Women and American Judaism: Historical Perspectives (review)

In this wide-ranging anthology, editors Pamela S. Nadell and Jonathan D. Sarna bring together an impressive group of essays that demonstrate the process by which women and Judaism adapted to changing conditions in the United States, a process that magnified and transformed women's involvement in every aspect of Jewish religious life. The essays in this volume reveal not only the importance of women to the history of American Judaism, but the significance of that history to our understanding of the broader contours of women's experience in the United States.

In addition to an excellent introductory essay by Nadell and Sarna, the volume includes essays by Holly Snyder, Aviva Ben-Ur, Dianne Ashton, Karla Goldman, William Toll, Felicia Herman, Eric L. Goldstein, Beth S. Wenger, Regina Stein, Shuly Rubin Schwartz, Joyce Antler and Deborah E. Lipstadt. In studies ranging from discussions of Jewish women in the colonial household to investigations into the uses of Jewish racial identity among turn-of-the-century German Jewish women, to the role of twentieth-century rebbetzins and the relationship between Judaism and feminism, the volume's contributors demonstrate that from the earliest days of American settlement to the modern civil rights era and beyond, Jewish women from Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform congregations simultaneously participated in both the internal religious life of their own households and communities and acted as cultural ambassadors, representing the public face of Judaism to the larger American society.

What is especially useful about these essays is their attention to the complicated ways in which women's roles in the realm of religious life both undergirded and helped justify their participation in the wider public sphere of Jewish-American life. Using the metaphor of "shifting veils," for example, Dianne Ashton examines patterns of Jewish women's lives during the Civil War, especially among the peddlers who settled in frontier communities, where they found themselves relatively isolated from other Jewish families. In a time of deep national divisions, Ashton shows, Jewish women sometimes concealed their religious differences from Christian neighbors in order to make common political cause in a divided nation. Conversely, some hid their political beliefs in order to consolidate faith-based bonds among Jewish family and friends.

Three articles (by Karla Goldman, William Toll, and Felicia Herman) examine the role of synagogue "Sisterhoods" as both extensions of women's domestic roles and springboards for more activist patterns of (German) Jewish female benevolence in nineteenth-century cities. Felicia Herman describes the ethos of "personal service" among a new generation of urban women and examines the rise of "scientific" concepts of charity that developed among "uptown" Sisterhoods which attempted to minister to the needs of "downtown" Eastern European immigrants. Together they show how the history of synagogue women both paralleled and diverged from broader patterns of urban women's lives in the U.S.

Several essays in this volume stand out for their ability to open their subjects onto wider conceptual terrain and, in doing so, to tie the theme of women and Judaism to a broader set of historical and intellectual issues. Beth Wenger's fascinating investigation into the scientific discourses on family purity in the interwar period is an especially compelling example of this kind of analytical reach. In her exploration of "Mitzvah and Medicine," Wenger traces the growing public interest in Judaism's laws of "family purity," especially the command that menstruating women abstain from sexual intercourse. Underscoring the syncretism between religious and scientific discourse in the period from 1920 to 1940, Wenger shows how medical studies of the lower rates of cervical cancer among Jewish women helped shape an uncanny relationship between rabbis and public health officials. In an era when rabbis feared that modernity and assimilation were eroding commitments to Judaism, scientific experts on female reproductive health "bolstered the argument that...