American Jewish women and the Zionist enterprise

This chapter discusses maternalism as a collective belief in gender difference based on motherhood as the foundation for reform. It argues that maternalism was a crucial ingredient in the activism of Jewish women of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It also mentions Der Fraynd, the socialist Workmen's Circle monthly publication that linked the origins of the women's rights movement to prehistoric matriarchal societies in the fight for suffrage. The chapter analyses the peace movement that exhorted Jewish mothers to pass on the value of peace to their children and instruct them about the evils of war. It looks at how maternalism provided a framework and language for maintaining Jewish identity within a wider societal sphere as Jewish women moved into more public arenas and joined with women of different ethnic identities.

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A Breath of Life: Feminism in the American Jewish Community. Sylvia Barack FishmanWriting Their Nations: The Tradition of Nineteenth-Century American Jewish Women Writers. Diane Lichtenstein

Signs ◽

10.1086/495151 ◽

1996 ◽

Vol 22 (1) ◽

pp. 234-236

Author(s):

Ann R. Shapiro

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Women Writers ◽

Jewish Community ◽

American Jewish Community ◽

Jewish Women ◽

American Jewish

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American Jewish Women and the Zionist Enterprise (review)

Nashim A Journal of Jewish Women s Studies & Gender Issues ◽

10.1353/nsh.2005.0027 ◽

2006 ◽

Vol 10 (1) ◽

pp. 250-252

Author(s):

Pamela Susan Nadell

Keyword(s):

Jewish Women ◽

American Jewish

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Hasia R. Diner and Beryl Leiff Benderly. Her Works Praise Her: A History of Jewish Women in America from Colonial Times to the Present. New York: Basic Books, 2002. xvii, 462 pp.

AJS Review ◽

10.1017/s0364009405410090 ◽

2005 ◽

Vol 29 (1) ◽

pp. 197-198

Author(s):

Dianne Ashton

Keyword(s):

New York ◽

Social History ◽

Jewish Women ◽

General Audience ◽

American Jewry ◽

Valuable Book ◽

History Of ◽

American Jewish ◽

Familiar Material ◽

Experiences Of Women

This valuable book is more than a long overdue corrective to the extant one-volume histories of American Jewry whose narratives pivot upon a familiar list of male names. Diner and Benderly offer us all the events and themes of American Jewish social history that we expect to find, but we see them through the actions, motivations, and experiences of women. And because women's experiences often have been entirely different from those of men, we learn more about the topic than can be available in the previous one-volume accounts. Although this book was written for a general audience, it reminds this reader of the more scholarly U.S. History as Women's History (1995) for the new understandings it brings to familiar material.

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