Book Review

Canada and the United States

Karla Goldman argues that in order to understand the changes that took place in the American synagogue in the nineteenth century, we must include in our analysis the major role that contemporaneous changes in women's lives—within and outside of the synagogue—played in its transformation. Her work reflects the insights of the feminist historiography of the past two decades in its assertion that we cannot simply add women into the historical picture and expect to see only minor changes; rather, the analysis of gender is fundamental to our understanding of all social life. Within the history of modern Jewry, Goldman's work resonates beautifully with Marion Kaplan's argument in The Making of the Jewish Middle Class: Women, Family, and Identity in Imperial Germany (1991) that the embourgeoisement of Jews in late nineteenth-century Germany was understandable only in terms of a gendered analysis in which men, seeking to assimilate into the wider culture, dropped most of their religious practices while women, in keeping with the gendered ideals of middle-class German society of that time, maintained domestic piety and religious practice. Goldman also draws on Paula Hyman's work illustrating how gendered assumptions—that girls would grow into women, whose role was to sustain household piety and the religious education of children—reshaped orientations to the education of Jewish girls.

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