Review - American Jewish Archives

Book Reviews 215
Hyman, Paula E.
Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish Histo y:
The Roles and Rqresentation of Women.
The Samuel and Althea Strourn Lectures in Jewish Studies.
Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995.197 pages.
Paula E. Hyman, a leading scholar in Jewish and women's history
offers a thoughtful and important discussion about the role of gen-
der in Jewish assimilation. The volume, short in length, examines
experiences of Ashkenazi Jews in four chapters, drawing on recent
scholarship about gender, assimilation, and Judaism. Hyman uses ma-
terial from the Jewish press in various countries, the women's own
writings, Jewish women's organizational records, advice manuals,
and Jewish literature. Hyman explains in her introduction her two
main goals in developing the book; "to reclaim the experience of
Jewish women as they accommodated to the socioeconomic and ide-
ological challenges of modernity in western and central Europe,
eastern Europe, and the United States, particularly in the latter part
of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth"; and
"to explore the role of ideas about gender in the construction of the
Jewish identity in the modern period(5).
Hyman clearly distinguishes between the "process" of assimilation
and the "project"of assimilation in her analysis of Jewish women's ex-
periences in her first chapter,"Paradoxes of Assimilation." The process
of assimilation, Hyman states, refers to the sociological process con-
sisting of different stages: beginning with acculturation, the integra-
tion of minorities into the larger majority institutions, and then the
"dissolution of the minority by biological merger with the majority
through intermarriage." In short, the process yields the minority
members' desire to be like the majority and the majority members'
willingness to have minorities participate in their society (13-14).
The project of assimilation embodies the "official response of Jewish
communal leaders in both Europe and the United States to emanci-
pation and was expressed in communal policy"(16). The project of as-
similation involved a public agenda about Jewish emancipation in
the nineteenth century, expressed by Jewish male elites.