Jewish Women & the Shaping of America, Jan. 2025

Jewish Women & the Shaping of America
with Cliff Wilcox, Ph.D.

TBT Library Tuesday Mornings, 10:15-11:30 am

6 weeks: 1/14, 1/21, 1/28, 2/4, 2/11, 2/18

Session One: The First Two Centuries: Jewish American Experience, 1654-1880

In 1976, Jewish literary critic and intellectual Irving Howe published World of Our Fathers: The Journey of the East European Jews to America and the Life They Found and Made. Beautifully written, lavishly illustrated, and a satisfying 694 pages in length, the book became a #1 national bestseller. No Jewish home in America seemed complete without a World of Our Fathers copy on its coffee table. Yet, as we look back at that book today, we see it left out so much – specifically, women. If there was a world of our fathers, was there not a world of our mothers? This series of discussions will leverage the critical work done in recent decades on Jewish women’s history to explore Jewish American history with an emphasis on the contributions of Jewish women from colonial times to the present.