 Good evening and welcome to the William G. McGowan Theatre here at the National Archives. I'm David Ferriero, the Archivist of the United States, and it's a pleasure to welcome you this evening. Whether you're here in the theater or joining us on our YouTube or Facebook stations, we are presenting this program in partnership with the Capital Jewish Museum in celebration of Jewish Heritage Month, and we thank them for their support. Tonight's conversation is one of many programs we have developed to tie into our new exhibit in the Lawrence F. O'Brien Gallery upstairs, rightfully hers, American women, and the vote. Before we get started, I'd like to tell you about two other programs coming up soon in this theater. On Tuesday, May 28th at 7 p.m., Henry Louis Gates, Jr. will be here to discuss Stony the Road, Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow, his book about the struggle by African-Americans for equality after the Civil War. And on Tuesday, June 4th at noon, Caitlin Sidorski, author of All Roads Lead to Power, The Appointed and Elected Paths to Public Office for U.S. Women, will examine how many more women are appointed rather than elected to a political office. Check our website at archives.gov or sign up at the table outside the theater to get email notifications. You'll also find information about other National Archives programs and activities. And another way to get more involved with the National Archives is to become a member of the National Archives Foundation. The Foundation supports all of our education and outreach activities. Visit its website, archivesfoundation.org to learn more about the Foundation and join online. And a little-known secret that I keep telling everyone, no one has ever been turned down for membership in the National Archives Foundation. I mentioned earlier that we've just opened a new exhibit upstairs, rightfully hers, is the cornerstone of our centennial celebration of the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote. This exhibit tells the story of women's struggle for voting rights and explores the roles of women from a variety of backgrounds. One of the women featured in a suffragist spotlight is Rose Schneiderman. Schneiderman was born into a Jewish family in Russian Poland that moved to New York City in 1890 when she was a child. In 1906, she was elected as an officer in the New York Women's Trade Union League and was instrumental in the 1909 garment worker strike, insisting that wage-earning women needed the vote to fight against low wages, long hours and unsafe working conditions. Schneiderman's powerful oratory played a crucial role in winning women's suffrage in New York in 1917. Women like Schneiderman contributed to the growth of the nation throughout American history. And tonight, we're privileged to hear about several of them from author Pamela Nadell and when determined of the Capital Jewish Museum. It's now my pleasure to welcome to the stage Howard Morse, the president of the Lillian and Albert Small Capital Jewish Museum. Projected to open in 2021, the Capital Jewish Museum will explore the past, present and future of Jewish life in Washington. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Howard Morse. Thank you very much, David. I am delighted to see many of our members and supporters in the audience to be joined by members of our board and staff this evening and hopefully future members of the Capital Jewish Museum, formerly the Jewish Historical Society of Greater Washington. I want to thank the National Archives and in particular David Furrier, the 10th Archivist of the United States, who has made transparency, participation and collaboration a cornerstone of the archives mission and therefore partnering with us for this annual program to commemorate Jewish American Heritage Month. We have done so now for many years and I have always found it to be a great program, which I get to learn a lot. Jewish American Heritage Month has been celebrated since 2006 in recognition of Jewish American contributions to our country for over 350 years. It's particularly important to focus on the meaning of religious pluralism and cultural diversity in light of events from those in Charlottesville to Pittsburgh to just last month in Poway, California. As you may know, we're in the midst of an exciting project to build the Capital Jewish Museum to open in 2021, as David said, a few blocks from here at the corner of 3rd and F Streets Northwest. That museum will be anchored by our historic 1876 synagogue, which we picked up, put on wheels and moved for the third time this past January, hopefully to its permanent and last place. The museum's core exhibition and programming will explore the past, present and future of Jewish life in Washington. We hope to inspire audiences to connect, to reflect and to act, to connect across generations and diverse communities, to reflect on the relevance of history to today and to act on behalf of communities and their values. We also welcome new members to receive our newsletter and follow our new museum's progress and get more involved. Tonight's speaker, Dr. Pamela Nadel, is no stranger to the Capital Jewish Museum. She has been our academic advisor and a member of our organization for decades. She's influenced our knowledge of local, national and international Jewish women's history and women's role in social and political movements that have shaped our country. The fighters, picketers and agitators, to use her terms, from the international ladies, garment workers to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, which we will be sharing through our exhibitions. Dr. Nadel received her doctorate in American Jewish history, focusing on Eastern European migration patterns. She is now a professor and the Patrick Clinton chair in women's and gender history at American University, where she's a recipient of AU's highest faculty award scholar teacher of the year. Dr. Nadel will be talking tonight about her book American Jewish Women from Colonial Times to Today, which was published just a few months ago. Earlier books include Women Who Would Be Rabbis, a history of women's organization, which was a finalist for National Jewish Book Award. She's also a past president of the Association for Jewish Studies, has been an important leader in academia in support of free speech, received the American Jewish Historical Society's Lee Max Friedman Award for her distinguished service to the profession. Joining Dr. Nadel in conversation is our own, the Capital Jewish Museum's Deputy Director Wendy Terman, who has served us for nearly two decades. Wendy has an incredibly deep knowledge of our own collections and their stories, and is a key member of our team developing our exhibitions for the Capital Jewish Museum. With that, let me turn things over to Wendy and Pam, and like you, I'm going to sit down and learn more from them. Hi, everybody. Pam, I want to start off by thanking you for writing the book. I just finished it over the weekend. And for me, it was not just Jewish history, women's history. It was helping broaden my own understanding of American history. And there's so many stories. Every single page had, like, 10 different stories that I wanted to follow up on, so we're not going to get to most of those. But what I liked was how you told these stories across big themes in American history of labor and gender and politics and power in all of its different forms, religious observance. So there's many, many ways that you're telling stories of Jewish women who help illustrate some of these bigger things. So I want to ask you about some of the stories of some of those particular women, but also some of the bigger things that I was seeing that you're weaving together throughout the book. But I want to start off with just the fundamental question, why is it important to study American Jewish women? Why is that something we should be doing? So I'll tell you a story that kind of led me into this. A long time ago, my department at American University was hiring an American women's historian. And I was a fairly young assistant associate professor at that point. And I was in awe because this was the 90s. We'd had about a decade of U.S. women's historians had emerged in the 70s, the 80s. So the fields had really begun to grow. And these women were