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This chapter analyzes the expansion of American Jewish women's peace activism, which also predated suffrage victory but achieved new power and recognition during and after the First World War. Throughout the 1920s, Jewish women's organizations devoted considerable resources to the cause, regardless of the suspect radicalism of peace work. Their peace activism was fueled by religious imperatives, class identity, maternalism, and notions of international sisterhood. Significant numbers of American Jewish women joined nonsectarian women's peace groups as well and won the respect of peace leaders at home and abroad. However, Jewish women were disappointed to encounter anti-Semitism within these groups. In response, the American Jewish community conducted a lively debate about the relationship between peace and Jewishness.

This introductory chapter provides a brief history of Jewish women throughout the United States, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, who developed a distinctive activist identity that drew on both their gender and their religious or ethnic identities. For Jewish women, the moment of reform at the turn of the twentieth century offered possibilities for acculturating into American society. Indeed, a significant number of Jewish women focused their energies on the great women's social movements of the first part of the twentieth century: suffrage, birth control, and peace. These movements offered Jewish women opportunities to participate in gendered activism without abandoning Jewish meaning.

This chapter examines a new set of challenges facing Jewish women in the peace movement during the 1930s. As the international scene deteriorated, the Depression spread worldwide, and Hitler rose to power, the female and Jewish identities that underlay American Jewish women's peace activism steadily came into conflict with each other. Eventually, most Jewish women in the peace movement faced a crucial choice between their political beliefs and their religious, ethnic, and cultural identities. Decades of committed peace work at home and abroad, meaningful friendships, and synthesis of gender and religious identity could not withstand what most American Jewish women considered an existential threat to the survival of Jews and Judaism.

This introductory chapter first sets out the book's focus, namely the history of American Jewish women who intermarried during the twentieth century. The book seeks to answer three main questions: What did intermarriage mean to and for women who were Jewish at the time they married Gentile men? In what ways did Jewish women shed or retain their ethnic and religious heritage despite marrying “out”? And how was intermarriage portrayed by the mass media and religious activists? This endeavor strives to understand how women's lives changed over time according to their exogamous marriage choices and whether they further integrated into non-Jewish society or contributed to Jewish continuity by self-identifying as Jews and raising Jewish children. The remainder of the chapter discusses the issue of continuity, the historical prohibition of Jewish–Gentile intermarriage, and the underrepresentation of intermarried Jewish women in scholarly analyses.

The past quarter-century has seen a sea change in the way we view Jewish American literature—that is, the texts that we read and the ways in which we read them. This chapter examines two aspects of this change: new developments in the way we approach Jewish American women's writing and new trends in the growing body of Jewish American literature by women. It discusses how Jewish feminist literary scholars traversed the terrain marked by three minefields: patriarchy, feminism, and religion. It explains the so-called “new wave” of Jewish American writing published at the turn of the century. This form of writing tends to be less polemical and more nuanced than the writing of the 1980s, which first introduced issues of Jewish feminism into a literature that had not encompassed them before.

This chapter explores Hadassah's ideological foundations. One of Hadassah's basic principles was that it should be a mass Zionist movement for American Jewish women: that is, ultimately every American Jewish woman should be counted among its members. However, the fundamental values and principles that guided Hadassah were not formulated in explicitly ideological statements, and so for the most part must be traced through its publications and activities. Over the years, Hadassah's ideology was shaped by its leaders, who conveyed it to the rank-and-file members through the organization's publications, especially the official Hadassah Newsletter but also various other documents and pamphlets produced by the Education Department, and at the annual conventions. Here, ideology refers to the organization's ideas, values, and modus operandi, whether formulated explicitly or not.

This chapter examines the themes of religion, politics, and womanhood in the Civil War writings of American Jewish women. It considers how American Jewish women in both North and South sought to maintain relationships with friends and family across political and religious divides during the war. It also discusses the ways that American Jewish women navigated the cultural storm caused by the sharp increase in antisemitism during the war. By adapting themselves to various measures of in-group memberships, this chapter shows that Jewish women were able to fashion new meanings for the concepts of friendship, family, and community. Through letters and diaries, they expressed their own perceptions of their war experiences to themselves and to others in ways that reshaped and strengthened communal ties during the crisis years of the Civil War.

This concluding chapter reflects on the motivations of Jewish women engaged in early feminist activism, considering the importance of fluid, but ever-present, Jewish identity to every kind of social movement in which they became involved. Over a period of several decades and several generations, American Jewish women supported large-scale social movements that promised to grant them political authority and citizenship, enhance their power over their own bodies and families, and expand their roles in international relations through the promotion of peace. Though Jewish identity constantly fluctuated, many women held fast to their own ideas of what it meant to be Jewish; Jewishness often shaped their political commitments to secular causes. The chapter then discusses the impact of Jewish women on American women's feminist activism in order to understand the foundational and critical involvement of Jewish women in postwar feminism.

This introductory chapter is a brief overview of Hadassah, the Women's Zionist Organization of America. It briefly describes the organization's founding, as well as its leader, Henrietta Szold (1860–1945) — a woman who personified a rare combination of spirit, vision, idealism, and an extraordinary organizational and practical ability. Szold, who was both the spiritual and the organizational progenitor of Hadassah, envisioned it as a way to harness the unique capabilities of American Jewish women to the Zionist enterprise in Palestine. Here, the chapter discusses Hadassah's parallel history with that of American Jewry in general, and reviews the extent of scholarship regarding the organization. It places the study within the context of the circumstances prevailing both in the United States and in the Yishuv and Israel.