Paula Hyman broadens and revises earlier analyses of Jewish assimilation, which depicted “the Jews” as though they were all men, by focusing on women and the domestic as well as the public realms. Surveying Jewish accommodations to new conditions in Europe and the United States in the years between 1850 and 1950, she retrieves the experience of women as reflected in their writings--memoirs, newspaper and journal articles, and texts of speeches--and finds that Jewish women’s patterns of assimilation differed from men’s and that an examination of those differences exposes the tensions inherent in the project of Jewish assimilation. Patterns of assimilation varied not only between men and women but also according to geographical locale and social class. Germany, France, England, and the United States offered some degree of civic equality to their Jewish populations, and by the last third of the nineteenth century, their relatively small Jewish communities were generally defined by their middle-class characteristics. In contrast, the eastern European nations contained relatively large and overwhelmingly non-middle-class Jewish population. Hyman considers how these differences between East and West influenced gender norms, which in turn shaped Jewish women’s responses to the changing conditions of the modern world, and how they merged in the large communities of eastern European Jewish immigrants in the United States. The book concludes with an exploration of the sexual politics of Jewish identity. Hyman argues that the frustration of Jewish men at their “feminization” in societies in which they had achieved political equality and economic success was manifested in their criticism of, and distancing from, Jewish women. The book integrates a wide range of primary and secondary sources to incorporate Jewish women’s history into one of the salient themes in modern Jewish history, that of assimilation. The book is addressed to a wide audience: those with an interest in modern Jewish history, in women’s history, and in ethnic studies and all who are concerned with the experience and identity of Jews in the modern world.

Explores the relation between gender and the encounter of Jews with various conditions of Modernity. She makes clear that the study of the process of Jewish assimilation in contemporary times must include women and gender in its framework.

""A Major Collection of Scholarship that Contains the most up-to-Date, Indeed Cutting-Edge Work on Gender and Jewish History by Several Generations of Top Scholars."--Atina Grossmann, the Cooper Union.

Between the French Revolution and World War II, hundreds of thousands of Jews left the Jewish fold - by becoming Christians or, in liberal states, by intermarrying. Telling the stories of both famous and obscure individuals, Leaving the Jewish Fold explores the nature of this drift and defection from Judaism in Europe and America from the eighteenth century to today. Arguing that religious conviction was rarely a motive for Jews who become Christians, Todd Endelman shows that those who severed their Jewish ties were driven above all by pragmatic concerns - especially the desire to escape the stigma of Jewishness and its social, occupational, and emotional burdens. Through a detailed and colorful narrative, Endelman considers the social setting, national contexts, and historical circumstances that encouraged Jews to abandon Judaism, and factors that worked to the opposite effect. Demonstrating that anti-Jewish prejudice weighed more heavily on the Jews of Germany and Austria than those living in France and other liberal states as early as the first half of the nineteenth century, he reexamines how Germany's political and social development deviated from other European states. Endelman also reveals that liberal societies such as Great Britain and the United States, which tolerated Jewish integration, promoted radical assimilation and the dissolution of Jewish ties as often as hostile, illiberal societies such as Germany and Poland. -- from dust jacket.

This book is an expression of how the different memories of different gendered experiences affected the Jewish attitudes towards modernity. Focusing on three geographical centers - pre-war and wartime Europe, the United States and Israel, the fifteen articles provide a backdrop to understanding the variation of Jewish life and identity.

Demonstates through different essays Jewish Womens movement rides the fine line between tradition and transformation.

A thorough reassessment by fourteen leading historians of the supposed period of Jewish assimilation.

Volume XVI in this well-received annual series contains an up-to-date survey of gender issues in modern Judaism. It includes original essays on Orthodox Judaism and feminism, American Jewish women, female rabbis, the impact of feminism on rabbinic study, masculinity, Jewish women in the Third Reich, and gender and military service.