"The Whole Wide World, Without Limits": International Relief, Gender Politics, and American Jewish Women, 1893-1930 (review)

In "The Whole Wide World, Without Limits," author Mary McCune explores the international relief activities of American Jewish women during World War I and after the armistice in the context of three major organizations: the National Council of Jewish Women (NCJW), Hadassah (the Women's Zionist Organization of America), and the Workmen's Circle (Arbeter Ring). The book's title, taken from the oft-quoted comments of NCJW founder Hannah G. Solomon, reflects a major theme of McCune's book, that after 1890 Jewish women in America assumed increasingly visible public roles, and by the outbreak of World War I their focus turned to a significant extent to issues taking place overseas. McCune considers the war a watershed in women's history and argues that, while many American women from a variety of religious and ethnic groups were involved in peace efforts and assistance activities during the period, Jewish women were especially affected by the war because of the unique plight of Jews in Europe and Palestine at the time. Women in all three Jewish organizations dedicated themselves to raising significant funds to aid the war victims and refugees and at the same time negotiated their expanding roles among a number of Jewish male-dominated organizations. Furthermore, McCune maintains that participation in relief activities by these Jewish women firmly launched them into the world of international politics.

McCune's book is based on her doctoral dissertation, and she has meticulously researched archival resources. "The Whole Wide World, Without Limits" begins with an examination of the diverse ways in which Jewish women organized in the NCJW, Hadassah, and the Workmen's Circle to meet their goals. While the founders and members of the NCJW and Hadassah were drawn largely from the German Jewish and Eastern European middle class, respectively, the women involved in the Workmen's Circle were primarily working-class, Yiddish-speaking immigrants from Eastern Europe. Despite difference in class, language, religious affiliation, and political views, McCune argues that activist women in all three organizations, which together reflected a wide membership spectrum that included the well-to-do and the working classes, religious adherents and secularists, and Zionists and anti-Zionists, "had a profound impact on American Jewish life" and the "shaping of the contours of modern American Jewish identity" (192). Working within separate female organizations allowed these American Jewish women to develop a heightened sense of gender consciousness that facilitated their entry "into the public realm in a manner that did not necessitate their sacrificing commitment to either Jewish or women's issues" (195). McCune demonstrates how Hadassah, in particular, developed effective marketing strategies to attract Jewish women to the Zionist cause, which not only enabled the women's organization to outpace similar men's groups but to grow into the largest Jewish women's group in America.

While McCune's in-depth focus on three vitally important early Jewish women's groups is an important and clearly written study, its tendency to zero-in only on a circumscribed time period sometimes obscures the larger picture. Although World War I undoubtedly influenced the continuing and expanding development of Jewish women's public activism, McCune tends to minimize the fact that well before 1914 this phenomenon was already in process as Jewish women throughout the country, not only in the Northeast, were taking critical roles in civic and Jewish communal affairs. For example, in her introduction she mentions only briefly in passing that "the American Jewish female tradition of 'charity work' served as a critical foundation" for later efforts by Jewish groups on behalf of world Jewry, although she does elaborate this idea somewhat in a related footnote (4). McCune also asserts that before World War I, few Jewish women were involved in suffrage efforts; yet by the time of America's entry into the war, women, including Jews, in almost all western states were already enfranchised, and...