Reading Jewish women : marginality and modernization in nineteenth-century Eastern European Jewish society
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Reading Jewish women : marginality and modernization in nineteenth-century Eastern European Jewish society
（Brandeis series on Jewish women）（The Tauber Institute for the study of European Jewry series）
Brandeis University Press , University Press of New England, c2004
- pbk. : alk. paper
- Other Title
-
Nashim korot : Ytronah Shel Shuliyut
- Uniform Title
-
Nashim ḳorʾot
Available at 1 libraries
Note
Includes bibliographical references and index
Originally published in Hebrew as "Nashim korot : Ytronah Shel Shuliyut" by Am Oved Publishers Ltd., Tel Aviv, 2001
Contents of Works
- Reading women and the spirit of Jewish enlightenment
- Language, literacy, and literature as the battleground of haredim and maskilim
- Gender roles and women's "window of opportunity"
- The benefit of marginality: gender differences in the traditional educational system
- "A woman prides herself on cooing and prattling in French and German": the secular education of women
- The reading-biography of men
- "This whole trouble is the fault of the little story books": women who read Yiddish
- "A Hebrew maiden, yet acting alien": Women who read European languages
- "One in a thousand": women and the Hebrew language
- Hebrew :man's apparatus or woman's apparel?
Description and Table of Contents
Description
In this volume, Iris Parush opens up the hitherto unexamined world of literate Jewish women, their reading habits, and their role in the cultural modernization of Eastern European Jewish society in the nineteenth century. Parush makes a paradoxical claim: she argues that because Jewish women were marginalized and neglected by rabbinical authorities who regarded men as the bearers of religious learning, they were free to read secular literature in German, Yiddish, Polish, and Russian. As a result of their exposure to a wealth of literature, these reading women became conduits for Haskalah (Enlightenment) ideas and ideals within the Jewish community. This deceptively simple thesis dramatically challenges and revamps both scholarly and popular notions of Jewish life and learning in nineteenth-century Eastern Europe. While scholars of European women's history have been transforming and complicating ideas about the historical roles of middle-class women for some time, Parush is among the first scholars to work exclusively in Jewish territory.
The book will be a very welcome introduction to many facets of modern Jewish cultural history - particularly the role of women - which have too long been ignored.
by "Nielsen BookData"