superstars. And I was learning from them as we would bring them in. They would give us, and they would talk to us. And one day, at that point I was actually working on women who would be rabbis, an earlier book. And I turned to one of them and I said to her, I said, I'm going to write a history of America's Jewish women. And she snapped back and said there's no such thing. And I knew that she was Jewish. I knew that she was interested in America's women in their multicultural dimensions, that she had ignored Jewish women in an early anthology. Later on, she corrected that. But that's kind of stuck with me, this sense that other than maybe around the labor movement, Jewish women didn't have a separate history. And I was convinced then, and I remain convinced that Jewish women, yes, they're a part of American history, but there is something that continues to set them apart. And so that's why it's important to write about America's Jewish women, just the way we write about Native American women, African American women, Latino women, that this particular group has its own distinctive history. Own distinctive history in their own distinctive voice as they are continuing to negotiate Jewish identity and continually pushing the bounds of their economic opportunity or their opportunities for service or advocacy in so many different ways. And the way those two weave together was really interesting to me. I do want to just start off with asking you a little question since we're here at the National Archives and there's a new exhibition, Rightfully Hers, American Women and the Right to Vote. So it's on display here. And to mark the 100th anniversary of the amendment granting women the right to vote. And I was captivated by some of your suffrage stories and so I'm going to just ask you to start off with one of my favorites. I have a lot of favorites. But you talk about Ernestine Rose who started off as by suing her father for her dowry money. Is that right? Yes. Okay. So could you tell us how she goes from that to becoming on the stage of an American suffragist? Ernestine Potowski Rose. So Ernestine Potowski was born in Poland. She claimed she was a rebel from the age of five. And that she was pushing against the biblical commandment and he shall rule over you from the get-go. And in Poland, one of the things you never quite know is how much she invented it for life and how much actually happened. But when she was about 16, her mother died. Her mother left her money that her father decides to promise to the man he's picked that she should marry. And she sues her father for the inheritance that she was due and she wins. And although she ultimately gives him the money, but she doesn't want to be into a forced marriage. And so she has a number of amazing stories. She eventually ends up in London where she marries William Rose, who's a follower of Robert Owens, one of these utopian communities. And around the 1830s or so they sail to America. They think they're going to end up in a utopian community, but instead they stay in New York. And she begins speaking out about women's rights and free thought from religious freedom. She's not particularly attached to her Jewish identity from the get-go. And you have to remember that in the 1830s and actually for a very long time, in the United States, when a woman got married, her husband controlled her property. And she fights for the Married Woman's Property Act in New York. Here's this immigrant fighting to improve American, the American legal system that discriminates against women. And from there she's drawn to the suffrage movement. And the suffrage movement in the 19th century was not friendly to immigrants, was not friendly to African Americans because the white women who were leading the suffrage movement didn't want their husbands to realize that if women got the vote, these other groups might also get the vote. And so she is really the lone female Jewish suffragist that we know from that mid-19th century moment of the women's suffrage movement. She speaks at, not in 1848 at the Seneca Falls Convention, but I think at the very next convention in 1850. She was a surprise to me. She was like finding somebody new. But then you carry on and talk a little bit about the suffrage movement later on. And one of the things I found interesting was that you were talking about how some of the women's organizations, like the National Council of Jewish Women, did not support suffrage at least at some point. I'm not sure. No, they never resolved in favor of suffrage. So what's going on with that? Could you explain? Today it would seem so odd because we think of organizations, these powerhouse Jewish women's organizations that have been around for more than a century. We think of them as being very liberal in terms of their politics. But suffrage was controversial in America. And while, for example, the National Council of Jewish Women was founded in 1893, its founding president, Hannah Solomon, was well known for being in favor of suffrage and knew the major suffrage leaders of the day. The organization never resolves in favor of suffrage because they're afraid that they're going to split the membership over suffrage. So it's, and I'm sure this is something that comes up in the exhibit is that there are men and women who are in favor of suffrage and there are men and women who were not in favor of suffrage until the ratification, first the amendment and then the ratification of the amendment in 1920. So you tell, I mean, you obviously tell stories of women who were much more active and out there, including, I don't know, a woman in Montana who was campaigning in front of a saloon. I was a little curious where that story came from. How did you find that story? So the terrific historian Melissa Clapper wrote a book called Ballads, Babies and Banners of Peace. And she really ferreted out Jewish women's involvements in birth control, in the peace movement, and in the suffrage movement. And I'm pretty sure that that's one of the stories that I took from her book. But, and she has really the details, the really the depth of the stories to show the breadth of Jewish women's involvement in suffrage. And of course, the exhibit here mentions Rose Schneiderman and her role in the New York State campaign for women's suffrage in 1915 and then the successful passage in 1917. So she was another favorite for me because I didn't know she was the origin of that bread and roses quote. So could you... So we heard a little bit from the archivist that Rose Schneiderman was an immigrant. She was in the sweatshops by the age of 10 or 12. And she was active as a labor leader. She was also active and eventually president of the Women's Trade Union League, which was an organization not generally of immigrant women, but more of uptown women who were helping the immigrant women in their labor struggles because they actually saw that this was a women's, the labor struggles were women's rights issue. And Schneiderman was active as were a number of Jewish women who had also been labor activists, but were active in campaigning for women's suffrage. So remember, the women's suffrage movement and the exhibit must talk about this was fought on two fronts. It was fought on the level of the National Amendment, but since the late 19th century, individual states had been granting women the right to vote. But those states were always in the west and New York state was the first eastern industrial state to grant women the right to vote. So there was a suffrage referendum in New York state in 1915. It failed. When the Suffrage Amendment passed in New York state in 1917, although at the time nobody really noticed it, the vote for women's suffrage in the Jewish districts of New York was overwhelming. The women had compelled their husbands, had convinced their husbands and brothers and sons that they should vote to grant them the grant women's suffrage. And then from the passage of women's suffrage in 1917, it's really a major turning point because then it helps repel the National Amendment forward. So that was a very different way for me to think about American women's suffrage, looking at that idea about all the Jewish men who were out there supporting their wives by voting. And all the Jewish women were standing on soapboxes telling men to support them. Yeah, that