American Jewish women's history : a reader

"It gives me a secret pleasure to observe the fair character our family has in the 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.

Portraits of a community: the image and experience of early American Jews / Ellen Smith -- The lessons of the Hebrew Sunday school / Dianne Ashton -- A great awakening: the transformation that shaped twentieth-century American Judaism / Jonathan D. Sarna -- Gone to another meeting: the National Council of Jewish Women, 1893-1993 / Faith Rogow -- Borrowers or lenders be: Jewish immigrant women's credit networks / Shelly Tenenbaum -- "We dug more rocks": women and work / Linda Mack Schloff -- Organizing the unorganizable: three Jewish women and their union / Alice Kessler-Harris -- Immigrant women and consumer protest: the New York City kosher meat boycott of 1902 / Paula E. Hyman -- Zion in our hearts: Henrietta Szold and the American Jewish Women's movement / Joyce Antler -- The Jewish priestess and ritual: the sacred life of American Orthodox women / Jenna Weissman Joselit -- The women who would be rabbis / Pamela S. Nadell -- Budgets, boycotts, and babies: Jewish women in the great depression / Beth S. Wenger -- Angels "Rewolt!": Jewish women in modern dance in the 1930s / Julia L. Foulkes -- The "me" of me: voices of Jewish girls in adolescent diaries of the 1920s and 1950s / Joan Jacobs Brumberg -- Rage and representation: Jewish gender stereotypes in American culture / Riv-Ellen Prell -- "From the recipe file of Luba Cohen": a study of southern Jewish foodways and cultural identity / Marcie Cohen Ferris -- Going south: Jewish women in the civil rights movement / Debra L. Schultz -- Jewish feminism faces the American women's movement: convergence and divergence / Paula E. Hyman.