Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
In April 1998, the front page of the Los Angeles Times proclaimed that Jews live in extraordinary times, when American women have transformed their status in Judaism, creating one of the most dramatic cultural shifts in centuries of Jewish history. At the end of the 20th century Jewish women had indeed redefined the ways they lived their Judaism: innovative religious ceremonies welcoming the birth of daughters proliferated, girls came to mark their bat mitzvah, and Jewish women turned out for feminist seders and became rabbis.
As the 12 essays in this volume demonstrate, Jewish women from the colonial era to the present have continually reshaped their roles as Jews and as members of their synagogues and communities. Offering nothing less than a gendered overview of three centuries of American Jewish religious life, the authors raise key questions about how women from across the nation conceptualized their ideas of Jewish womanhood even as they transformed their roles at home, in synagogues, as volunteers, and in the public eye.
Table of Contents
Queens of the household: the Jewish women of British America, 1700-1800 / Holly Snyder -- The exceptional and the mundane: a biographical portrait of Rebecca Machado Phillips (1746-1831) / Aviva Ben-Ur -- Shifting veils: religion, politics, and womanhood in the Civil War writings of American Jewish women / Dianne Ashton -- The public religious lives of Cincinnati's Jewish women / Karla Goldman -- From domestic Judaism to public ritual: women and religious identity in the American west / William Toll -- From priestess to hostess: sisterhoods of personal service in New York City: 1887-1936 / Felicia Herman -- Between race and religion: Jewish women and self-definition in late-nineteenth-century America / Eric L. Goldstein -- Mitzvah and medicine: gender, assimilation, and the scientific defense of "family purity" / Beth S. Wenger -- The road to bat mitzvah in America / Regina Stein -- Ambassadors without portfolio? The religious leadership of Rebbetzins in late-twentieth-century American Jewish life / Shuly Rubin Schwartz -- Justine Wise Polier and the prophetic tradition / Joyce Antler -- Feminism and American Judaism: looking back at the turn of the century / Deborah E. Lipstadt.