was good. And I also really liked the story of the two sisters you tell them. Their story is a little bit earlier. Annie Nathan who helped found Barnard College who was opposed to suffrage. So she helped found a women's college in New York City, but her sister Maude Nathan was an active supporter. Right. I mean, this is such an interesting story. You've got two sisters, Annie Nathan and becomes Annie Nathan Mayer and her sister Maude Nathan. It was also married, but she married a cousin. So she keeps her last name because they have the same last name. And Maude Nathan is an active suffragist. She's also president of Women's Consumer League. And Annie Nathan Mayer, the founder of Barnard College, the college wasn't so happy with her because she is an active opponent of women's suffrage. She doesn't think women need suffrage. They need education, but they don't need suffrage. So women don't always think alike on issues. Exactly. Especially Jewish women. So Howard talked about the museum that we're starting to build with our historic synagogue as obviously the largest object in our collection. You have been in our ears. I think at least since 1996, which is before I started working here when we did an exhibit on women's history. And I'm pretty sure your name is there in some way. And so you have been pushing us to make sure we are looking at the women's roles in the stories we're telling for a long time. So, of course, I'm looking at your book thinking, okay, what's in here that I need to make sure we have. And so I saw some very familiar names and faces. Eugenia Levy Phillips, who's everybody's favorite Civil War fire-eating secessionist in skirts. And Carrie Simon, who founded the sisterhood at Washington Hebrew. And Denise Turover, who's more of a, she's a representative for Hadassah in Washington, so she takes on more of the lobbying role. But there was a new one that I didn't know, Sonia Pressman, who I really wrapped. I loved her story because she's such a Washington story. She starts out at a brand new Washington agency. And I'm wondering if you could tell a little bit about her story and her being at the EEOC and sort of what she found there. I will, but also I'll put you in touch with her because she would love to have a conversation with you. Yes, I think we need to have a conversation. I think she needs to be in our museum. Right. Oh, that'll make her very happy. So here's, you know, so many of the people I talk about were immigrants. And here's another one of those immigrant stories. So Sonia Pressman came to America from Germany as a refugee in the 1930s. And then she goes to college, you know, classic immigrant story, you want your children to succeed and do better than they have more opportunities than you had. And she becomes a lawyer and she has a very similar experience. Some other very famous lawyers also had to them who ended up on the Supreme Court, which is that she can't get a job as a lawyer initially because people are telling her she should be a legal secretary. But she eventually gets hired by the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission, which was established to enforce Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. You may remember this, the Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act prohibited discrimination and employment not only on the basis of race but also on the basis of sex. And when she got to the EEOC, she discovered that the other lawyers who were there, they assumed that there wasn't any sex discrimination and employment. And they're getting a third of their complaints in their first year are coming from women and they're totally ignoring them. And they're only dealing with complaints about race. And she went to Betty Friedan and said American women need their own civil rights organization and also she determined to pressure the EEOC to start addressing the complaints based on sex discrimination. And she ended up really being one of the very important pioneers in Jewish women and the feminist movement and changing American life in this one particular area of her expertise. Those are stories that we love to see those stories of people making change both on a small scale and on a huge scale. So she was really pushing the boundaries. I think here we are in the National Archives. I think we really better talk about maybe the most famous woman in your book who's Justice Ginsburg because she's a pretty prominent government lawyer. So one question that I had and this is why you should get the book which we'll have available afterwards is because there's some amazing photographs and there's a photograph I'm pretty sure you probably haven't seen. And I have to ask you, you have this beautiful photograph of Ruth Bader Ginsburg wearing her robes from her confirmation class surrounded by all the other people in her confirmation. So it's not surrounded by the other justices wearing her justice robes. And I'm curious why that was the photo. What is the point that you're making with choosing that photo? So I like to say that I have the photo of Ruth Bader Ginsburg when she was Ruth Bader and when she was getting confirmed not at her confirmation hearings. And there's actually an amazing story about this photo. So there was, I mean one of the themes that I talk about obviously extensively is that for many Jewish women, not for all, but for many Jewish women Judaism was very important in their lives. And it was very common for girls when they were in high school especially before they were having bat mitzvahs that they would be confirmed. It's an idea that the reform movement takes from the Protestants early in the 19th century by the 1840s, 1850s, we have confirmation in synagogues all across America and in some synagogues only girls got confirmed. And you have these photos of these rabbis in their black robes and all these women in their white robes and they're sitting and they hang, if you've been in American synagogues, often they're hanging on the walls of the synagogues. So I worked with a photo editor to help me get the photos because I didn't have time to do all that myself. And my photo editor, I had seen this photo and I think I found it online somewhere. And my photo editor writes to the East Midwood Jewish Center and they center the photo and all these photos look exactly alike except one happens to have Ruth Bader Ginsburg sitting next to the rabbi. And we're sending off the photos and it was my husband thankfully who said which one is RBG? And I looked at it, they had sent the wrong photo. And not only that, to make matters worse, they can't find the photo at the synagogue with RBG. They have all the other photos and they actually, I found, I needed a high resolution image and fortunately someone else had published this photo in a book about Ruth Bader Ginsburg's writings that I had read. She was a very generous scholar and she sent me the high resolution image. Otherwise I wasn't going to have it in the book. So, yeah. Do you think she's read the book? I actually know that Mary Hartnett from Georgetown University who helped me get that photo, I sent her a copy of the book to thank her. She's writing a biography of Justice Ginsburg and she took the book to Justice Ginsburg and showed her where she was in the book. So I know she's seen it. Wonderful. Wonderful. I'd love to hear what she has to say. Yeah, I would too. That would be kind of fun. Also on the subject of our museum, I'm looking at our collections and I was delighted to find that you mentioned the existence of something. We have a couple items in our collection that are these charm bracelets that women earned for selling Israel bonds in the 1950s. So each charm was worth $2,500 of Israel bonds. And I'm curious, how would you suggest we, what should we do with one of these kinds of charm bracelets? What's it a symbol of? What does it tell us? It's a symbol of a way, I love, first of all, I love material culture as you know and I love working on museums and what's so stunning about material culture is this was a way of displaying, physically displaying and wearing a symbol that meant something to these women. And you know, men have, Jewish men have always had prayer shawls and head coverings. They had ways of displaying who they were as Jews. Jewish women until the feminist movement don't take on the male garb, they