On Their Own Terms: America's Jewish Women, 1954-2004 (Part Two: Recent American Jewish History, 1954-2004‪)‬

In the half century since the 1954 tercentenary celebration of Jewish life in America, a sea change has occurred in historical writing. As fresh approaches emerged, first social history and more recently cultural history, scholars of American Jewry eagerly embraced new angles of vision and innovative methodologies. One approach to historical writing, which merited only the most cursory attention during the tercentenary celebrations, (1) has moved, if not to the center of the writing on the American Jewish experience, then at least firmly within its mainstream. Today's historians take into account women and gender as they construct narratives of the "remembered past." (2) While scholars once "subsumed women ... in a generalized, unified conception that was represented in the idea of man," (3) in recent decades they have attempted to open up the "true history of women [which] is the history of their ongoing functioning in that male-defined world, on their own terms." (4) Writing about women and gender--that is, the social construction of the relationships between the sexes (5)--in the context of American Jewish history means writing about Jewish women against the backdrop of U.S. women's history. Not surprisingly, the diversity of America's women precludes a single story. Criticizing some of the early efforts to write women's history, historian Estelle Friedman observed, "The most serious of the problems which recent studies manifest is that of excessive generalization--the tendency to write about the American woman, when race, class, region, and ethnicity have significantly divided women." (6) She could have, although she did not, added religion to that list of factors complicating women's history.