Introduction

Volume 9, No.4 Summer 1991 INTRODUCTION Norma Fain Pratt r Norma Fain Pratt, the Special Editor of this issue, is a professor of history. She has taught women's history at Sarah Lawrence College , the University of California at Los Angeles, California State University, Los Angeles, and Mt. San Antonio College. Her books Morris Hillquit: A Political History of an American Jewish Socialist (Greenwood Press, 1979) and The History ofJewish Women in Southern California (Legacy series III, Southern California Jewish Historical Society, 1990) both deal with Jewish immigration to the United States. She has published several articles on the history and culture of Eastern European Jewish women immigrants in American Quarterly, Studies in the American Jewish Experience, and Studies in American Jewish Literature. Dr~ Pratt also writes fiction and has had several short stories published as well as two plays, one of which is about the Yiddish poet Anna Margolin. . . 1 Over the last twenty years a steadily increasing number of books and articles are being published giving us new information and documenting the lives and works of Jewish women, both the famous and the unknown. The appearance of this vital scholarship about Jewish women points to the faCt that a new generation of Jewish historians, sociologists, literary analysts, religious thinkers, and other Jewish women's studies scholars are inspired by the flowering of American feminist scholarship since the 1960s and are influenced by the social realities illuminated through the contemporary women's movements. As the winter 1990 issue of the feminist magazine Lilith exclaimed , "Jewish Feminist Scholill'ship COmes of Age," and women scholars are now pondering gender issues within the context of Jewish history and culture. This special issue of Shofar is devoted to a small portion of this vast new field of Jewish women's studies. The artiCles in this volume explore the lives of a partiCular group ofwomen, immigrant Eastern European Jewish women in America and in Israel, during the tum of the century and in the first decades of the twentieth century. We have chosen to concentrate our attention on this immigrant group because many women scholars, the descendants of Eastern European immigrant women, presently are actively engaged in research in this area of scholarship. Also, important general theoretical 2 SHOFAR questions that are addressed by other researchers throughout the rich interdisciplinary fields ofJewish women's studies are well considered by the scholars in the field of women's immigrant culture and history. We hope these articles in our special women's issue enrich the understanding of female Eastern European immigrant Jewry while also revealing, methodologically, how the exploration ofwomen's lives asks original questions ofJewish history, society , and literature. The late nineteenth and early twentieth century was a time of enormous change. Not only mass migration but vast economic, cultural, political, and intellectual transformations revolutionized ancient traditional ways of Eastern European Jewish life for a majority of Jews. Under such circumstances it is not surprising that gender relationships, the roles played by women and men in society and their understanding of these roles, also wpuld be re-evaluated and transformed. One thread linking the five articles in this issue with each other and with the previous literature about Eastern European Jewish women is their common focus upon the process of modernization. All contemporary histories of Eastern European Jewish women beginning with Baum, Hymowitz and Michel, The Jewish Women in America (1976) to Sydney Weinberg, The World of Our Mothers (1988) attempt to isolate, to describe, and to interpret the characteristics of the traditional Eastern European female identity and the process by which this persona was altered in thought and in actual day-to-day behavior. Whether she travelled to New York or to Tel Aviv, the Eastern European female immigrant brought with her cultural baggage which required sorting, readjustment, and transition when she began to settle into her new home. To become the so-called "New Woman" demanded that she acquire different ideals; it asked her to perform differently in her private and public life. While each of the articles examines a particular aspect of this modernization process, in essence they all address one basic issue: the impact of changing values on Jewish...