don't have so many ways of displaying their pride in their Jewish identity. So when we think about writing the label for that exhibit, I think we need to think about that this is a public demonstration of their commitment to the Jewish people. That's great because I always look at it as these women are able to raise a lot of money. And you know, $2,500 for one of these charms and there's a charm for each tribe of Israel. So there's a lot of charms on there. That's a lot of money that I see women involving themselves in this bigger story. So I love that you're giving me some new perspectives. Right. Well, and you know, I mean, Jewish women's philanthropy is such an important component of Jewish women's lives. Well, you talk about that at length in many, many different ways. And there's a lot of talk about money in your book and women's work in the home. And women's work outside the home is the boundaries of that work changed and women's work in women's organizations. So a lot of things I was trying to get a handle on about women are sort of constantly pushing up against their need to survive and thrive and coming up with ways of negotiating economic forces that are pushing against them. So this is a sort of a big leap in history. But I was very taken with the idea of the gallery of missing men that was a way for women to try and get some agency over their lives when they're very, very vulnerable. The gallery of missing men, the gallery of missing husbands was in the East European immigrant period. So roughly 1880 to 1920, when over 2 million East European Jews come to America, many men had abandoned their wives. Either they abandoned wives back in Europe, who would then send letters to New York Jewish newspapers or relatives and say, send me my husband who was living in New York. Or they abandoned their wives because of the difficulties of poverty or marital discord in America. What historians like to say is, in the early 20th century, the way the rich people got divorced was they went to the courts because to get divorced costs money. The way poor people got divorced was the men just split. And marital desertion was such a problem in the Jewish community in New York that they created the National Desertion Bureau to track down these men. And one of its tools was to publish the photos of the men in the Yiddish press. And then hopefully people would see them and would identify them. The reality is that most of the time, the women didn't want the men back while they wanted was the Jewish divorce decree that they needed to get because otherwise they couldn't remarry. And we actually, we know the historian who's written about this says that the National Desertion Bureau was successful at reunification at something like 3% of the cases it handled. And it handled thousands of cases. So another way I saw, you talk about women trying to control their economic lives was boycotting kosher meat when the prices get too high. So the, and rent strikes and similar things, women across the ages have a long history of staging food and rent strikes. I mean, this comes, there are models of it in terms of the French Revolution, for example. In America, in May 1902 in New York City, the price of kosher meat soared from 12 cents a pound to 18 cents a pound. And Jewish women in New York broke into butcher shops, threw the meat on the street, doused it with kerosene, sometimes set it aflame and demanded that the prices be reduced. And it had to do, it's a very complicated story with the butchers and the beef trust. But it's also, it's very much about women's activism because they needed every single one of those pennies to feed their families and to clothe their children. And when anything ever threatened, what they could do for their families and when times were difficult, we find Jewish women and Jewish men, of course, the Jewish women especially being activists in their neighborhood. So this is not the garment workers. These are mothers, their average age is around 40. They are, they're staging food strikes and rent strikes and they continue all the way up until World War II. So I was a little curious and I've thought about this before. You talk about the role of women in sisterhoods supporting the synagogues and the many, you tell a wonderful story about Washington Hebrew congregation right here in our city with the lore of the Washington Hebrew sisterhood starting with 50 women pledging 10 cents a piece with a promise to pay off the mortgage which would mean it's a very small mortgage or they're just very optimistic. And then they went off to polish the door knobs. But can you help me understand a little bit how this works because these women are not working outside the home. They don't have their own independent income stream. So how is it these sisterhoods are so phenomenally successful in supporting the work of the congregation? Part of the way they're phenomenally successful is they stage a lot of fundraisers. So, you know, in the 20th century, well, going back into the 19th century, they stage things like strawberry festivals and even in the reform movement, oyster suppers in the 19th century. And they continue, they hold bazaars. I mean, that also, that model comes from the 19th century. They hold dinner dances. They do all sorts of things to raise money and probably not in the book but in an article that I wrote about the sisterhood of the Washington Hebrew congregation. They gave the congregation a substantial portion of the money it needed to lower what it called its sinking fund. And also some of the women, while they don't have independent businesses, some of them also have independent incomes because they inherited money. But the important thing is that the way in which they're demonstrating their agency in the synagogue and their power in the synagogue is through what they are able to do to sustain the synagogue. But that detail that you pulled out about polishing the door knobs is actually really significant because when they create the sisterhood, which they see as a more sophisticated example of the old ladies' benevolent societies, they're very careful to extend their homemaker role to the synagogue. So on the one hand they're organizing, they have these ambitions, they're going to do things that are showing that they're moving into the 20th century. On the other hand, they still want to say that what they're doing is they're just taking their homemaker roles into the synagogue so they're polishing the door knobs. So there's another batch of women that maybe is fairly common to read about in women's history, although I hadn't thought of it in terms of Jewish women, which is those women who had to turn to prostitution. And you talk about that in several American cities. But the most startling thing was that there were women who had their own prostitutes who had their own cemetery and Hebrew benevolent society. The madams had it, yeah. So what does that tell us about these women and their connection to their Jewish identity? So the first thing that we should know is that in the late 19th and 20th century, there was an international, what was then called a white slavery trade, and that there were Jewish procurers who were active in Europe and also in the United States, but especially active in Europe. And it was very dangerous for, there are a lot of people on the move, the Jewish migration of 2 million between 1880 and 1920 is part of 25 million immigrants coming into America. A lot of those immigrants who were traveling were single girls and women traveling on their own, or they might have been married women, but their husbands had come over first, and they're traveling to America on their own, or maybe with some children. There was tremendous concern justifiably about women being snared en route to America and being dispatched to brothels in Turkey and in Argentina. And Argentina had a thriving Jewish prostitution trade in the late 19th and early 20th century, and it's so well organized, both in Argentina and in New York, that they have their own kind of unions, not the prostitutes so much, but the pimps and the madams, and they have their own burial ground in Brooklyn, and they're influenced by the labor movement, so it's their expression of the labor movement. Okay, that's you can understand why it took me by surprise. Yeah, I can. Well, it