American Jewish Women and the Zionist Enterprise (review)

2006 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 204-210
Author(s):  
Donna Robinson Divine
Keyword(s):  
Author(s):  
Melissa R. Klapper

This chapter discusses maternalism as a collective belief in gender difference based on motherhood as the foundation for reform. It argues that maternalism was a crucial ingredient in the activism of Jewish women of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It also mentions Der Fraynd, the socialist Workmen's Circle monthly publication that linked the origins of the women's rights movement to prehistoric matriarchal societies in the fight for suffrage. The chapter analyses the peace movement that exhorted Jewish mothers to pass on the value of peace to their children and instruct them about the evils of war. It looks at how maternalism provided a framework and language for maintaining Jewish identity within a wider societal sphere as Jewish women moved into more public arenas and joined with women of different ethnic identities.


AJS Review ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 197-198
Author(s):  
Dianne Ashton

This valuable book is more than a long overdue corrective to the extant one-volume histories of American Jewry whose narratives pivot upon a familiar list of male names. Diner and Benderly offer us all the events and themes of American Jewish social history that we expect to find, but we see them through the actions, motivations, and experiences of women. And because women's experiences often have been entirely different from those of men, we learn more about the topic than can be available in the previous one-volume accounts. Although this book was written for a general audience, it reminds this reader of the more scholarly U.S. History as Women's History (1995) for the new understandings it brings to familiar material.


1997 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 377
Author(s):  
Miriyam Glazer ◽  
Janet Handler Burstein ◽  
Faye Moskowitz
Keyword(s):  

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