America's Jewish Women: A History from Colonial Times to Today by Pamela S. Nadell (review)

Jewish women have been largely invisible in mainstream United States history writing for two reasons. First, like all women until quite recently, their lives and accomplishments—both inside the home and beyond—have fallen outside the categories most historians deemed important, namely, politics, international relations, economics and the military. Or they have been pushed to the margins (both in fact and in historical accounts) in the public realms where they were able to participate, such as reform and labor. Until feminist critics began claiming that "the personal is political," women's experiences and struggles simply didn't make the cut. To be sure, dozens of women, inspired by second-wave feminism, began writing their own history starting in the 1970s, but for decades, that body of work remained more or less separate from (though not necessarily equal to) "malestream" history and seldom appeared in synthetic works such as US history textbooks.

It was not until the 1980s that textbook authors began to include material on women, but mostly it was, to use Gerda Lerner's apt terms, "compensatory"—citing the names of already famous women such as Eleanor Roosevelt or Dorothea Dix—or "contributory"—explaining how women fit into significant male-defined events, such as major wars or the New Deal. Even today, few textbooks have achieved what Lerner called "the new universal history," one in which men's and women's history are fully integrated, with the result that Jewish women, like their gentile sisters, remain largely absent or appear only anecdotally, when, for example, they make a major gain such as winning suffrage.¹

The second reason Jewish women are absent is that Jews on the whole are also a relatively invisible category in mainstream US history. Unlike white gentiles, who are, though unmarked, the implicit subject—the presumed norm—of much writing in this field, and different from other minorities, most notably Blacks, whose long narrative of oppression and resistance is threaded throughout the chapters of nearly every major American history textbook, American Jews appear only sporadically in these accounts, usually in conjunction with the Holocaust, or in the person of notables (almost always male) such as Louis Brandeis or Bernard Baruch. But even if Jews were more fully integrated, there is no assurance that Jewish women would be included, since in much mainstream American Jewish history they are marginalized or excluded as well.

The presumed subjects of any field of history shape its categories of analysis, and vice-versa. Erased both by gender and by religion and ethnicity, Jewish women simply don't appear in conventional US history writing. Can the field be modified to make room for them? Surely there is no dearth of resources. Since publication of my own book The Jewish Woman in America, co-authored with Charlotte Baum and Paula Hyman in 1976 (a pioneering study, but admittedly somewhat thin in terms of archival research), historians have produced a substantial body of work on Jewish women, including articles, monographs, and even an encyclopedia. They have produced biographies of major figures in politics, women's organizations, and culture, and analyzed specialized aspects such as Jewish women's fertility and use of birth control, education, and entry into the professions. This should now allow US historians to make the leap and grant Jewish women their place in a "new universal history."

Though Pamela Nadell did not necessarily set out with this goal in mind, her comprehensive new book, America's Jewish Women: A History from Colonial Times to Today, could certainly facilitate the task of integration. But it is not without its challenges. Nadell begins by problematizing the very category of Jewish women, noting that over the centuries but even within specific generations, they varied widely, not just in the ways that all American women differ from one another (in terms of location, class, occupation, etc.), but with regard to their own identity as Jews. Many were highly observant while...