The Impulse to Jewish Women's History at the Tercentenary

T H E JE W I S H Q UA R T E R LY R E V I E W, Vol. 94, No. 4 (Fall 2004) 637–642 The Impulse to Jewish Women’s History at the Tercentenary PAME LA S . NADE L L We knew about women’s history, long before the revival of modern feminism. Gerda Lerner, Fireweed: A Political Autobiography IN 1954 THE EMMA LAZARUS FEDERATION of Jewish Women’s Clubs presented a musical revue Bread and Roses Too at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. The concert and dramatic presentation, directed by Alice Childress, an African-American actress and playwright, included amateur and professional musicians, dancers, and actors. It was ‘‘billed as a celebration of ‘300 Years of Jewish Life in America’.’’ Its author was Gerda Lerner.1 Historians need no introduction to Gerda Lerner. For those unfamiliar with her life and work, the encyclopedia Jewish Women in America telescopes her career: ‘‘Entering the field of United States history with a freshly minted Ph.D. in 1966, Gerda Lerner blazed a new professional path that led to the establishment of the field of women’s history.’’ Born in Vienna in 1920 and imprisoned by the Nazis after the Anschluss, Lerner escaped to America in 1939. Involved in progressive politics, Lerner also had literary ambitions, which led her, in the late 1950s, to start a novel about the abolitionists Sarah and Angelina Grimké. Her research for that propelled her to her doctorate, and thereafter, in works like The Majority Finds its Past (1979) and The Creation of Feminist Consciousness (1993), she pioneered women’s history in the historical profession.2 By the time Jews began celebrating the 300th anniversary of American Jewish history in 1954, Lerner’s progressive politics and literary designs 1. Gerda Lerner, Fireweed: A Political Autobiography (Philadelphia, 2002), 324. 2. Kathryn Kish Sklar, ‘‘Gerda Lerner,’’ Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, ed. Paula Hyman and Deborah Dash Moore (New York, 1997), 827–29. The Jewish Quarterly Review (Fall 2004) Copyright 䉷 2004 Center for Advanced Judaic Studies. All rights reserved. 638 JQR 94:4 (2004) had already led her to collaborate, with the poet Eve Merriam, on a dramatic revue, Singing of Women. Staged in 1951, it dramatized key moments in the history of the ‘‘woman question’’: for example, girls striking at the Lowell textile mills, Sojourner Truth asking ‘‘Ain’t I a Woman?,’’ union women struggling for better lives, and contemporary women demanding equal pay. Reflecting upon this early feminist work in her 2002 memoir Fireweed, Lerner concluded: ‘‘We knew about women’s history, long before the revival of modern feminism.’’3 After Singing of Women, Lerner came to write the revue Bread and Roses Too. Regrettably, its script is, at the moment, unavailable.4 But in Fireweed, Lerner remarks that, in rereading it, she was ‘‘struck by the well-documented and well-researched historical material’’ she gathered and ‘‘by the inclusion of several female heroines.’’ Although, as Lerner reflected much later, even in 1969, ‘‘the status of Women’s History’’ in the historical profession ‘‘was nonexistent,’’ her involvements with Singing of Women and Bread and Roses Too demonstrate in the early 1950s an impulse, albeit outside the academy, to the writing of women’s history. Moreover, that impulse promised to extend to the history of American Jewish women. That Bread and Roses Too was written for the Emma Lazarus Federation of Jewish Women’s Clubs is not surprising. In an important essay (included in two prominent anthologies of U.S. women’s history), Joyce Antler has analyzed the ‘‘Emmas’’ and demonstrated that their ‘‘new kind of American cultural Jewishness’’ linked their interests in Jewish, feminist , and radical causes. The Emmas set out to promote ‘‘the neglected history of American Jewish women’’ and to feature their contributions to American arts and letters, to the abolition and the trade union movements , and to immigration policy. In the early 1950s the Federation commissioned biographies of the woman’s rights activist Ernestine Rose and of, as one would expect, the poet Emma Lazarus. In fact, like Bread and Roses Too, Eve Merriam’s Emma Lazarus: Woman with a Torch was written to celebrate the tercentenary.5...