took you by surprise also because earlier histories of America's Jewish women were much more celebratory, and that was not a story they wanted to tell about Jewish women who engaged in prostitution. And so why is it important to include? Because when women's history emerged, the study of what became called sex workers became a component of the story of women's history. And so if Jewish women were involved in sex work, then I needed to tell that story to be a legitimate historian. So you spent not a lot of time, but a significant amount of time talking about birth control. Why is that an important subject for a history book? It's critical for women's history because when you have in 1800 American women having seven children, the average white American woman has seven children in 1800. By 1900, the average white American woman has three and a half children. I don't know what to do with those halves. But the point is that we need to understand women's reproductive lives. And Jewish women also have certain unique patterns in terms of their reproductive lives. We know, for example, that the Jewish women's baby boom was smaller than the American baby boom. And so that's part of what makes Jewish women distinctive, is to understand what's unique in terms of their reproductive lives. Because as you and I were talking earlier, one of the things that I tried to do in this book was I wanted to tell the story of women who lived their lives on the smaller canvases of their families and neighborhoods. And as well as obviously the women of renown, like a Rose Schneiderman or Ernestine Potowski Rose, who have to be in a book like this. And when I think of what are the concerns affecting the lives of women who lived in the smaller canvases, I think how they raised their families, the kinds of work that they did, the politics that they pursued, these intimate details of their lives are critical to understanding that history. So birth control is critical to understanding their history. You mentioned Betty Friedan. And of course, Betty Friedan is in your book, because she wrote the Feminine Mystique in 1963. And what I found interesting was you talked a little bit about how she came to her feminism. And she sort of talked about some of the antisemitism she experienced as a girl and made a connection. And I'm wondering if you could tell some of that story. I would say two things. First of all, I would say antisemitism is a theme that crops up across the boat. Well, we're going to get there too. So about Betty Friedan, what historians have been trying to figure out, what is so striking is that Jewish women were disproportionately represented in the leadership of the feminist movement that emerged in America in the 1960s and 1970s. Not saying that Jewish women were disproportionately feminist overall, but they were disproportionately represented in the leadership. And one of the things I ask is why. I'm trying to figure out why. Just to give you an example, 12% of the founding members of the national organization for women were Jewish women at a time when Jews make up about 3% of the population of the United States. So why were they disproportionately represented? For some, like Friedan, the exclusions they experienced from antisemitism sensitized them to the exclusions they were experiencing as women. Some Jewish women specifically talk about that they came to understand or they came to feminism because when they walked into the synagogue, they knew they were second class citizens, that they experienced exclusion from Jewish men. Other Jewish women actually said that they came to their feminism because of Judaism, that from Judaism they learned about the commandments to social justice, to pursue justice. And that Judaism and also sometimes growing up in families on the political left propelled them into the feminist movement or for some into the civil rights movement. So Judaism is really interesting. It has a paradoxical effect. It could point to the exclusion that led them to feminism, but for others it was actually propelling them there, something positive within Judaism propelled them. Antisemitism does run as a continuing theme through your book. And I was very moved by the story of a 19th century school girl who her teacher told her, I'm sorry, it's not your fault you were born a Jew. That's just your tough luck. And then you thread stories throughout through the United Nations, delegates to the United Nations decade on women. I always find that funny that there was one decade for women in the 1980s. And then you wrote an editorial that was published in the Washington Post maybe two months ago talking about understanding antisemitism in American history. So I'm wondering if you can tell us a little bit about you pulled from some of the stories in your editorial, pulled from some of the stories in this book. So what has it meant and what does it continue to mean for American Jewish women? So the archivist also opened by talking about some of the antisemitism in the moment that we're in now. Antisemitism is a theme that is coursed through American history since the first Jews landed in New Amsterdam in 1654. And Governor Peter Stuyvesant tried to eject what he called this despicable race. And I have been, I think like everyone here tonight, I've been thinking so much about antisemitism and of course when I was writing the book I couldn't write about Jewish women without writing about how often they bumped up against antisemitism. And what I think is distinctive for women is that often they experienced antisemitism through these very personal kinds of interactions or maybe what happened to their children. I talk about a woman in the 1940s who writes a letter trying to convey to people what antisemitism means to her children. And her daughter can't go to a hotel with a friend because she won't find the kind of people there that she likes. Her son can't become an engineer because if he goes, even if he gets into engineering school, he's not going to be able to get a job as an engineer. And whereas men often bump up against antisemitism out in the workforce or at that kind of five o'clock shadow they might have done business with Gentiles during the day but then at five o'clock they went in different directions. Women really like that little girl whose teacher says to her, it's not your fault, you're a Jew. They really experienced antisemitism on a very personal level. And of course we're in this moment where antisemitism is just surging again around us, especially on the Internet but then also with expressions of physical violence that have, there have been examples of physical violence in America before but not shootings in Cinevox. Well and help us understand the antisemitism in the modern feminist perspective and movement because that's I think really difficult. Can you be a feminist in a Jewish woman at the same time? I think what's helpful to know is that this is not brand new. So right now as many of you know there have been charges of antisemitism directed at leaders of the women's march and justifiably so and there have been a number of very highly public incidents in which Jewish feminists have been excluded like in certain marches from displaying Jewish symbols or have been told very quite point blanked that they can either stand up for the rights of everyone and focusing specifically on Palestinians or they don't belong. There's no place for them in this feminist movement. What I wrote about was not about what's going on now but I wrote about the antisemitism that Jewish women, American Jewish women faced during the international decade of women that the United States, the United Nations had declared between 1975 and 1985 and they held a series of conferences around the world and Jewish women were physically threatened at those conferences and were told not to be on display to display any kinds of Jewish symbols. Some of the major Jewish feminist leaders were called out. Bella Abzug, Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem who's half Jewish, they were told that having these Jewish women as leaders of the American feminist delegation gave the American feminist delegation a bad name, delegitimized it. So what we're seeing now has an earlier history and actually a much deeper history of tension in the women's movement. A lot of your