“The Whole Wide World, Without Limits”: International Relief, Gender Politics, and American Jewish Women, 1893-1930

2. The Crisis Years: Jewish Women and World War I

43 The First World War had a profound impact on the American Jewish community despite the fact that the United States did not directly involve itself in the conflict until mid-1917. Following the outbreak of hostilities in August 1914, American Jewish organizations immediately turned away from their individual projects to join large-scale international relief endeavors. The intensity and scope of the crisis impelled American Jews to act in concert, cooperating to a degree unknown before the war. Women’s groups, like other American Jewish organizations, responded to the plight of European Jewry and united in the national effort to coordinate raising relief funds and distributing them. Despite women’s heightened involvement, the war years seemed to exacerbate male attitudes against which women had fought for years. Women from the NCJW, Hadassah, and the Workmen’s Circle discovered that after the outbreak of the war their opinions were sought even less frequently than before, their leadership rarely summoned. In an effort to respond effectively to the crisis, Jewish women willingly joined with men’s groups to facilitate the speedy distribution of relief funds. But this cooperation soon resulted in a near total subordination of their plans to those devised by men. In some cases, like the Workmen’s Circle, discussion of gender issues virtually disappeared as men and women turned their attention to their “brothers and sisters” in Eastern chapter 2 The Crisis Years Jewish Women and World War I 6 Chapter 2 44 Europe. Women’s experiences in the wartime relief campaigns would soon challenge their faith in men’s commitment to gender equality; cooperation, they found, rarely resulted in recognition of women’s significant contribution to these efforts. Jewish women were not unique in facing such barriers. Women in both the peace and preparedness movements also encountered resistance from men. At the same time, these women were strong advocates of the idea that women brought unique contributions to the public world. 1 Jewish women’s cooperation and continuing, if muted, conflict with men similarly reinforced a strong sense of gender identity. By 1920 members of all three organizations spoke forthrightly and proudly about their own accomplishments and capabilities. Not only did women experience a growing sense of gender consciousness, they also began to reexamine their ideas regarding Jewish identity. The war uncovered fissures in the normative Jewish identity propounded by elite American Jews. Although all the major organizations rallied to the call to save the “Jewish people,” the definition of what precisely that meant was increasingly complicated by gender, class, ideological, political, and religious differences. By war’s end divisions within the American Jewish community that many people had previously left unexamined could no longer be ignored. The Plight of Jews in Eastern Europe and Palestine When the nations of Europe went to war in August 1914, American Jews viewed developments with intense anxiety. The vast majority of the world’s fifteen million Jews lived in those areas of Europe most directly affected by the onslaught of war: Germany and the Russian and Austrian-Hungarian Empires. 2 As members of the most recent wave of immigration, a majority of American Jews felt a visceral connection to the events in Europe. Although they expressed great affinity for those they left behind, few American Jews, if any, worried about Russia’s tsarist regime, which was responsible for some of the worst persecutions of Jews in modern times. Therefore, when war broke out between the Central Powers and the Allied nations, including Russia, most American Jews refused to lend support to the tsar’s war effort. At best Jews hoped that France and Great Britain might pressure their ally to change governmental policies affecting that empire’s Jewish subjects. Jewish Women and World War I 45 Within a few short months even these faint hopes died when it became all too apparent that the war had intensified the plight of Jews, especially those in the Pale of Settlement, where most Russian Jews lived. In the fall of 1915, as German forces advanced quickly into Russian territory, the Russian military laid the blame for their losses on Jews and other non-Russian populations, calling them conspirators, traitors who loved Germany more than Russia. This attitude served, in some areas, to inflame local antisemitic fervor , which not infrequently resulted in pogroms or other anti-Jewish actions. The Russian government ordered the expulsion of large numbers of Jews from the Eastern...