"Making Jewish Gender: Religion, Race, Sexuality, and American Jews, 1910-1924" argues that the discourses of race, sexuality, and criminality served to construct what kinds of gendered identities were available to American Jews. Using sources from both Jews and non-Jews, it explores the contests and changes over what it meant to be a Jewish man or a Jewish woman in America. The study asks how Judaism and religious practice created gender norms, and how those gendered norms were adapted by immigrants and acculturated Jews in the American context. It uses the discourse of race and race science, "passing," acting and the theatrical, civilization, and criminality to position Jewish masculinity and femininity in a wider landscape of American culture. Drawing on feminist theorist Judith Butler, "Making Jewish Gender" suggests that the historical situation was more complicated than a simple "feminization" of male Jews by antisemites and others. Rather, both Jews and non-Jews actively participated in conversations about the cultural and biological status of both Jewish men and Jewish women. Perhaps because of the growing similarity of gender norms for both white non-Jewish American women and, especially, acculturated Jewish women, much of the discourse effectively erased one part of a Jewish/woman identity in favor of collapse under the larger category of white womanhood or the male category "Jew."

Gift of Rabbi W. Gunther Plaut.

Jewish masculinity as a diverse set of adaptive reactions to masculine hegemony and the political, religious, and social realities of American Jews throughout the twentieth century. For twentieth-century Jewish immigrants and their children attempting to gain full access to American society, performative masculinity was a tool of acculturation. However, as scholar Miriam Eve Mora demonstrates, this performance is consistently challenged by American mainstream society that holds Jewish men outside of the American ideal of masculinity. Depicted as weak, effeminate, cowardly, gentle, bookish, or conflict-averse, Jewish men have been ascribed these qualities by outside forces, but some have also intentionally subscribed themselves to masculinities at odds with the American mainstream. Carrying a Big Schtickdissects notions of Jewish masculinity and its perception and practice in America in the twentieth century through the lenses of immigration and cultural history. Tracing Jewish masculinity through major themes and events including both World Wars, the Holocaust, American Zionism, Israeli statehood, and the Six-Day War, this work establishes that the struggle of this process can shed light on the changing dynamics in religious, social, and economic American Jewish life.

Despite much study of Viennese culture and Judaism between 1890 and 1914, little research has been done to examine the role of Jewish women in this milieu. Rescuing a lost legacy, Jewish Women in Fin de Siècle Vienna explores the myriad ways in which Jewish women contributed to the development of Viennese culture and participated widely in politics and cultural spheres. Areas of exploration include the education and family lives of Viennese Jewish girls and varying degrees of involvement of Jewish women in philanthropy and prayer, university life, Zionism, psychoanalysis and medicine, literature, and culture. Incorporating general studies of Austrian women during this period, Alison Rose also presents significant findings regarding stereotypes of Jewish gender and sexuality and the politics of anti-Semitism, as well as the impact of German culture, feminist dialogues, and bourgeois self-images. As members of two minority groups, Viennese Jewish women nonetheless used their involvement in various movements to come to terms with their dual identity during this period of profound social turmoil. Breaking new ground in the study of perceptions and realities within a pivotal segment of the Viennese population, Jewish Women in Fin de Siècle Vienna applies the lens of gender in important new ways.

This work argues that Freud's internalizing of images of racial difference shaped the questions of psychoanalysis. The book explores the belief of the "feminizing" of male Jews and challenges those who separate Freud's revolutionary theories from his Jewis

Common Sense and a Little Fire traces the personal and public lives of four immigrant women activists who left a lasting imprint on American politics. Though they have rarely had more than cameo appearances in previous histories, Rose Schneiderman, Fannia Cohn, Clara Lemlich Shavelson, and Pauline Newman played important roles in the emergence of organized labor, the New Deal welfare state, adult education, and the modern women's movement. Orleck takes her four subjects from turbulent, turn-of-the-century Eastern Europe to the radical ferment of New York's Lower East Side and the gaslit tenements where young workers studied together. Drawing from the women's writings and speeches, she paints a compelling picture of housewives' food and rent protests, of grim conditions in the garment shops, of factory-floor friendships that laid the basis for a mass uprising of young women garment workers, and of the impassioned rallies working women organized for suffrage. From that era of rebellion, Orleck charts the rise of a distinctly working-class feminism that fueled poor women's activism and shaped government labor, tenant, and consumer policies through the early 1950s.