A prodigiously researched and beautifully illustrated contribution to Jewish and women’s studies.
A revisionist history of Jewish women.
Historians Kaplan and Carlebach examine the lives of Ashkenazi women in Western and Central Europe from 1500 to 1800 to rectify historians’ marginalization of this “most visible minority” and to argue persuasively for their centrality within their communities. Drawing on myriad sources, including personal letters, recipes, laundry lists, community records, wills, books of Jewish customs, and descriptions of Jewish practices by Christian observers, the authors show that during this period, women took leadership roles in the kehillah, the formal organization through which Jews interacted with state authorities; figured prominently in synagogues, overseeing the women’s section, for example, and collecting donations; took charge of the mikveh, or ritual bath in which a woman cleansed herself after menstruation; and served to carry out Jewish rituals, such as burials. With an increase of printed material, women expanded their literacy, some collecting their own libraries, others commissioning religious or literary manuscripts, in Hebrew or Yiddish, for their own use or for other women—including for the education of their daughters. “Several broad circles of women had exceptional access to learning,” the authors reveal. Many also took part in the economic life of the community, owning property, taking up professions, and engaging in financial and commercial dealings. At the same time, religious and secular laws and customs had an impact on their bodies (such as menstruation, pregnancy, miscarriages, nursing, and female illnesses) and social status (marriage, divorce, remarriage, and opportunities for those who did not marry). The authors offer vivid details of women’s mundane and sacred possessions, everyday and festive clothing, and even the underwear that comprised Jewish women’s material worlds. Throughout their richly detailed history, the authors compare Jewish women’s lives with those of their Christian contemporaries.
A prodigiously researched and beautifully illustrated contribution to Jewish and women’s studies.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9780691268613
Page Count: 488
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: July 31, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2025
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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SEEN & HEARD
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