Reflections on the “Jewish Women and Philanthropy” Roundtable

As an historian contemplating the roundtable at the “Jewish Women and Philanthropy” conference, I cannot help wondering what the foremothers of American Jewish social welfare would have contributed to this symposium. Hence, I would like to invite three of them into the conversation. Let me introduce our guests from the past: In her native Philadelphia, Rebecca Gratz (1781–1869) founded a series of firsts in American Jewish communal life— the first female Hebrew benevolent society outside the confines of the synagogue (1819), the first Hebrew Sunday School (1838), and the first Jewish orphanage (1855). Chicagoan Hannah Greenebaum Solomon (1858–1942) was the founding president of the Council of Jewish Women (1893), more widely known as the National Council of Jewish Women. Henrietta Szold (1860–1945) had a multifaceted career as a journalist, teacher, editor and student before founding Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization of America (1912).

What would they have understood of this conversation? Some of its language would have been foreign to them. Concepts like social change, social entrepreneurship, feminism, radical egalitarianism, gendered analysis and feminist empowerment did not exist in their eras. We would have had to explain that by invoking social change, our panelists were asking how best to use philanthropy and womanpower to ameliorate social ills, and that social entrepreneurship advocates emulating business entrepreneurs in imagining new ways to solve problems. Two of our pioneering leaders of Jewish women, Hannah Solomon and Henrietta Szold, would likely have heard the word feminism before, for it first emerged in the 1910s and was then spelled with a capital F.¹ However, they would have been utterly befuddled by the idea of radical egalitarianism and equally confused by the concept of gendered analysis. The panelists would have had to explain to our guests the concept of gender and that, as opposed to sex, it is seen as being socially and historically constructed.² However, all three would have embraced the notion of feminist empowerment, once they understood that it referred to women taking charge of their own lives and projects, for that is exactly what Gratz, Solomon and Szold did in their lifetimes.

Once our guests had gotten past the late twentieth-century terminology, they would surely have been delighted, but also somewhat astonished, to meet the panelists. Henrietta Szold wanted to attend college but could not leave home to do so, and no colleges in Baltimore admitted women when Szold graduated high school.³ She would have been amazed to meet Sylvia Barack Fishman, a woman professor at a university established under Jewish auspices (Brandeis University was founded after Szold’s death), focusing both her scholarship and her work as co-director of the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute on gender and the Jewish community. When Szold founded Hadassah, advancing scholarship on women in Judaism was not among its aims.

Hannah Solomon would surely have welcomed Gail Reimer’s activity as founding director of the Jewish Women’s Archive, the “go-to” address for the history of American Jewish women. As Solomon was organizing the Jewish Women’s Congress at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, where the Council of Jewish Women was founded, she made certain to include several papers on women in the Jewish past—in the biblical and medieval eras, in “modern days” and within the realm of the synagogue.⁴ By showing how women across the breadth of the Jewish historical experience adapted to their time and place, Solomon was laying the foundation for the new organizational effort that she hoped would emerge from the conference, aimed at linking Jewish women across the nation with the organizational and associational endeavors underway among American women at large.⁵

Rebecca Gratz would have appreciated the work of Shifra Bronznick, a consultant and leadership strategist and founding president of Advancing Women Professionals and the Jewish Community. In her lifetime, Gratz headed many organizations inside the Jewish community and beyond its borders. In 1801, she helped found Philadelphia’s Female Association for the Relief of Women and Children in Reduced Circumstances, and she was its secretary for the next twenty-two years...