Gendering Jewish inter/nationalism: introduction to the special issue

ABSTRACT

This essay introduces and sets out the stakes of the special issue, “Gendering Jewish Inter/Nationalism,” especially for Jewish historians. It summarises each of the pieces contained within and defines the terms and subject area. It also highlights common themes that emerge from several articles, discussing activist trajectories, causes, strategies, and kinship relations; the concepts of double shifts and women as vectors for internationalism; and geographies including Zionist internationalism.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender
• Jewish history
• diplomacy
• Zionism
• internationalism
• activism

High politics and international diplomacy have long been an area that resists gendering.¹ Likewise, the Jewish historians engaged in a project of situating Jewish political history in an international context have not used gender as a historical lens. Jewish internationalism is about Jewish activism which sought to solve the “Jewish Question” and worked for Jewish emancipation and rights across geopolitical borders beginning in the nineteenth century. It had both diplomatic and philanthropic dimensions, engaging international and imperial structures such as foreign offices, diplomatic congresses, colonial administration, and intergovernmental institutions. So far, academic studies of Jewish internationalism have covered only male networks and masculinity, without reflecting on this bias. The goal of this special issue is to think through how gender barriers and norms historically engendered creativity among Jewish women themselves and different ways of operating from men in international activism.

This project grew out of a collaboration between Abigail Green and me. While Green published about women in religious internationalisms and I wrote women into my history of Jewish humanitarianism around the First World War,² hardly anyone else has engaged with the androcentrism of the study of Jewish internationalism. There are, however, scholars working on the international lives of Jewish women.³ We convened a workshop at the University of Oxford in 2018, from which most of the articles in this issue derive. By autumn 2021, international historian Carole Fink reviewed a new book on Jewish internationalism, noting that it “centered on male communal leaders operating within a rarefied world of Jewish, national, and global politics.”⁴ Gender analysis is overdue in this discussion on Jewish internationalism, now well over a decade old.

What does it mean to gender Jewish internationalism? In this special issue it has proved difficult to gender Jewish internationalism in an integrated way instead of writing women’s history. Archives reproduce and inscribe the patriarchy; just the effort of locating and reading sources with gender diversity can be enormous. One cannot ask questions about how gender operates generally if we only know half the story. Appropriate approaches are still in the making. We need to be asking different questions, finding different source material, and reframing our answers accordingly. What changes when we add gender to Jewish international history? What methods might we adapt from those, like Glenda Sluga, who have been gendering “mainstream” international history, or from ethnic or Black feminist studies who have sought to build narratives outside that “mainstream”?

Intersectionality suggests that Jewish women cannot be understood as people who exist at the margins of either Jewishness or of womanhood, but as people who are always both Jews and women at the same time – as well as having other identities rooted in nation, place, class, or family relationships. True, Jewish women have had to choose or foreground different aspects of their identities in their communal and political affiliations in different times and places.⁵ Yet, in the modern era, when gender roles have been in flux as much as Jewish life, it is clear that Jewish women will only ever fully be seen if they are understood as a complete category and also contextualized within all of the communities in which they have been an inherent part. The research papers in this special issue focus specifically on transnational and international spaces, between, across, and among national and local places. These spaces were arguably particularly favourable for women’s activism because international structures were less well established than national ones. Most of these articles take Jewish women themselves as the point of departure and examine their transnational trajectories. In so doing, they indicate how to study these rarefied Jewish political spaces and open them to new perspectives, providing glimpses of new spaces and causes that have not been part of the historical narrative.

