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Reviews
JEWISH WOMEN PIONEERING THE FRONTIER TRAIL: A HISTORY IN THE AMERICAN WEST
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by Jeanne E. Abrams
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| New York University Press, 2006. Photographs, notes, bibliography, index. 279 pages. $39.00 cloth. |
| Jeanne Abrams's Jewish Women Pioneering the Frontier Trail is a landmark of scholarship in western women's history. Abrams assembles provocative juxtapositions, reminding readers of an intensely immigrant West, where Jews nonetheless assimilated almost completely, as well as of Jews' status as a highly visible yet numerically tiny minority. This is a readable, vividly written book, organized by theme — such as institution building, business, and education — and focused mainly on the period 1880–1920. Yet, it is as frustrating as it is evocative. |
1
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Despite the title, there is little here on "pioneering the frontier trail" and no detailed analysis of the movement and transformation of family customs, gender roles, and general culture in the trek west. Instead, Abrams focuses on substantial towns and city populations, especially San Francisco, Denver, and Portland, Oregon. In these relatively familiar settings for studies of Jewish immigration, people and events are mainly reported on rather than reinterpreted. Abrams does not move much beyond conclusions found in the current scholarship on Jewish women's organized urban activities in charity, education, settlement work, and business elsewhere in the United States at the time. That literature describes immigration as placing new responsibilities on Jewish women, which they in turn seized as opportunities to uphold religious observance, family cohesion, and community unity as well as to acculturate and succeed in the American context. |
2
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Each of Abrams's chapters cries out for more incisive grappling with this basic thesis. The work of leading figure Hattie Hecht Sloss of San Francisco — a major patron of the arts and outstanding National Council of Jewish Women leader — is, for example, summarized but not explained, most glaringly in regard to her dramatic turnabout on Zionism. Abrams's description of Denver's Ray David, superintendent of that city's Jewish Aid Society, includes mention of David's media image as "Little Mother to the Poor" but bypasses the opportunity to hone in on a specifically Jewish (or western) deployment of maternalist ideology (p. 64). The text alludes to but does not engage the literature on "whiteness" and Jewishness referring to a Jewish woman in Los Angeles "possibly" birthing the first "Anglo" child in the West during the 1850s (pp. 72 and 113). But Abrams does not really argue that European Jews became white as they crossed the Rocky Mountains — as Linda Gordon (The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction, 1999) has suggested for poor Irish orphans who were racialized and pathologized in the urban northeast but who gained status and white privilege when transported west for adoption. Abrams might have framed for Jewish women the exacting comparative approach found in Peggy Pascoe's Relations of Rescue: Search for Female Moral Authority in the American west, 1874–1939 (1990), which focuses on Protestant women's work reform and benevolent work in a series of case studies. Instead, Abrams's sweeping narrative rests on equivocal or conditional formulations for Jewish achievement, as in her suggestion that opportunity "perhaps reflect[ed] more flexible paths still open to immigrants in the west," her assertion that anti-Semitism "appears to have been no barrier" for the women she tracks across time and place, and her conclusion that prosperous Jewish women had "seemingly easy access" to local "movers and shakers" in various communities (pp. 75, 65, and 54). |
3
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Real analytic promise attends Abrams's suggestion that Jewish women's community work, as compared to Protestant women's, expressed "not merely ... an altruistic impulse but ... an imperative of justice" (p. 55). If Abrams has a searching critique of sentimental politics by Jewish men or women in the Progressive Era, however, it is not developed in this text. Indeed, after dropping in this suggestion in Chapter Four, it is referred to in passing again in Chapter Five, but to the reverse effect — that Reform and Conservative Jews disagreed on key matters of religious observance and Zionism, for example, but were able to "unite on cause of dependent children" to build a major children's health care facility in Denver (p. 80). Yet the precise calculus of this unity — maternalist politics, Victorian humanitarianism, or a deeper tradition of Jewish chessed (lovingkindness) — remains unexplored, though Abrams credits the charismatic leadership of organizer Fannie Lorber with the realization of the Denver Sheltering Home for Jewish Children. |
4
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As in the Lorber case, Abrams is drawn to an emblematic rather than analytical approach. A sensitive and well-informed study, the book is nonetheless is driven by the momentum of success narratives. I longed for an approach that could sift the evidence for contradiction or irony, and that could track the costs and benefits to Jewish communities who disagreed about major issues and tactics yet still embraced a shared self-concept and identity. Certainly the work of bearing the weight of historical contradictions — Jewish peoplehood and American citizenship, modernity and tradition, religious observance and secular success — fell significantly to women. Jean Abrams's book will be essential reading for those looking to mine these deeper layers of historical meaning. |
5
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| Patricia A. Schechter
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| Portland State University |
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