Gone to Another Meeting: The National Council of Jewish Women, 1893-1993

A history of the oldest religious Jewish women’s organisation in the United States,
Gone to Another Meeting
charts the development of the National Council of Jewish Women and its impact on both the Jewish community in the United States and American society in general. Founded in 1893 by Hannah Greenebaum Solomon, NCJW provided a conduit through which Jewish women’s voices could be heard and brought a Jewish voice to America’s women’s rights movement. NCJW would come to represent both the modernisation and renewal of traditional Jewish womanhood. Through its emphasis on motherhood, its adoption of domestic feminism, and its efforts to carve a distinct Jewish niche in the late 19th-century Progressive social reform movement in the largely Christian world of women’s clubs, NCJW was instrumental in defining a uniquely American version of Jewish womanhood. Its weave of American and Jewish culture makes NCJW an ideal starting point for the study of the development of modern Jewish womanhood. Rather than assuming that American Jewish culture was shaped largely by men with occasional help from women, Faith Rogow goes beyond the mere addition of women to the established canon and examines why and where gender produced differing beliefs and practices. Using women’s studies methodology, Rogow discussed NCJW’s uniquely female approach to such issues as immigration aid, relationships between German and Eastern European Jews and the power struggle between the Reform movement and more traditional interpretations of Judaism. The result should provide a greater understanding of the American Jewish community through Rogow’s fusion of both male and female experience.