| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Shuly Rubin Schwartz. The Rabbi's Wife: The Rebbetzin in American Jewish Life. New York: New York University Press. 2006. Pp. xiii, 312. $35.00.
Since the mid 1990s there has been an explosion of scholarship on the history of Jewish women, especially in the United States, much of it engaged in uncovering a past neglected by historians. Although Shuly Rubin Schwartz's study of rabbis' wives, or rebbetzins as they are called in Yiddish, participates in this process, it goes beyond reclamation to offer a gendered interpretation of American Jewish religious leadership. The book covers the years from the late nineteenth century through the 1970s when second wave feminism produced women's ordination as rabbis in the Reform (1972), Reconstructionist (1973), and Conservative (1985) movements and challenged basic premises of defining a woman's position as a Jewish authority through her status as a wife.	1
Rubin Schwartz begins her account with the story of the last box of papers of Rabbi Herman Rubenovitz, Box 14, which disappeared from the archives. Separated from the other thirteen cartons presumably by archivists, Box 14 is finally located in a remote storeroom. When Rubin Schwartz discovers it, she recovers the papers of Rabbi Rubenovitz's wife, Mignon. Box 14 symbolizes for Rubin Schwartz the challenges she faced trying to uncover the experiences of rabbis' wives. Mignon Rubenovitz had assembled and donated the papers of her husband after his death and considered one box of her own papers worthy of preservation, but her self-assertion almost was erased from institutional memory. In reuniting Box 14 with the other boxes of the collection, Rubin Schwartz seeks to make whole what had been partial. Her account of rabbis' wives similarly strives to restore what had been sundered. For much of the twentieth century, Jewish congregations, like many Protestant ones, got two for the price of one when they hired a religious leader.	. . .

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