book is on women organizing to make change whether it's organizing in their synagogue or working in Hadassah or working on a much more one-on-one level but one of the things that seem to me to run throughout is that as women are trying to advocate in whatever venue they're in, they're also budding up against their very traditional roles as women or mothers and others' expectations of them. So I was delighted to find that you pulled a story from our, an exhibit that we did several years ago on Soviet Jewelry where you tell about Betty Miller getting arrested. She was a local housewife, one of those many housewives who supported the Soviet Jewelry movement and she got arrested. And then after she was released from jail, she was in there for a few hours with a bunch of teenagers and her kid, and then she went out and bought supplies at 7-Eleven to make peanut butter sandwiches for all the teenagers because she thought they'd be hungry after they'd been in jail. But that kind of juxtaposition of, you know, you got to do your women's work while you're doing this other women's work. With so striking, first of all, I had no idea I had so many Washington women in there. So it's really kind of interesting. I was just looking for them. Yeah, I loved it. I loved the way you pulled them out. I hadn't really thought about that. But that's great because people always say that everybody writes only about New York. So it's really good. I wasn't writing only about New York. What jumps out from the get-go when American women at the end of the 19th century really start organizing on a grand scale and create all sorts of women's organizations, including the many suffrage organizations that emerge then. What jumps out is that they're always really careful to show that they were in their traditional roles even while they're doing these things that are very radical. And so the first example I think of is Hannah Solomon who founded the National Council of Jewish Women. And when there's an article about her in an English language magazine called The American Jewish, they talk about her first of all as a wife and a mother. And she's running this household and her mother-in-law is living in the household and the brother-in-law. And she's got three kids and the husband. And even in her memoirs, she writes about how on Fridays she would shuttle between her desk and the kitchen because she was making her special fish for Friday evening. She probably had a slew of servants in that kitchen as well. She was quite well to do. But she was leading the National Council of Jewish Women as it takes up the banner of fighting against white slavery. And there's a great photo that I have. It's not in the book, but there's, I don't think it's in the book, but there's this photo of the National Council of Jewish Women of hundreds of them in 1926 at the White House demanding that the president do something about the international problem of white slavery. So you've got this kind of, and then Betty Miller's doing the same thing. You've got this this political activism, but you don't want to undermine your traditional role because if you do, then you're going to get called out as being unnatural in some way. Well, and you had this very startling quote. It's not that startling. I'm sure you've heard this a million times, but you were telling the story of a hadasa that was there was a a faction in the Zionist organization in America that was pushing back against hadasas being able to control their own money and their own funds. And the quote was they nag, they interfere in things which are none of their business. So I love that. It's such an amazing question. How many times have you heard that kind of pushback? But back to Hannah Solomon that you mentioned, I was kind of interested in the story that you told of the founding of the National Council of Jewish Women with the Columbia exposition of World's Fair in Chicago. This is one of those places where America's Jewish women are part of America's women, but they have to stand apart. So in 1893 there was this gigantic World's Fair in Chicago. And maybe some of you have read the wonderful book The Devil in the White City about that World's Fair. One of the things that happened out of that World's Fair was that there was a very powerful Chicago Women's Club. And they were tasked with making certain that there would be a fair representation of women in all of what they called Congresses at the World's Fair. We would call them conventions. And there were all sorts of different meetings that were held. The press held a convention. And there was the World's Parliament of Religion. And at the World's Parliament of Religion, this was really the first grand interfaith event in the United States. And all sorts of religions that had never been represented on a national scene before, especially Asian religions, were given platforms in this World's Parliament of Religions. So Hannah Solomon was tasked with organizing Jewish women's participation in the World's Parliament of Religions. And she, right, and there's no national Jewish women's organization. Troy, it's like 100 letters by hand to rabbis around the country asking for the name of prominent women in their congregations. And she then writes those women and says to them, will you come to Chicago and deliver a paper at this Congress? And she has a whole program planned out. And the men, the rabbis who are planning the Jewish Congress, they finally get their act together and they call her and they say, will you participate with us? Because in the other Congresses, the men and women are participating together. And she says, sure, as she tells it, they leave the room. But she says, as long as my women are present, they leave the room, they come back with the program and there's not a single woman's name in the program. And so she puts on her hat, puts on her gloves, stomps out and organizes a separate Jewish woman's Congress. And it is packed. It's so packed that some of the sessions had to be repeated because they couldn't get enough people, because everybody couldn't fit into the room on the first one. And out of that, having realized this great lacuna of no national Jewish women's organization, they create the National Council of Jewish Women. But that's also the place that the National Council of Negro women emerges. There were dozens, scores, if not hundreds of new American women's organizations that emerged in the wake of that. Jewish women happened to organize one of those organizations. Oh, see, that kind of brought tears to my eyes. I mean, that's a really moving, very exciting story. I'm curious, you've been working in this field for, I'm not sure how many years, a long time. Me neither. So what can you tell us about the way women's history, the field, has changed since you've been working in it? It's changed tremendously. This book is really a product of a lifetime of research. I've been thinking about writing it for a long time. And every time I would say, okay, I would take a sabbatical, I would say, I'm going to work on this book. And then I would end up doing a different book. I was never finishing this book. And what happened is I now have about 40 years of women's history under my belt. And I have about 25 years of serious scholarship in Jewish women's history. Jewish history tends always to lag behind the trends in the field. And the questions that people are asking, the sources that they are using, the big change of the online databases, the digitization of newspapers, especially chronicling America, the Library of Congress, these have allowed an enormous wealth of sources. On the one hand, it's incredibly daunting. There's too much to look at. On the other hand, it lets me get a voice. I couldn't have gotten that before. Great. I think we have time for some questions from folks. But before we do, this is what the book looks like. And we'll be available outside. And you can buy a book and have her sign it. And I want to thank you again, because I really, to me, I really read it as informing and deepening my own sense of myself as an American, a student of American history, as well as Jewish history and women's history. So it worked well on so many, so many levels. Thanks. I really appreciate it. And like I said, there was many more threads to pull out. So I look forward to doing