Women and American Judaism: Historical Perspectives (review)

The twelve well-documented essays collected in this volume succeed admirably in depicting how American Jewish women from the colonial era to the end of the twentieth century expressed their commitment to Judaism and fashioned gendered places for themselves within the home, the synagogue, and the Jewish community, and among non-Jews in the larger American society. Moreover, the various chapters in this book reveal that many of the central controversies in the historical development of American Judaism revolved around issues concerned with women. Gender-centered disputes have raged over mixed seating during worship, appropriate female roles within the synagogue and in its ritual life, whether women could found and administer Sunday schools, the nature of religious education for girls, and whether women could become rabbis and cantors. As editors Pamela Nadell and Jonathan Sarna remark, “Viewed in retrospect, [such conflicts] underscore the extent to which women’s history and its gendered twists and turns have marked the history of American Judaism as a whole” (p. 3).

The first seven chapters of this book, dealing with events and individuals prior to 1900, are its special strength, since much of the material discussed is little known to those interested in the history of Jewish women. Essays by Holly Snyder and Aviva Ben-Ur illuminate the lives of individual Jewish women and their larger settings in colonial British America and the early American Republic, while Dianne Ashton delineates the situations of Jewish women on both sides of the Civil War through their writings of various kinds. Karla Goldman’s essay on Jewish women’s public religious lives in late nineteenth-century Cincinnati, the center of American Reform Judaism, demonstrates the reframing of Jewish religious life and institutions in mainstream middle-class patterns. She shows how the increasing female domination of synagogue life in many American cities in this period reflected larger social patterns, an indication of the difficulties inherent in “Americanizing Jewish gender identity and public Jewish worship” (p. 124). William Toll deals with similar themes in more rugged settings in his discussion of Jewish women in the American West and their spiritual dedication to building Jewish communities with enduring institutions. He writes that “[t]he benevolent work of pioneer women, despite the rudimentary Judaism they conveyed to their daughters, had produced a spirit of communal responsibility that their daughters could make more sophisticated” (p. 142).

Implicit in all the essays mentioned so far is the impact both of general American assumptions that women were the pious sex and the nineteenth-century growth of Christian women’s organizations intent on promoting religious values. Felicia Herman and Eric Goldstein focus on the formation of distinctively Jewish women’s associations in response to these social phenomena. Herman discusses the formation of “Sisterhoods of Personal Service,” particularly in New York City’s most prestigious congregations, and how these precursors of the synagogue sisterhood movement served as vehicles for women to express themselves religiously through charitable endeavors. Goldstein deals with the fascinating topic of the difficulties American Jewish women of German background encountered in their attempts to define Jewish difference in a time when racial language was pervasive in American society.

Given the vast and tumultuous changes that characterized Jewish life in North America between 1900 and 2000, it is not surprising that the twentieth century is not as well served as earlier eras in Women and American Judaism. While Deborah Lipstadt’s concluding essay offers an inclusive look at the religious transformations feminism has wrought for American Jewish women of various denominational approaches in recent decades, the remaining four chapters concentrate on more limited facets of American Jewish women’s spiritual lives. Thus, Beth Wenger examines the ways in which Jewish leaders between the 1920s and 1940s linked “family purity” practices with supposed scientific and medical benefits, in an attempt to buttress traditional observance in a modern American setting, while Regina Stein traces the emergence of the Bat Mitzvah. Shuly Rubin Schwartz reveals how many women...