This introduction and a second think-piece by Glenda Sluga set out the stakes in this special issue, both for Jewish historians and for international historians. Sluga makes a key point about how “a longer history of the repertoires of antisemitism” offers a way to think through the overall relationship between nationalism and internationalism. Five articles follow in chronological order, addressing a range of geographies and themes. Luisa Levi D’Ancona Modena investigates women as “vectors of internationalism” in liberal Italy, and the way in which Italy as a destination for elite or professional Russian Jewish women influenced Italian civic culture. Melissa Klapper analyses American Jewish women’s international travel at the turn of the century and how it functioned simultaneously as leisure and activism. Anne Summers examines the Women’s International Zionist Organisation’s transnational and local dimensions across Britain, Europe, and Mandate Palestine to theorize about the strategies and contradictions in Jewish women’s movement building. Ofer Idels focuses on international sport as an arena for the Yishuv to gain international legitimacy as a Jewish nation, using a gender lens to interrogate the idea of the “new Jew” and the bodily revolution at the core of Zionism. Rebecca Kobrin follows the story of Laura Margolis, Joint Distribution Committee social worker in wartime Shanghai, arguing that she became an especially successful diplomat due to an array of skills, including wielding her gender. The issue closes with a special section, “From the Archive” containing two short pieces, one by Michele Klein and the other by Abigail Green and Peter Bergamin. They show how different types of sources, here family photo albums and a country house museum, point to different types of stories typically excluded from literature on Zionism and Jewish diplomacy. Even sources whose inherent meaning is oblique are a powerful reminder that women had international thoughts and lived international lives.

Not all Jews could or did become international activists. Jewish international institutions excluded women as agents by default, even if they were rhetorically called upon to act as patrons or were the object of international activism. Or, as Idels shows, if they were used as a wedge to legitimise the fledgling Jewish nation in a lower-stakes, feminized arena. Given these high barriers to entry, women had to bring whatever resources they had to their activism and forge their own paths. Nevertheless, “Jewish women had moved along transnational trajectories since the seventeenth century” (Levi D’Ancona Modena). We thus find several types of women in these pages, including intellectuals, baronesses, professionals, athletes, and rabbis’ female kin, though they typically defied strict categorization. Some of their paths to activism routed through kinship relations and the class status or professional role of a spouse, while others were entirely self-made roles, and still others somewhere at the intersection of the two. A secular education and some family wealth were prerequisites, and class, kinship, and place of birth shaped the kinds of activists these internationalists became. Yet, social position was not clearly determinative of the kind of work or degree of radicalism each took.

Jewish women did not have one overarching cause. As Summers points out, women had to function within the framework shaped by men; if they tried to organize apart from men, they were obliged to form ideologically incoherent, broad tents. Their activism was diffuse and counted among its causes all the shades of “secular” androcentric political internationalisms of the time, from liberalism to socialism to nationalism; those same internationalisms but in a Jewish key, from emancipation to Bundism to Zionism; to radical feminist causes such as pacifism and women’s suffrage; to maternalism and social politics that involved shaping robust civil societies through philanthropy and education. There were patterns, which are easiest to discern article by article. It bears remembering that while some historical actors may have understood their Jewishness as contingent rather than constitutive, it was still relevant as they prioritized other interests – they had “multivariable identities” (Klapper). So feminism, pacifism, suffragism, and even children’s education or sexual education were all causes with an international dimension that Jewish women undertook and sometimes combined with more explicitly Jewish work, as evident in Levi D’Ancona Modena, Klapper, and Summers. Klapper, for example, discusses how American Jewish women visited European synagogues, providing them with materials on Jewish feminist political activity and on modern ways of observing Jewish tradition. Jewish women were engaged in Jewish causes, even if they were more active in women’s or secular spaces. They were linked; not bifurcated. Others remained embedded in the Jewish world, such as Maccabi athletes and Laura Margolis. All these Jewish women were nonetheless clearly seeking to make a mark in what were fundamentally male spaces.

The international strategies women activists used to reach their goals also varied considerably but differed substantially from that of male counterparts. Summers especially offers insight into feminist strategies, explaining first that feminists tended to be pragmatic above all in their approach. Women’s organizations determined that to be effective they had to claim representation of a large membership, which they could do by creating new international organizations to link women and by implementing a policy of inclusiveness that embraced a diversity of views and ambitions. Yet these strategies could promote intra-coalition conflicts – like how to prioritize which causes – that could create setbacks, and did, for WIZO. Conversely, Klapper demonstrates Jewish women’s internationalism was not always organized or institutionalized. Rather, for the Joint Distribution Committee, it happened unofficially on the side of men’s work. Levi D’Ancona Modena describes another patterned strategy used by Russian Jewish trailblazers, who through professionalizing in the West, actualized their commitments to science, education, the equality of women, and improving the lot of the masses.

