Examines how women's histories are explored and explained around the world Making Women's Histories showcases the transformations that the intellectual and political production of women's history has engendered across time and space. It considers the difference women's and gender history has made to and within national fields of study, and to what extent the wider historiography has integrated this new knowledge. What are the accomplishments of women's and gender history? What are its shortcomings? What is its future? The contributors discuss their discovery of women's histories, the multiple turns the field has taken, and how place affected the course of this scholarship. Noted scholars of women's and gender history, they stand atop such historiographically-defined vantage points as Tsarist Russia, the British Empire in Egypt and India, Qing-dynasty China, and the U.S. roiling through the 1960s. From these and other peaks they gaze out at the world around them, surveying trajectories in the creation of women's histories in recent and distant pasts and envisioning their futures.

View the Table of Contents "Nadell makes explicit the diverse roles and experiences of Jewish women in the United States."
-- "History Reviews of New Books"

"Historians...who have heretofore not taken notice...of the scholarship on Jewish women would benefit the most from perusing this volume."
-- "Journal of American Ethnic History"

"Anyone wanting an interesting read will find the information presented by these women lively, well written, and well researched."
--"The National Jewish Post & Opinion"

"This is a very interesting, well-written and well-researched work."
--"Cleveland Jewish News"

"This anthology conveys the breadth of the historical experiences of American Jewish women."
--"Jewish Advocate"

"An impressive compendium of essays, "American Jewish Women's History" paints a broad and diverse portrait of American Jewish women. Written by some of the most incisive historians of the American Jewish community, the chapters examine Jewish women in many different venues: the home and the marketplace, religious and secular institutions, and picket lines and cultural institutions."
--Deborah E. Lipstadt, Emory University

"It's a thought-provoking book that should be read by women and men alike."
--"Booklist"

"The essays Nadell has collected highlight the diversity of the American Jewish women whose identities over time and place were shaped by the interplay of complex forces.... And they demonstrate, too, that the history of American Jewish women is finally being accorded its own 'room' within the house of women's history."
--"The Jewish Quarterly Review"

"It gives me a secret pleasure to observe the fair character our family has inthe place by Jews & Christians," Abigail Levy Franks wrote to her son from New York City in 1733. Abigail was part of a tiny community of Jews living in the new world. In the centuries that followed, as that community swelled to several millions, women came to occupy diverse and changing roles.

American Jewish Women's History, an anthology covering colonial times to the present, illuminates that historical diversity. It shows women shaping Judaism and their American Jewish communities as they engaged in volunteer activities and political crusades, battled stereotypes, and constructed relationships with their Christian neighbors. It ranges from Rebecca Gratz's development of the Jewish Sunday School in Philadelphia in 1838 to protest the rising prices of kosher meat at the turn of the century, to the shaping of southern Jewish women's cultural identity through food. There is currently no other reader conveying the breadth of the historical experiences of American Jewish women available.

The reader is divided into four sections complete with detailed introductions. The contributors include: Joyce Antler, Joan Jacobs Brumberg, Alice Kessler-Harris, Paula E. Hyman, Riv-Ellen Prell, and Jonathan D. Sarna.

Examines how women's histories are explored and explained around the world Making Women's Histories showcases the transformations that the intellectual and political production of women's history has engendered across time and space. It considers the difference women's and gender history has made to and within national fields of study, and to what extent the wider historiography has integrated this new knowledge. What are the accomplishments of women's and gender history? What are its shortcomings? What is its future? The contributors discuss their discovery of women's histories, the multiple turns the field has taken, and how place affected the course of this scholarship. Noted scholars of women's and gender history, they stand atop such historiographically-defined vantage points as Tsarist Russia, the British Empire in Egypt and India, Qing-dynasty China, and the U.S. roiling through the 1960s. From these and other peaks they gaze out at the world around them, surveying trajectories in the creation of women's histories in recent and distant pasts and envisioning their futures.