that. Thanks. The best, it's so wonderful for any author to be in conversation with somebody who's read their book so carefully. You know how flattering that is? Other than, you know, like my husband. So thank you. Thanks. So I think there are mics on the side. So there's mics on the side. And you can, if anybody has any questions. And we probably should say that by asking your question, this is going to be up available, so you're going to be in perpetuity. So you should know that. Could you talk about the importance of the role of Jewish women in the history of education, either Jewish education or public education? Right. So I actually talk about, thank you for asking for that question. I, one of the things I'm really interested in is how Jewish women are structurally different than other American women. And they remain today, but it starts at least in the 1920s, if not earlier. They go to college in greater numbers, disproportionately in greater numbers, than other American women. And they have more advanced degrees than other American women. And education has become for Jewish women one of the paths into a successful life and career in America. By the way, this is also true for Jewish men, but Jewish women are, Jewish men are disproportionately better educated than other white American men as well. And they are also disproportionately better educated than Jewish women. But I also, I was really interested in Jewish women as educators in the Jewish world. And that's an American development. A woman named Rebecca Gratz in 1839 founded the first Hebrew Sunday School. If you ever went to Sunday School or in a Jewish setting, she's the creator of that model. And she gets the idea from the Protestant women who are part of the Protestant, or part of the American Sunday School union. But she has this huge problem. It's the 1840s. There are no Jewish textbooks. And so they get primers from the Protestant Sunday School union. And she and the other women that she's training to be teachers, they either paste over the mentions of Jesus or they cut them out of the books to hand them out. Yeah. But she creates a system of education of Jewish education that then becomes very powerful, a powerful vehicle for Jewish women. Thanks. See, I have jokingly say that my paternal grandmother, born and raised in Countess Lithuania, emigrated in the first decade of the 20th century and lived her life in Wisconsin in Illinois, belonged to the Bolshevik Atheistic School of American Judaism. Have you written on that phenomenon? Yeah. So I'm really interested. I didn't call them the Bolshevik Atheistic. I love that term. I wish we had had this conversation before because it's really catchy. One of the things that I try to do in this book, besides writing about the women who live their lives on the smaller canvases and larger canvases, is I'm very aware that being Jewish really differs for various groups of Jewish women. So they're Jewish women that I write about for whom Judaism is the center of their lives. Sabbaths, holidays, these Jewish women's organizations, the Jewish community, it's all encompassing for them. They're Jewish women for whom Jewishness affected their lives. But religion wasn't so important. But Jewishness would determine who they married. It would determine the kind of work they could do or could not do. It would often determine the neighborhood they could live in or not live in. And there are many Jewish women for whom it wasn't Jewishness. It was that Jewishness was replaced with leftist politics. And we know that American Jews are disproportionately, Jews actually, not just in America, but also in Europe, that Jews were often attracted to politics of the left. And they were very active both in socialist and communist politics in the United States. There was never a majority of Jews. It was a small proportion of American Jews, but they were very active in that. But much of that leftist politics goes underground with the execution of the Rosenbergs in 1953. And the House on American Activities hearings, it's just too dangerous to engage in those leftist politics. But it was definitely a stream that I followed through in the book. Thank you. Maybe we'll take over here. Hi. Thank you for your stories. And curious to know part of the American story is the story of immigration. My mom's here with me, Romanian Jew, who emigrates to Latin America and then comes to the U.S. in her 20s. So do you explore in the book or have you explored that path of immigration in the American Jew through like another country that becomes like the transport and how generationally those cultural influences then become part of like the stories that we hear. Yeah, that's such a great question. I didn't write about it extensively, but I am aware that there are some Jewish women that I talk about who did stop elsewhere and then eventually made their way to America. One of the best stories that I tell is a woman named Ingeborg Cohen. And she was a refugee from Germany in the 1930s. And she lands in Baltimore like 1937, 1938. And she's on shipboard and some Baltimore women who are active in one of the women's organizations come on board. And she's not allowed to disembark because she doesn't have a visa for the United States. So they come on board and she says, I want to marry my boyfriend. Her boyfriend had come to America earlier. He was living in Virginia. He knew her ship was going to dock. And these women go and find him. He was waiting for her. One of them, her husband's a judge. He waves the 24 or 48-hour rule about for a marriage license. They find a rabbi. They bring her husband. They bring Hans Weinberger on board. They get married. And then the next day, the ship sails with her to South America. And it takes him about a year to get a visa for her to come to America. So I am aware of that other, that difficult path. Yeah. I'm wondering, what percentage of your Jewish women in your book come from rural America or central United States, farmland, as opposed to big cities or at least on the coast? Right. I definitely talk about Jewish women, both in the West. And also Jewish women who did decide to engage in agricultural experiments, both in terms of the upper Midwest. But also places like Vineland, New Jersey, which was an agricultural colony. It's not the story of the majority of America's Jewish women, but it does become, especially the agricultural colonies in the 20th century, become a place of refuge for Jewish women when I write about one day she looks up and she sees the baby is crawled out on the fire escape. And she's terrified he's going to fall. And with that, she and her husband pack up and they move to Vineland. And then also there are the Jewish women like the famous ones like Jenny Grossinger moved out to the Catskills and created a different kind of Jewish women's economic activity. But I mean, that's still on the East Coast. I'm wondering like from Iowa or Nebraska or Kansas or places like that. Right. The one, I think I told something about Rachel Califf's story and Rachel Califf is in, she's in the upper Midwest, but maybe in Michigan. But I also write about Jewish women who went to the West, not necessarily the Midwest, but who were pioneering in Western territories like Arizona and then California in the 19th century. Yeah. Oh, wait, we have one over here. We'll go back and forth. Okay. Hi. I am so excited to read your book. All these stories are fascinating and I nod my head knowing some of them and then others I'm just really excited to learn about not just from the Jewish perspective, but the fact that this is a fabric of our nation's history, which is really fascinating. I'd like to know as a historian, can you put your futurist hat on for a second? And have there been any patterns through the history that you've been looking at that kind of hint towards the shaping of American Jewish women for the future? I mean, obviously, women are waiting longer. They're maybe not getting married, not having kids, having dogs, having, you know, and just different relationships with the Jewish world and Jewish community as a whole. And so I'd like to hear your thoughts on where this all might be heading. So the first thing I'm going to say is historians should never predict the future because we're always wrong. But I will. I'll venture a few things. One of