Reviewed by Shira Kohn Levy | Reviews | Journal of American Ethnic History, 27.4

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Reviewed by Shira Kohn Levy | Reviews | Journal of American Ethnic History, 27.4 | The History Cooperative

Reviews

Wives without Husbands: Marriage, Desertion, and Welfare in New York, 1900–1935. By Anne R. Igra. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. xiii + 175 pp. Photos, notes, bibliography, and index. $49.95 (cloth); $19.95 (paper).

In 1911 the National Conference of Jewish Charities founded an offshoot agency, the National Desertion Bureau (NDB), to combat acts of male abandonment in New York's Jewish immigrant community. The American Jewish elite who funded this organization believed that by forcing male deserters to reunite with and provide for their families, they could both acculturate Jewish immigrants into the prevailing middle-class male breadwinning culture and simultaneously dissolve what the elite perceived to be a societal ill that threatened the reputation of the Jewish community as a whole. However, as Anne Igra demonstrates in this excellent study, the goals of the NDB were quite different from those of the deserted families they hoped to help.

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