""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.

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.

A survey of Jewish women’s history from biblical times to the twenty-first century.

A critical look at the history and culture of women of the Yishuv and a call for a new national discourse

Despite much study of Viennese culture and Judaism between 1890 and 1914, little research has been done to examine the role of Jewish women in this milieu. Rescuing a lost legacy, Jewish Women in Fin de Siècle Vienna explores the myriad ways in which Jewish women contributed to the development of Viennese culture and participated widely in politics and cultural spheres. Areas of exploration include the education and family lives of Viennese Jewish girls and varying degrees of involvement of Jewish women in philanthropy and prayer, university life, Zionism, psychoanalysis and medicine, literature, and culture. Incorporating general studies of Austrian women during this period, Alison Rose also presents significant findings regarding stereotypes of Jewish gender and sexuality and the politics of anti-Semitism, as well as the impact of German culture, feminist dialogues, and bourgeois self-images. As members of two minority groups, Viennese Jewish women nonetheless used their involvement in various movements to come to terms with their dual identity during this period of profound social turmoil. Breaking new ground in the study of perceptions and realities within a pivotal segment of the Viennese population, Jewish Women in Fin de Siècle Vienna applies the lens of gender in important new ways.

Stereotyped as delicate and feeble intellectuals, Jewish men in German-speaking lands in fact developed a rich and complex spectrum of male norms, models, and behaviors. Jewish Masculinities explores conceptions and experiences of masculinity among Jews in Germany from the 16th through the late 20th century as well as emigrants to North America, Palestine, and Israel. The volume examines the different worlds of students, businessmen, mohels, ritual slaughterers, rabbis, performers, and others, shedding new light on the challenge for Jewish men of balancing German citizenship and cultural affiliation with Jewish communal solidarity, religious practice, and identity.

This collection of revised and new essays explores Jewish women's history. Topics include portrayals of women in the Hebrew Bible, the image and status of women in the diaspora world of late antiquity, and Jewish women in the Middle Ages.