the things that really strikes me is there have been tremendous structural changes in the Jewish community. So there was in the 19th century, there are a number of women quite well-known Jewish women who never marry. There's especially after the Civil War, there's a shortage of men in the United States. But we have seen in the late 20th and the 21st century, we've seen a really striking change in the American Jewish community in terms of the percentage of Jews who never marry or do not marry especially for women by child-bearing age. So we're seeing, but that's a reflection of what's going on in the American community. It's the same thing with a sense of religiosity. The Pew Research reports on religion tell us that we're in a moment where they call it the rise of the nuns, N-O-N-E-S, and those are Americans who say they have no religion. And we're seeing it among Catholics, we're seeing among Protestants, and we're seeing it among Jews. Of course, for Jews, being a Jewish identity is much more complicated. Religion is only a part of it. And so it's not necessarily that they're disputing their Jewish identity, but that they are distanced from Judaism as a religion. One of the themes that I'm sure will continue, but which by the way I trace back to colonial times, is intermarriage. And I have examples in the colonial era of Jewish women who are dealing with the intermarriage of their children. And inter-marriage and interfaith relations will remain a major component of the American Jewish community. And you can even see in the American Jewish community how its stance on that has changed from the 1980s to the 2018s. So I think there are a number of trends that will continue. I am sorry to say that I'm sure anti-Semitism will continue. But on a more positive note, I will say that the diversity of America's Jewish women today is something that I find particularly striking that doesn't show up earlier. Women of, and also men, but of different ethnicities and races who have entered into the Jewish community and what in various different fashions, through adoption, through history, their family lives, through marriage, that's going to be I think an increasing part of the American Jewish community and the American Jewish story. Thank you. I am a product having grown up in Philadelphia of the Rebecca Gratz Hebrew Sunday School Society from kindergarten through teacher training. So I know it very well. I wanted to ask you about the earliest period that you cover about if there were any striking characteristics of one or more women in the colonial period? I'm really glad you asked that. One of the things, because I open with a prologue about a woman from the colonial period who lived through the early republic and then another woman. I open with a woman named Grace Nathan. I imagine none of you have ever heard of her. I don't see any hands. You read the book. Grace Nathan was, first of all, she's the original child of mixed marriage because her father was born in Portugal, a country that prohibited its Jews from being Jewish and had to resume Judaism and her mother was an Ashkenazic Jew. But Grace Nathan was born in the freedom of colonial New York. And when I read her letters, and by the way she was also a poet, when I read her letters and her poetry, I know she lived through the American Revolution, the Declaration of Independence, the War of 1812. But she's writing about her life as a daughter and a sister, a wife, a mother, a grandmother, a widow, but also a religious innovator. And one of the things that she did as a religious innovator was at, she wrote something called an ethical will. This is a document that often people towards the end of their life will write about the life's lessons they want their children and the members of their family to learn. She told her son that at her death he should only keep his beard for seven days. Now under Jewish tradition, a man does not shave at the death of a parent for a minimum of 30 days. And she was an observant Jew. She's making Jewish law. She's changing Jewish law. And then I tell the story of her great-granddaughter who was named Emma Lazarus. And many of you have heard of Emma Lazarus. Emma Lazarus had a very different life. She never married. She never had a child. But she was an acclaimed poet. And her words have welcomed the huddled masses yearning to breathe free to America for more than a century. They're inscribed in the base of the Statue of Liberty. But Emma Lazarus was also a religious innovator. Emma Lazarus in one of her poems praised America for giving her people the freedom to follow Moses' law. And then she said and to think the thoughts Spinoza taught. Spinoza was a major philosopher in the 17th century who was excommunicated by the Jewish community. So here she's praising Jewish law but she's claiming Spinoza. One of the themes that I think courses throughout the book is the way Jewish women tested Judaism starting with Grace Nathan and Emma Lazarus. Thank you. I think this is our last question. I'll do some books. Hi. I guess I'm still formulating my question. But you talk about Jewish women in a sense it makes it sound homogeneous. And yet I'm in my 70s and I can think of so many differences and classes and groups. You know, we've got the reform orthodox conservative when I was growing up. I was in Ashkenazi. We came after the migration of German Jews. We came in the migration of the Russian Jews in the late 1890s and 1910s. I never knew anyone who was Sephardic until coming to DC and a couple of years ago. I've gone to some of the Sephardic Jewish programs to taste their food and to hear their services. So in a sense, except perhaps for the Jewish women who were involved in these organizations, I'm really not seeing much in common among the Jewish women. I know in DC, for example, when I go to services, they know different tunes to the songs that I learned in the Midwest. They went to Jewish camp. I went to Girl Scout camp. So I guess I just wanted you to comment, not on the homogeneity, but maybe the differences too. What I can say is that that's a theme that I pay particular attention to. And especially of class, I actually wrote a chapter called the American Jewesses about the 19th century German Jewish women who are well to do. And I called it parallel lives because they're living at the same time as the East European immigrant Jewish women. And I also pay attention to the different waves of migration, the different kinds of Jews who come to America, even towards the end of the book, the Soviet Jews. And Israelis. So I really tried to weave all of that in in admittedly a relatively short history of a very long period of time. So thank you. Thank you. It was a big undertaking. I can appreciate what you did. Thank you. Thanks. All right. All right. I think we're all right. We had one more, but maybe we, if it's real class. Yeah, we have the last one. The Jewish people in America today are 70 percent assimilated. What I hear from you is that the roots of this assimilation in what I'm hearing from you is clearly because women have assumed another role in their lives. At least these women have. You describe a woman who is now telling people don't listen to the Torah in a full way, but add a little bit of someone else to look at the Torah. What I'm trying to point out is that Jewish women who have given up their role as a mother and a role model for the continuation of the Torah believing Jew have really accomplished very little. Okay. Well, let me let me just say first of all, I don't know where you got the figure 70 percent of well established. That's a very well established figure. I don't really like that word assimilated because I think what happened in America is that Jews acculturated. They kept bits and pieces of Judaism, and then they acculturated more broadly to America. But I do in the book also talk about Orthodox Jewish women who have, as I said earlier, have reached that for them, Judaism and the Torah remain at the center of their lives. So it's the diversity of America's Jewish. And I would suggest and I would say that those women. I think we should continue the conversation afterwards. Okay. All right. Thanks. We're going to continue. You can come out there and we'll continue. Thank you. Thank you so much. Because that leads me to a whole other batch of questions.