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In this chapter, Kraemer examines an account not considered in her earlier work: the Letter of Severus of Minorca on the Conversion of the Jews, which narrates the conversion of the entire Jewish population of the island in the space of one week in February, 418 C.E. Based on the text’s representation of women as the last to convert, some scholars have read it as a reliable account of Jewish women’s principled resistance to Christianity. Kraemer argues instead that Severus casts Jewish women as the last hold-outs against Christian pressure to convert, not to show us their courage and faithfulness, but rather so that he can depict Christians as models of proper gender relations (with women submissive to men, male bishops, Christ, and God), and Jews as paradigms of gender dis-order (with disobedient women, still the daughters of Eve, whose husbands are unable to control them).

Jewish feminism began to take shape in America in the late 1960s when Jewish women began to examine critically both their status within the Jewish tradition and the political and social structure of the Jewish community. Some Jewish women, particularly those who were active in the feminist movement and who often did not have a strong Jewish communal attachment, attacked the cultural and social norms that they believed had shaped them. Among women who were active in Jewish communal affairs, there was a similar feeling that all was not right regarding the distribution of power in the Jewish communal world. These women demanded credit for the work they had already done and greater access to decision-making. At the same time, other women addressed the Jewish religious tradition, focusing their energies on winning women a greater role in traditional Jewish life.

The chapter relates how Jewish women reinvented and expanded their roles within their families and the community in order to adjust to the rapidly deteriorating situation. The focus is on individual lives, which were not affected much by the Nazi government's broad antisemitic policies but were instead pummeled by particular social decrees resulting in cruelty and humiliation. The impact varied across individual lives through gender, wealth, and even marital status. To cope, Jews closed ranks in friendship and community organizations such as the League of Jewish Women. Others turned to Zionism. Within households, Jewish women were forced to assume new roles and responsibilities and families were confronted with the issue of emigration, which the Nazi government exerted all efforts to promote. The chapter ends with a discussion on the hindrances to migration which include gender attitudes among Jews, the lack of financial means, and the threat of confiscation and plunder.

The chapter discusses the implementation of the pogrom by the Nazis and the destruction it brought upon the Jews. In early 1938, the Nazi government intensified its campaign of discrimination against the Jews through the enactment of several laws that essentially stripped them of any social, economic, or political rights. The series of events leading up to the violent pogrom of November 1938 are related, beginning with the expulsion of “foreign” Jews — including Soviet and Polish Jews — until the fateful shooting of a German diplomat by one Herschel Grynszpan. Instances of brutality and violence towards all Jews, regardless of age or sex, are recounted. A section is also devoted to the reactions of the Germans, which seemed to be contradictory due to stories of random acts of kindness amidst the violence and persecution. The actions and reactions of Jewish women are also presented, along with the obstacles to emigration.

This chapter traces Jewish women's suffrage activism from the creation of National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) in 1890 through the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920 and its aftermath. Jewish women primarily worked for suffrage as individuals, though intense debate flourished among Jewish women's groups. The American Jewish press also devoted time and space to suffrage, and rabbis aired the issue within the community. Once the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified in August 1920, Jewish women moved to apply their new rights to their sense of Jewish communal status as well as American citizenship. Indeed, immediately after winning the vote, the members of the sisterhood of The Temple in Atlanta successfully demanded representation on the synagogue board.

This chapter, which covers the years from 1980 through 2004, delves into the personal narratives of fifteen of the forty-three women interviewed to discuss three central themes: Jewish women's marriages to men without religious faith; the intensified identification and observance the women experienced as a result of their intermarriages and motherhood; and the ironic triple marginality they faced as intermarried Jewish women living in an American society where the dominant identity was Christian male, and in an organized Jewish community where “intermarriage” remained a dirty word. It argues that some Jewish women's intermarriage experiences brought them closer to their religious heritage, rendered a new meaning of intermarriage in America, and transformed what it meant to be a “Jewish wife.”

