Gender and the Americanization of Judaism

Karla Goldman. Beyond the Synagogue Gallery: Finding a Place for Women in American Judaism. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000. xii + 275 pp. ISBN 0-674-00221-0 (cl).

Historian Karla Goldman examines the ways in which Jewish women became a presence in the American synagogue and, thus, in Jewish life more broadly over the course of the nineteenth century. Relegated to separate sections in traditional services, Jewish women were not central actors in public worship. However, uniquely American conditions led reformers to encourage greater female participation through the institution of such reforms as mixed-choirs and family pews. The latter, a characteristic of American Reform synagogues by the turn of the twentieth century, failed to attract adherents in all but the most radical Reform temples of Central Europe. Goldman argues that American Jews' desire to achieve middle-class respectability, their concern for what Christians thought of their religious practices, along with weak communal control, created a situation conducive to instituting the sorts of reforms that drew women more centrally into public religious life.

Even as Jewish leaders endeavored to bring women into public worship, they resisted their participation in the administration of the synagogue itself. For the greater part of the nineteenth century, most women were not members of their synagogues. Thus, women lacked a voice in communal policymaking even as they gained a voice in religious services. Nevertheless, women experimented with synagogue-centered public activism. Early in the century, they raised money to decorate sanctuaries, and later they opened Sunday schools and aided widows and orphans. Especially important in the early period was Philadelphia's Rebecca Gratz who, well into the next century, served as a model for female public activism.

This example aside, however, Goldman observes that, in contrast to Protestant women, the level of Jewish women's communal work declined as their religious participation increased. Despite the fact that women constituted the majority of service attendees, their activist purview grew more constricted as many leaders, witnessing the rapid acculturation of Jewish men, turned to women to maintain Jewish tradition. Only with the huge wave of immigration that began in the 1880s did women find work of their own outside the confines of the synagogue's walls. By the turn of the twentieth century, Jewish women had not only created a national organization, the National Council of Jewish Women (NCJW), but also had begun to question rules of synagogue membership and governance and, for a few, the gendered nature of the rabbinate itself.

Goldman is at her best when discussing the ways in which physical space reflects and influences religious expression and power. Her discussions of the architecture of early American synagogues and the ambivalent relationship of American Jews to the mikveh (ritual bath) are both intriguing. She urges us to see the connections between reforms involving physical space with the reordering of gender in religious expression. For instance, she notes that mixed choirs allowed women "important symbolic participation and leadership in the prayers of the community" (88).

Protestants play a large role in this narrative as models against which Jews are compared, both by their contemporaries and by the author. The conflation of Baptists, Methodists, Episcopalians and Quakers as "Christians" unfortunately leaves us without a firm sense of who these people were. Did the form of Christianity that Jews imitated vary by region? What sort of power did assorted Christian women have in their own congregations? What role did regional culture play in the development of standards of respectability? Finally, Goldman speculates that Jews imitated aspects of Christian services out of a desire, in part, to avoid the "excesses of Christian revivalism" (81). She does not comment, however, on the fact that many of the "respectable," middle-class community leaders admired by Jews were themselves adherents of the Second Great Awakening, its revivalism and reform spirit. ¹

One wonders if the focus on the synagogue limits Goldman's ability to explore more fully the...