As Levi D’Ancona Modena, Klein, and Green make clear, so too must kinship relations be taken seriously. These three pieces examine the most elite, quasi-aristocratic Jewish women, many of whom curated and cultivated their families from their urban mansions and grand country houses. Not all women activists lived international lives apart from their family relationships, yet by being embedded in transnational Jewish families, they took a clear part. Levi D’Ancona Modena explains how women drew upon the philanthropic ethos of their birth families to change the society around them where they had relocated for dynastic marriages. One prototypic configuration she identifies was a woman who was an international and local activist in several secular causes of her time, but only her male relatives were engaged in Jewish causes. It is a matter of teasing out what their part was and how it was achieved distinct from individual activism or waged labour, rather than crediting it all as a default to the male, more public-facing members of a family. It also is evident across these articles that individual women built ties with like-minded Christians, including through marriage, which moved them closer to centres of influence.

There are other striking ideas contained in this special issue which resonate across articles, such as the theory that Jewish women acted as “vectors for internationalisms.” This insight from Levi D’Ancona Modena stems from the very marginality of foreign Jewish women in Italy. While Jewish internationalism usually concerns itself with the activism of Jewish elites from Western and Central Europe elsewhere, the Jewish women internationals in her study were foreign born but directed their activist energies inwards, into Italian civil society. Likewise, Klapper’s travelling American Jewish women connected both with their European Jewish heritage and with feminists across the Continent – Jewish and non-sectarian; “women’s travel thereby facilitated social and political activism.” The athletes described by Idels were valuable for what they could symbolize outside of their land, in the international arena of women’s sport in interwar London. For women, international activism could never be about sitting around a diplomatic table, but only about the actual movement of women’s bodies and ideas across borders and through the spaces women inhabited. More generally, Summers explains how women’s movements made themselves larger by linking up beyond state borders, something Jewish women could do with relative ease by building on existing diaspora networks. Yet women who acted as a vector between Jewish and secular spaces operated quite differently from men because women had a different set of spaces and networks available to them. Thus Green has argued elsewhere that prominent male Jewish liberals tended to downplay their Jewishness in national politics, but found it easier to express their Jewish affiliations and commitments in the international arena. By contrast, the women in the same liberal networks found themselves as excluded from the male world of international Jewish organizations as they were from the male world of parliamentary politics. Instead, they embraced more secular, and sometimes explicitly feminist, causes.⁶ In this way, the gendered patterns of behaviour that shaped both Jewish and non-Jewish internationalisms also structured the connections between them in important, but not always obvious, ways.

Another idea that emerges startlingly from this special issue is the “second shift.” Here, however, I do not primarily reference Hochschild’s concept of waged work outside the home/unwaged domestic caring work dichotomy,⁷ but other kinds of second shifts, dual lives embodied in just one person, or doubling of labour borne by women. Levi D’Ancona Modena notes that Jewish women in elite circles acted as tokens of exchange in marriage plus their own advocates for educational reform. Klapper demonstrates that her travellers were both tourists and international feminists. Summers explores the duality of a movement which required large membership but was thereby torn between balancing political feminist and social Zionist causes because few members were fully committed to both ideologies. It was one organization doubling as two (or more!). The young amateurs of the Maccabi delegation to the 1934 Women’s World Games whom Idels discusses served as athletes, beauty icons, and as foreign ambassadors of the nascent Jewish state. Kobrin describes Laura Margolis as functioning essentially as a diplomatic wife and as a professional humanitarian aid worker.

