeit, in the American environment . Indeed, some of the actresses were tempted to the Englishspeaking stage, some looked at the lights of Broadway and temporarily abandoned the Yiddish stage for the Gentile audiences, but most of the first generation remained loyal to the Yiddish theater on the Lower East Side of New York and the Yiddish stages in all of the cities with a significant Jewish population. Yiddish actresses became idols in their community. The Jewish women of the neighborhood emulated the fashions of the actresses and attended their performances regularly. If actress Bertha Kalisch wore a plumed hat, all of her fans promptly purchased the same model. By 1918, a quarter of a million Jews attended the Yiddish theater regularly in New York City. One source lamented that, in 1928, "nine out of ten Jews attend theatrical performances of Yiddish theater while not one out of ten attends synagogue.'" Born in Russia and trained in Europe, Keni Liptzen (1856-1918) became the most famous Yiddish actress of the first generation. She performed in most of the plays written by Jacob Gordin, the acknowledged dean of the first generation of Yiddish playwrights. One of Gordin's themes was "the need for women to become emancipated in society."2 Liptzen acted in Gordin's Mirele Efros in 1898, when it was written, and made it a regular part of her repertory. Because Mirele Efros became a standard part of the Yiddish-theater repertory and featured a woman, a brief description of the plot is in order. Mirele Efros is the story of a widow by that name who is a very successful businesswoman. She has two sons, to whom she is devoted. Shalmon, her business associate, has been a faithful colleague during the sixteen years she has been widowed. When the play begins, Mirele is preparing to visit the family of her elder son's fiance. The family is not as wealthy as Mirele but they are pious people , a virtue important to traditional Jews. The visit does not prove satisfactory as the bride's parents turn out to be greedy people, anxious to...

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