Introduction

The idea for this issue was born over two years ago during a casual lunch conversation between Deborah Greniman and me in the gardens behind the Jerusalem Van Leer Institute. In response to the Katrina-related disaster, I had left Scotland and joined the influx of professionals moving to New Orleans to help with the city’s recovery. We discussed the chaos there—how it looked from a mediated perspective versus how it was lived on the ground, and the Jewish community’s efforts to rebuild itself and aid the city’s rebuilding efforts. The contribution of local and non-local Jewish women to the effort was and is of staggering proportions. It prompted me to begin researching Jewish women’s involvement in philanthropic endeavors, only to find the literature rather scarce. The seed of this special issue was planted. Although no article explicitly addresses the contribution of Jewish women to the Katrina-linked disaster relief in the Gulf Coast region of the USA, their efforts provided the impetus for this issue, and thus provide a vital subtext to the issue as a whole.

Once the board of Nashim accepted the proposal for this special issue, we opted to host a conference on Jewish women and philanthropy prior to assembling it. A main goal of the conference was to bring scholars and activists together to initiate a public conversation that could be documented and included in the issue. The roundtable dialogue that resulted serves as the issue’s capstone.

In planning for the conference and this issue, I looked forward to the papers and discussions with eagerness and a little unease. As it turned out, the eagerness was well-founded. The unease was less so; yet it persisted until the close of the event. It stemmed from the key terms we selected to identify the topic: Jewish, women, philanthropy. Each was chosen with care to focus attention on a particular range of social phenomena by particular social actors; yet each posed challenges in its use that were critical to confront.

The necessary, albeit contested term that defined the focus of our project was Jewish. Debates over the extent to which religious, social, political or psychological components constitute Jewish identity percolate through popular and academic literature. As religious organizations have provided a signature vehicle for women’s involvement in philanthropy, the presentations and papers might justifiably have been skewed toward synagogue practices, but, as it turned out, they were not.¹ Instead, the scholarship focused on Jewish women’s organizations and female philanthropic groups. Susan Tannanbaum, for example, writes insightfully about the formation and early practices of the Union of Jewish Women (UJW) in Britain, suggesting that in addition to its philanthropic endeavors, it expanded the possibilities for Jewish women’s work in the community.

In the conference and the issue’s Call for Papers, the term Jewish was used absent any particular prescriptive content. Our hope was that potential contributors might draw upon our intentional under-definition to explore the significance of Jewishness for the topic. Debra Mesch and her co-authors took this route. Her quantitative analysis of giving levels in the USA yielded findings suggesting that in an era of increasing intermarriage, Jewishness—defined by self-identification—retains its importance.

The next problematic term was philanthropy, often confused with charity, but the two do differ. Charity is directed toward the poor and typically aims to relieve severe, immediate needs. Philanthropy is a broader conception. It includes charity but also encompasses the private support of cultural institutions such as museums, hospitals, research centers and more.² The article by Deborah Greniman and Judith Margolis on feminist artists and their matrons provides a glimpse at one stream of such philanthropic activism, even while noting that in feminist art the roles of philanthropic actor and recipient frequently combine.

According to the Oxford Dictionary of English, the English term “philanthropy” has its origin in the early seventeenth century, derived via Late Latin from the Greek term philanthropia, ‘man-loving.’ It was widely adopted to describe the act of promoting the welfare of others, or the desire to do so, in large part because it...