Jews, especially women, were apparently particularly concerned with clothing as a symbol of American middle-class status. In the nineteenth century, with a flood of immigrants from Eastern Europe entering the United States, organizations were formed to aid in their acculturation. They, too, presented themselves and their activities in terms of the then prevailing concept of femininity, which, in their case, included a distinctive Jewish component. Encounter With Emancipation: The German Jews in the United States, 1830–1914 (1981); Diner, Hasia. The first such club, the United Order of True Sisters, was founded in 1846 in New York and by 1851 had spread to Philadelphia, Albany, and New Haven. Term used for ritually untainted food according to the laws of, Lesson Plan: Benevolent Societies and Tzedakah, Encyclopedia Article: German Immigrant Period in the United States, Encyclopedia Article: Assimilation in the United States: Twentieth Century, Encyclopedia Article: Rebekah Bettelheim Kohut, Copyright © 1998–2020, Jewish Women's Archive. The effect of the assimilation process on the social actors and their environment allows flexibility and variety in the ethnic blends, depending on the social-historical conditions in which they take shape. They were also responding to the fluidity of the larger (host) society in the making and the voluntary basis of its operation. In the secular public forum, new avenues for German Jewish women’s pursuits in the late nineteenth century were opened, on the one hand, by the professionalization of American middle-class women’s education, especially in the fields of teaching and social work, and, on the other hand, by the ideology and practice of Progressive reform movement to which lay and clergy, middle-class Americans, Protestant and Jewish Reform, actively committed themselves. The first nonsynagogual female Jewish society was founded in 1819 by Rebecca Gratz, a member of the Philadelphia Jewish upper class and an exceptionally independent-minded woman for her time. endobj NCJW was founded in 1893, during a Jewish Women’s Congress organized under the auspices of the World’s Parliament of Religions held at the Chicago World’s Fair. The latter were the ways of proper Jewish womanhood taught to Eastern European immigrant girls, including the modern Term used for ritually untainted food according to the laws of Kashrut (Jewish dietary laws).kosher kitchen, observance of Jewish holidays, and morals and appropriate Jewish gender attitudes. That it was, precisely, the Americanization of the synagogue that, by making women active participants in its religious activities, contributed to the preservation of Jewish tradition in America is a good illustration of the accommodation of change and continuity in the process of ethnicization. In time, the sum total of Irish-Americans exceeded the entire population of Ireland. Jewish Women's Archive. The Clubwoman as Feminist: True Womanhood Redefined, 1868–1914 (1980); Cohen, Naomi. The two aspects of class and gender in the assimilation-ethnicization processes united with the historically situated gender and ethnic specificity of class position and class and the ethnic specificity of gender roles and relations of German Jewish women throughout the nineteenth century were influenced from the outside by the larger American environment, in particular the voluntary and democratic character of its social associations, and by its political culture and practice based on the principles of individual liberty. <> Some government reformers believed that while Indian policy would not end violence between settlers and Indians in the short term, patience for the assimilation program was the … But even when justified as falling into the domestic sphere, further redrawing of the boundaries of Jewish women’s public activities by the inclusion of the realm outside the ethnic community constituted the next important step in their assimilation. The transformation during the nineteenth century of American German Jewish society, especially its collective ascent to the middle class and the economic and cultural consequences thereof, and the emergence and spread of Reform Judaism also significantly contributed to the changes in women’s lives. Originated in Germany at the beginning of the nineteenth century by Jewish philosophers as the emancipation project “from within,” Reform Judaism found in liberal-democratic America a particularly hospitable ground and, among Americanizing German Jews, eager followers. Besides piety and good care of the home as primary obligations, the nineteenth-century American female role model called upon women to do charitable work for the sick and the needy. ��(�$ʬ7�PWw1�Z�q(r��fإ���[Η6�O�J�מ����}�����.�fh���

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The attention of German Jewish women educators and social workers naturally turned to recent Jewish arrivals from Russia and Austro-Hungary who had settled in densely populated immigrant sections in New York and other large cities in the East and Midwest. A greater surplus of free time gained by American middle-class women in the 1870s to 1890s as the result of general increase in the economic affluence and the mechanization of many household tasks and the proliferation of commercial entertainment, such as vaudeville theaters, dance halls, amusement parks, and the first moving pictures, changed the life-styles of entire families and their individual members. �1W The second development was the emergence of American Reform Judaism modeled in considerable part on contemporary American middle-class Protestantism in whose philosophy and institutional functioning the women occupied a position significantly different from that prescribed by the traditional (Orthodox) Jewish religion. The latter were more directly instrumental in integrating women into the synagogue—an idea that was the integral component of the religious philosophy of Reform Judaism as formulated by its rabbinic leaders, especially Isaac Mayer Wise and David Einhorn, the authors of two programmatic texts of American Reform, CustomMinhag America (1857) and Olat Tamid (1858), respectively. Assimilation in the United States: Nineteenth Century. 2, The German Jewish Woman (1976); Goldman, Karla. Because German Jews were a decisive majority among the immigrants and because, together with their American-born children, they played a central role in the assimilation/Americanization of their communities almost until World War I, they are the focus of this article. Although religious “from the roots,” to use Barbara Myerhoff’s apt phrase, most of them, especially the early arrivals, did not have much Jewish education. The female agents of this transformation did not explicitly challenge the separate-spheres model, but, as did their American Protestant sisters, they redrew the boundaries and thus altered the landscape of the female domestic realm by moving it into the public sphere of their ethnoreligious communities. In the late 1800s, why did most farmers on the Plains concentrate on cash crop staples like wheat and corn? Though these immigrants were not the poorest people in Ireland (the poorest were unable to raise the required sum for steerage passage on a ship to America), by American standards, they were destitute.

In turn, Jewish women’s presence and active participation in the public religious sphere had transformed—Americanized—the latter.

Adaptation and Assimilation Arrival of emigrants, Ellis Island The Irish immigrants left a rural lifestyle in a nation lacking modern industry. �ܾ��u���f����I2�R���1� �9� [� I�i� U�_/������+3[���S�Z(������� dgԊ٢�9�csa�k�/��,���n�H��J�I�����n6��yO�X��'?�i�/k�H��ǘZ �����5{��a��=����2Fx=��r�Z� nD�[��,�ب���䓴��޷R���+3p�ib������w��QE QY���6�`��h. This was quite a different pattern from the much greater urban concentration both of their Sephardi predecessors and their East European followers to America.