The rise of Jewish feminism, a branch of both second-wave feminism and the American counterculture, in the late 1960s had an extraordinary impact on the leadership, practice, and beliefs of American Jews. ""Women Remaking American Judaism"" is the first book to fully examine the changes in American Judaism as women fought to practice their religion fully and to ensure that its rituals, texts, and liturgies reflected their lives. In addition to identifying the changes that took place, this volume aims to understand the process of change in ritual, theology, and clergy across the denominations.The essays in ""Women Remaking American Judaism"" offer a paradoxical understanding of Jewish feminism as both radical, in the transformational sense, and accomodationist, in the sense that it was thoroughly compatible with liberal Judaism. Essays in the first section, Reenvisioning Judaism, investigate the feminist challenges to traditional understanding of Jewish law, texts, and theology. In Redefining Judaism, the second section, contributors recognize that the changes in American Judaism were ultimately put into place by each denomination, their law committees, seminaries, rabbinic courts, rabbis, and synagogues, and examine the distinct evolution of women's issues in the Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, and Reconstructionist movements.Finally, in the third section, Re-Framing Judaism, essays address feminist innovations that, in some cases, took place outside of the synagogue. An introduction by Riv-Ellen Prell situates the essays in both American and modern Jewish history and offers an analysis of why Jewish feminism was revolutionary.""Women Remaking American Judaism"" raises provocative questions about the changes to Judaism following the feminist movement, at every turn asking what change means in Judaism and other American religions and how the fight for equality between men and women parallels and differs from other changes in Judaism. ""Women Remaking American Judaism"" will be of interest to both scholars of Jewish history and women's studies.

View the Table of Contents "Nadell makes explicit the diverse roles and experiences of Jewish women in the United States."
-- "History Reviews of New Books"

"Historians...who have heretofore not taken notice...of the scholarship on Jewish women would benefit the most from perusing this volume."
-- "Journal of American Ethnic History"

"Anyone wanting an interesting read will find the information presented by these women lively, well written, and well researched."
--"The National Jewish Post & Opinion"

"This is a very interesting, well-written and well-researched work."
--"Cleveland Jewish News"

"This anthology conveys the breadth of the historical experiences of American Jewish women."
--"Jewish Advocate"

"An impressive compendium of essays, "American Jewish Women's History" paints a broad and diverse portrait of American Jewish women. Written by some of the most incisive historians of the American Jewish community, the chapters examine Jewish women in many different venues: the home and the marketplace, religious and secular institutions, and picket lines and cultural institutions."
--Deborah E. Lipstadt, Emory University

"It's a thought-provoking book that should be read by women and men alike."
--"Booklist"

"The essays Nadell has collected highlight the diversity of the American Jewish women whose identities over time and place were shaped by the interplay of complex forces.... And they demonstrate, too, that the history of American Jewish women is finally being accorded its own 'room' within the house of women's history."
--"The Jewish Quarterly Review"

"It gives me a secret pleasure to observe the fair character our family has inthe place by Jews & Christians," Abigail Levy Franks wrote to her son from New York City in 1733. Abigail was part of a tiny community of Jews living in the new world. In the centuries that followed, as that community swelled to several millions, women came to occupy diverse and changing roles.

American Jewish Women's History, an anthology covering colonial times to the present, illuminates that historical diversity. It shows women shaping Judaism and their American Jewish communities as they engaged in volunteer activities and political crusades, battled stereotypes, and constructed relationships with their Christian neighbors. It ranges from Rebecca Gratz's development of the Jewish Sunday School in Philadelphia in 1838 to protest the rising prices of kosher meat at the turn of the century, to the shaping of southern Jewish women's cultural identity through food. There is currently no other reader conveying the breadth of the historical experiences of American Jewish women available.

The reader is divided into four sections complete with detailed introductions. The contributors include: Joyce Antler, Joan Jacobs Brumberg, Alice Kessler-Harris, Paula E. Hyman, Riv-Ellen Prell, and Jonathan D. Sarna.

Pamela Nadell's biographical dictionary and sourcebook is a landmark contribution to American, Jewish, and religious history. For the first time, a great American Jewish religious movement is portrayed with amplitude, authority, and personality. In the most revolutionary era in two millenia of Jewish history, this surely is an important volumn. Moses Rischin, Professor of History, San Francisco State University Conservative Judaism in America: A Biographical Dictionary and Sourcebook is the first extensive effort to document the lives and careers of the most important leaders in Conservatism's first century and to provide a brief history of the movement and its central institutions. It includes essays on the history of the movement and on the evolution of its major institutions: The Jewish Theological Seminary of America, The Rabbinical Assembly, and The United Synagogue of America. It also contains 135 biographical entries on the leading figures of Conservative Judaism, appendices, and a complete bibliography on sources of study.