A Breath of Life: Feminism in the American Jewish Community. Sylvia Barack FishmanWriting Their Nations: The Tradition of Nineteenth-Century American Jewish Women Writers. Diane Lichtenstein

Signs ◽  
1996 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 234-236
Author(s):  
Ann R. Shapiro
2013 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 502-534
Author(s):  
Melissa R. Klapper

Jewish women played important roles in many aspects of the birth control movement, as activists, consumers, and distributors. Yet just as the legal system was not yet sure what to make of contraception, neither was the American Jewish community. While hundreds of thousands of Jewish women clearly limited their family size, both ambivalence toward birth control and pockets of outright opposition also persisted. This essay briefly examines the developments in the birth control movement during the pivotal year of 1916 in which Jewish women played important roles. The essay then turns to analysis of two Yiddish plays on the topic written that year. Neither play has ever before been translated in full. Because the Yiddish theater was a central American Jewish cultural institution, the production of plays on the subject of birth control in 1916 dramatized the importance of the issue within the American Jewish community. Though the plays quite possibly loom larger in retrospect than they did at the time and are notable more for content than literary merit, they nonetheless provide a critical lens through which to explore the complex relationship between American Jewry and the birth control movement.


Author(s):  
Sefton D. Temkin

This chapter considers Isaac Mayer Wise’s legacy to the Jews of America, as well as events in the aftermath of his death. In time, America’s powerful industrial society homogenized the American Jewish community, at the same time allowing for unforeseen divisions. The rejection of practices brought over from Europe, which characterized much of nineteenth-century Reform, abated as the immigrant generation disappeared, and nostalgia for the past helped to influence their descendants. As the twentieth century staggered to its mid-point, the scene was transformed in a more fundamental sense. In 1919, when the centenary of Wise’s birth came round, Europe had lost its hegemony in world affairs; in 1946, at the centenary of Wise’s arrival in New York, Europe lay in ruins, and world leadership had been thrust into America’s hands. The old heartland of Jewish life did not just lie in ruins; it had been utterly destroyed. It was for the Jews of America to take up the torch, and to this task they applied themselves with energy and generosity. Unencumbered by ideological restraints, the institutions which Wise had fostered, amid doubts as to whether American soil could sustain them, showed themselves resilient enough to rise to the challenge.


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