This chapter illustrates how the liberalism, ecumenism, and feminism of the 1960s and 1970s simultaneously created more room for Jewish women to intermarry and, for an increasing number of women, to proactively define themselves as Jews. It argues that argue that although Jewish women may have married out with greater frequency, their resolve to retain their religious and ethnic heritage often grew stronger rather than weaker. Indeed, intermarriage actually accentuated some women's sense of being Jewish, despite predictions to the contrary. Moreover, women who continued to identify as Jews often insisted that their children were also Jewish, regardless of their having non-Jewish fathers.

This chapter discusses how the second wave of feminism in the 20th century expanded opportunities for American women, which ultimately led to the transformation of American Judaism. Prior to the emergence of this second-wave, women's roles within American Jewish life had changed slowly and incrementally over time. Yet, once second-wave feminism stormed American Judaism, change cascaded over the American Jewish landscape. In the early 1970s, for instance, women bent on becoming rabbis were on their way to ordination. Feminists also turned their attention to public rituals and celebrations, seeking new venues for communal feminist spirituality. One of these is the women's seder. By the end of the 20th century, women's seders had sprung up in Jewish communities all across the United States, bringing together “women of all ages and from every corner of the Jewish community to celebrate the Exodus in story, song, and symbolism from a woman's perspective.”

This chapter examines the lives of lesser-known women who intermarried between 1930 and 1960. It argues that all Jewish women who intermarried did not reject their heritage, cease identifying as Jews, or completely disappear from Jewish life. Although antisemitism encouraged assimilation for some women who had thin connections to Judaism, their histories show the various ways that their Jewishness coexisted with their intermarriages. Moreover, whether or not women chose to assume new religious identities and “melt” into the mainstream, they could not escape the Jewish label. It is also argued that, although intermarriage became more commonplace among Christians and in the public eye, Jewish parents tenaciously objected to their daughters leaving the Jewish fold. By looking at the intersection of intermarriage and gender across time, Jewish women's experiences and self-defined identities will uncover the personal meaning of intermarriage.

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 chapter examines the role that crypto-Jewish women played in the maintenance of Jewish-origin beliefs and customs over time, beginning with a review of historical data on role of medieval women in the secretive cultural persistence of Jewish customs in households during the period of forced conversions. Crypto-Judaism gave new meaning to the Jewish laws of matrilineal descent that historically traced Jewish lineage through the bloodline of the mother. Women maintained primary control over the preservation of knowledge and the practice of Jewish rituals, and an informal system of matrilineal descent emerged in which both ancestry and faith were carried and transmitted through women in the family. Through the preservation of both oral history and ritual performance, women have been at the center of the recovery process for modern descendants of crypto-Jews. The chapter discusses narratives of several crypto-Jewish descendents on how women of their family practiced the Jewish customs through the observance of the Sabbath, dietary laws, food customs, holy days, fasts, and cleansing rituals.

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.

Gender has been at the heart of many of the most important controversies in the history of Jews in America, from the ordination of female rabbis to the introduction of mixed seating in the synagogue and the innovation of bat mitzvah. Yet historians of Judaism who have written about these controversies mostly focused on male perspectives instead of treating Jewish women as historical agents. This chapter explores the place of female actors in the great controversies concerning gender in the history of American Judaism. It argues that Jewish women, long ignored by scholars, have been lively historical actors, and also demonstrates how women's stories offer important insights into the transformations that have shaped modern Jewish life.

This introductory chapter discusses the book's four overarching themes. The first of these is the repercussions of the inherently androcentric characteristics of biblical religion and rabbinic Judaism for Jewish women and their religious and social options throughout the centuries. The second is the influence of host environments, whose norms and customs have also played a vital part in the ways by which Jewish women's social and spiritual lives have developed and diverged from place to place. The third is the role of economic resources in determining women's roles and status in various Jewish communities of the past and present. The fourth is the impact of technological innovations on the personal, educational, vocational, and communal opportunities open to Jewish women in the 21st century.

This chapter examines the lives of Jewish women in Central Europe during the first decades of the 20th century. In the transition from traditional Jewish society to modernity, Orthodox observances were gradually abandoned, Reform Judaism evolved, and some conversions to Christianity occurred, as integration into the surrounding German culture increased. Even though Central European Jews were legally emancipated during the 19th century, social acceptance took longer to achieve. Jewish women responded differently than men to modernity and the process of acculturation; while most became modern German-Jewish women, others had transformed into “new women” by the early 20th century.