Reviewed by:

• America's Jewish Women: A History from Colonial Times to Today by Pamela S. Nadell
• Sonya Michel (bio)

Jewish women have been largely invisible in mainstream United States history writing for two reasons. First, like all women until quite recently, their lives and accomplishments—both inside the home and beyond—have fallen outside the categories most historians deemed important, namely, politics, international relations, economics and the military. Or they have been pushed to the margins (both in fact and in historical accounts) in the public realms where they were able to participate, such as reform and labor. Until feminist critics began claiming that "the personal is political," women's experiences and struggles simply didn't make the cut. To be sure, dozens of women, inspired by second-wave feminism, began writing their own history starting in the 1970s, but for decades, that body of work remained more or less separate from (though not necessarily equal to) "malestream" history and seldom appeared in synthetic works such as US history textbooks.

It was not until the 1980s that textbook authors began to include material on women, but mostly it was, to use Gerda Lerner's apt terms, "compensatory"—citing the names of already famous women such as Eleanor Roosevelt or Dorothea Dix—or "contributory"—explaining how women fit into significant male-defined events, such as major wars or the New Deal. Even today, few textbooks have achieved what Lerner called "the new universal history," one in which men's and women's history are fully integrated, with the result that Jewish women, like their gentile sisters, remain largely absent or appear only anecdotally, when, for example, they make a major gain such as winning suffrage.¹

The second reason Jewish women are absent is that Jews on the whole are also a relatively invisible category in mainstream US history. Unlike white gentiles, who are, though unmarked, the implicit subject—the presumed norm—of much writing in this field, and different from other minorities, most notably Blacks, whose long narrative of oppression and resistance is threaded throughout the chapters of nearly every major [End Page 457] American history textbook, American Jews appear only sporadically in these accounts, usually in conjunction with the Holocaust, or in the person of notables (almost always male) such as Louis Brandeis or Bernard Baruch. But even if Jews were more fully integrated, there is no assurance that Jewish women would be included, since in much mainstream American Jewish history they are marginalized or excluded as well.

The presumed subjects of any field of history shape its categories of analysis, and vice-versa. Erased both by gender and by religion and ethnicity, Jewish women simply don't appear in conventional US history writing. Can the field be modified to make room for them? Surely there is no dearth of resources. Since publication of my own book The Jewish Woman in America, co-authored with Charlotte Baum and Paula Hyman in 1976 (a pioneering study, but admittedly somewhat thin in terms of archival research), historians have produced a substantial body of work on Jewish women, including articles, monographs, and even an encyclopedia. They have produced biographies of major figures in politics, women's organizations, and culture, and analyzed specialized aspects such as Jewish women's fertility and use of birth control, education, and entry into the professions. This should now allow US historians to make the leap and grant Jewish women their place in a "new universal history."

Though Pamela Nadell did not necessarily set out with this goal in mind, her comprehensive new book, America's Jewish Women: A History from Colonial Times to Today, could certainly facilitate the task of integration. But it is not without its challenges. Nadell begins by problematizing the very category of Jewish women, noting that over the centuries but even within specific generations, they varied widely, not just in the ways that all American women differ from one another (in terms of location, class, occupation, etc.), but with regard to their own identity as Jews. Many were highly observant while...

审核人：

• 美国的犹太妇女：从殖民时代到今天的历史作者：帕梅拉·纳德尔（Pamela S. Nadell）
• 索尼娅·米歇尔（生物）

在美国主流历史写作中，犹太妇女基本上是不可见的，这有两个原因。首先，像直到不久前的所有妇女一样，她们的生活和成就（无论在家中还是在家庭之外）都被大多数历史学家视为重要的范畴之外，即政治，国际关系，经济和军事。或者，他们已经被推到了他们能够参与的公共领域的边缘（实际上是历史上的边缘），例如改革和劳动。在女权主义者批评者开始声称“个人是政治人物”之前，女性的经历和挣扎根本没有取得成功。可以肯定的是，受第二波女权主义的启发，数十位女性开始撰写自己的历史（从1970年代开始），但几十年来，

直到1980年代，教科书的作者才开始包括有关女性的资料，但主要是使用格达·勒纳（Gerda Lerner）的恰当用语，“补偿性的”（援引诸如Eleanor Roosevelt或Dorothea Dix等已经着名的女性的名字）或“贡献性的”。 “-解释女性如何适应男性定义的重大事件，例如大战或新政。即使在今天，很少有教科书达到勒纳所说的“新的普遍历史”，其中男女历史完全融合在一起，结果，犹太妇女像他们的外邦姐妹一样，基本上仍然缺席，或者只是偶然地出现，例如，他们提出了一个重大的增益等殊荣选举权。^1个

犹太妇女缺席的第二个原因是，总体而言，犹太人在美国主流历史中还是一个相对不可见的类别。与白人外邦人不同，白人外邦人虽然没有被标记，但却是这一领域内大量写作的隐含主题（即假定的规范），并且与其他少数族裔（尤其是黑人）不同，黑人的长期压迫和抵抗叙事贯穿于几乎每一个章节的章节中。主要的[End Page 457]美国历史教科书中，美国犹太人很少偶发地出现在这些叙述中，通常与大屠杀一起出现，或出现在路易斯·布兰代斯或伯纳德·巴鲁克等名人（几乎总是男性）身上。但即使犹太人被更充分地整合，有没有保证犹太女人 会被包括在内，因为在美国主流犹太历史上，他们也被边缘化或排斥在外。

任何历史领域的假定主题都会决定其分析类别，反之亦然。犹太妇女在性别，宗教和种族上都被抹杀了，他们简直没有出现在美国传统的历史著作中。可以修改字段以为它们腾出空间吗？当然，没有资源短缺。自从我出版自己的著作《美国的犹太妇女》以来与历史学家夏洛特·鲍姆（Charlotte Baum）和宝拉·海曼（Paula Hyman）于1976年合着（一项开创性研究，但在档案研究方面被认为是薄薄的），历史学家在犹太妇女方面进行了大量工作，包括文章，专着甚至百科全书。他们制作了政治，妇女组织和文化中主要人物的传记，并分析了犹太妇女的生育能力和节育方法的使用等特殊方面，教育和职业。现在，这应使美国历史学家得以飞跃，并赋予犹太妇女在“新的普遍历史”中的地位。

尽管帕梅拉·纳德尔（Pamela Nadell）不一定会牢记这一目标，但她的综合新书《美国的犹太妇女：从殖民时代到今天的历史》肯定可以促进融合的任务。但这并非没有挑战。纳德尔首先对犹太妇女的类别提出了质疑，并指出，在过去的几个世纪中，甚至在特定的几代人中，她们的变化范围很大，不仅是因为所有美国妇女彼此之间的差异（在地理位置，阶级，职业等方面也是如此）。 ），但关于他们自己作为犹太人的身份。在...期间，许多人都非常观察。