Social Workers in the Muskeljudentum : "Hadassah Ladies," "Manly Men" and the Significance of Gender in the American Zionist Movement, 1912-1928

Even when [our detractors] concede our claims to the Zionist heritage, they dub us lachrymose, whining sisters of a brotherhood that stands for staunch manhood and dignified self-assertion, and looks upon charity as a necessary evil at best, and the need for exercising it as a blot upon civilization’s escutcheon. ¹

American women drawn to political and social reform movements in the early twentieth century often struggled to win support for their ambitions from the men who led those movements, and in this regard Zionism was no exception. Throughout its early years, Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization of America, sought to create an active role for women in a movement that many of its male leaders defined with masculine, virile images. As Hadassah’s founder and leader, Henrietta Szold, noted in 1917, these men considered Zionism a strong brotherhood, one in which middle-class women’s attempt to participate often amounted to “whining” and the promotion of useless charity. Hadassah ladies were not considered part of the same spirit that led socialist pioneers to settle in Palestine in the early twentieth century. The male leaders of the Zionist movement used explicitly masculine imagery such as the New Jewish Man or a Muskeljudentum (Muscular Jewry) and language replete with references to revitalizing Jewish manhood to illustrate what they hoped to accomplish by normalizing the Jewish people through the attainment of a secular nation-state. These masculine images sought to overturn contemporary stereotypical presentations of Jewish men as weak and urbanized. ²

This element of Zionist culture, focusing so explicitly on masculinity, complicated women’s attempts to participate in the movement on an equal basis with men. Those men who envisioned a virile, rejuvenated Muskeljudentum gave little thought to what the appropriate function of bourgeois women should be in that movement. Symbolically, the First Zionist Congress in 1897 lacked sufficient space on the main floor to accommodate all spectators and relegated most women to the gallery, away from the predominantly male delegates and therefore away from political deliberations and seats of power. ³ Seemingly, Zionist women, particularly those in the Diaspora, were to be mere observers or at most helpmates to programs led by men, a place to which women in many other organizations and movements were similarly relegated in the early twentieth century.

Yet American Zionist women refused to remain simply passive onlookers or supportive assistants. Those who founded Hadassah determined that women could contribute just as much as men to the movement to normalize their people. Hadassah’s emphasis on practical endeavors rooted in the social work initiatives of Jane Addams, Lillian Wald and other U.S. Progressives often placed them at odds with contemporary male Zionists who had imbibed nationalist rhetoric and abhorred older modes of charity to Jews in Palestine. Nevertheless, Hadassah insisted on defining its philanthropic enterprise as the uniquely feminine contribution of American women to the building of the Jewish homeland. In developing their position Hadassah leaders expressed a gender consciousness; at times, particularly in confrontations with the male establishment, this consciousness could become more explicitly feminist. All the while Hadassah leaders maintained that women, although differing in interests and capabilities from male Zionists, were equally qualified to contribute to the movement. The leadership believed that while men and women might serve different functions, ultimately both contributed to an enterprise grounded in a communal consciousness, one that was forthrightly Zionist in its commitment to the Jewish people as a whole. ⁴ This multilayered understanding of its overall mission facilitated Hadassah’s growth by attracting large numbers of new recruits to the Zionist cause in the years following World War I.

The more common perception of Hadassah as a bourgeois ladies’ circle has inclined scholars of American Zionism to overlook its importance for the growth and development of that movement apart from its success with social work in Palestine. In general surveys of American Zionism Hadassah appears as a movement apart, separate from the larger goals and struggles for nation-building. ⁵ And to...