Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History

The Roles and Representation of Women

Author: Paula Hyman
ISBN: 9780295974262

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 the

Publisher: University of Washington Press
Publish Date: 1995-01-01

Subjects: History / Jewish, Social Science / Women's Studies, Social Science / Gender Studies

This book is available in the following Community Centers: Women's Center (Location: Jewish )