Jewish Women Pioneering the Frontier Trail: A History in the American West (review)

Jewish Women Pioneering the Frontier Trail: A History in the American West is worthy of laudatory attention. The author, Jeanne E. Abrams, argues that despite small numbers and far-flung locations, Jewish women made significant contributions to the development of private and public spheres, doing so in ways that not only benefited their own culture but also western communities at large. The author further asserts that Jewish women used the West as a platform from which to launch themselves into social service and educational and professional roles that had an impact on regional and national Judaism. Abrams traces the experiences of Jewish women as they transformed themselves from nineteenth-century European immigrants into twentieth-century American citizens, but not at the expense of their religious identity. The author draws on a rich assortment of primary materials, buttressing them with an appropriate selection of published scholarship. The result is a deftly crafted, highly readable monograph that is important for the following reasons.

First, this work reminds the reader that it is not by heft of numbers or profile of celebrity that historical subjects merit assessment. Rather, as these women indicate, the powerful forces in individual and collective lives should be the measure of historical actors and the importance of their imprint on the national narrative. By delving into western municipalities, such as Denver and Los Angeles, but also examining lesser-known towns—including near villages in Kansas, Wyoming, Nevada, and Utah—Abrams convincingly demonstrates that in all parts of the West Jewish women planted and nurtured spiritual and cultural elements of their religion. For example, although few may know Dora Levine, her long years as a Portland vendor of hard-to-secure Jewish foods, as well as her faith-based community activism, point to the way that ordinary women, working alone or in small groups, protected and advanced their religion in western environments of every sort.

Second, Jewish Women Pioneering the Frontier Trail brings scholarly attention to a group of women neglected in the annals of western history. Abrams sets aside the amorphous subject "Jews in the West," which has in the main chronicled the contributions of notable businessmen, politicians, philanthropists, and rabbis who took up residence in western locales. She turns the spotlight on Jewish women, weaving their individual biographies into larger historical themes. The insightful manner in which Abrams gives the voices of Jewish women resonance inside the contours of western history represents a major strength of this book. Those voices were heard on tossing ships, along migrant routes, and within Jewish homes, nascent synagogues, activist groups, benevolent societies, businesses, schools, and the political circles of the West. Women's concern for the preservation of religious practice, often accompanied by great personal hardship in an alien land, led to the development of social welfare projects, reform interests, worship centers, educational institutions, and political organizations that shaped local and regional life. Thus, Jewish women participated in the myriad complexities of western society and were players in the "Women's West"; for, as Abrams documents, their actions were critical to the building of family and community, their values central to stabilizing both, among Jews and non-Jews.

Third, this study tracks the evolving agency of Jewish women. While western history often gives witness to the adaptability of all women, regardless of ethnic or racial kinship, the dynamics within cultures which accompanied shifting gender imperatives are sometimes misunderstood or underestimated. Abrams points out that as employment and travel demands on Jewish men changed to accommodate the emerging western economy, women constructed strategies that simultaneously preserved traditional practices and enlarged the female place in American Judaism. Thus, women's thinking often reflected a conservative attachment to the past, even as womanly behaviors forged a more liberal lifestyle within the Jewish community. In this, Jewish women mirrored a common paradox found in other arenas of western history when conservative and liberal ideologies paralleled, challenged, and sustained each...