The “inter/nationalism” formulation in the title of this issue encapsulates the dual geography of Jewish women’s activism overall. Sluga has argued that nationalism and internationalism are interlocked, keeping European nation-states at the heart of her analysis,⁸ but Jews in this period had a particular relationship to these ideologies and movements. Notably, although Zionism is rarely understood as internationalist, this was a transnational, explicitly Jewish political movement that was emancipatory in much the same way other nationalist movements were. Idels and Summers trace how Palestine and the potential of Jewish statehood interacted with the international system of nation-states and changed Jewish international activism, through the lens of gender. Although national projects in the first half of the twentieth century typically included both male and female activists, albeit in different ways, it was more unusual for international projects to do so. While WIZO and Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization of America, have been understood as auxiliary organizations to mainstream, androcentric Zionism, Summers argues that WIZO ought to be considered a feminist organization and a crucial part of a distinct women’s movement. They also were the two main women’s organizations within Jewish international activism between the wars. But, Summers emphasizes, Jewish women were confronted with a unique set of dilemmas, including how having to navigate the unique relationship between internationalism and nationalism inherent in pre-state Zionism differently from men – that dilemma gives us the “inter/nationalism” formulation. Idels shows how low-prestige women’s sports was cynically used by Yishuv leadership internationally, not to improve the status of Jewish women but to promote the Zionist cause, highlighting the same structural weaknesses of women’s movements in a world structured by men. However, it demonstrates too how those weaknesses created opportunities for women, an insight that applies to Zionism itself. Levi D’Ancona Modena argues that while Jewish organizations in liberal Italy resisted any public role for women, Italian Jewish women discovered that women could participate equally to men in Zionist activism. Zionism’s attractiveness to women had at least as much to do with its early integration of women as its ideological appeal. Recent heated discussions over the compatibility of feminism and Zionism should heed the history of this complex relationship, some of which is newly laid out in these pages.

A gendered perspective can also rearrange understandings of inter/national Jewish political geographies in ways besides Zionism. Levi D’Ancona Modena unseats established geographies by exploring the late nineteenth century gendered dynamics of Jewish connections between Europe, Russia, and the Mediterranean in Italy, which was, after all, a fulcrum for other internationals. The international connections of foreign-born Jewish women in Italy influenced how they shaped emerging liberal civil society, especially in education, social activism, and professional milieux. Alternatively, Klapper and Kobrin speak to the rising international importance of American Jewry, through the transnational efforts of its women. Klapper also notes the complex ways in which Jews from across the world encountered one another, as cultural imperialism and in genuine engagement. Summers, meanwhile, argues that British women became Zionist leaders because of their connection to the British Mandate, which requires looking to British Jewish communities and their gendered expectations to understand WIZO’s development, even though it was an international organization.

This special issue is tantalizingly fresh, especially compared with a new, gender free synthesis of the history of Jewish international aid.⁹ We do not pretend to give a comprehensive picture of the field, but rather open up a range of issues and geographies and collectively suggest an agenda for future research. Some obvious fields of activism, notably that focused on the trafficking of Jewish girls and women, are simply absent, and we only gesture towards others. These articles are not primarily global history nor do they deeply engage empire – or their Jewish corollaries in the Sephardi, Mizrahi, or MENA Jewish worlds. They hardly touch the heart of Ashkenaz in the Pale of Settlement or traditional religious worlds. Cutting edge gender research on sexuality, queerness, gender identity, the body, emotions, or affect have not made it far into these pages, which have assumed a gender binary. Yet the photo albums studied by Klein are broad in terms of whom they include, Levi D’Ancona Modena introduces us to Russian Jewish women scientists in Italy, Idels studies the athletic body and its performance, and Kobrin follows Margolis to Cuba and Shanghai. These articles examined class to a degree, but besides Idels, remained unremarkably focused on Western Jewish upper and middle classes. This narrative ends in the Second World War, only brushing against the Holocaust and postwar circumstances, but as Joyce Antler’s Jewish Radical Feminism makes clear, there is plenty to write about in the 75 ensuing years.¹⁰

Have patterns of exclusion in international activism, or in academia, changed? Rachel Blumenthal has remarked on the institutional Jewish world in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, which remained the domain of men.¹¹ The International Council of Jewish Women only managed to fully launch in this period, and yet its presence is routinely ignored and its legacy is barely discussed.¹² The Jewish Women’s Archive has not stopped most people from assuming the only person who could be researched for such a project as ours would be Golda Meir. Just 5 of 24 submissions to our call for papers for our 2018 workshop were by men, and few had research agendas already within the field of Jewish internationalism. Mainstream projects in international history have been looking at women lately, and sometimes race and coloniality, but have entirely overlooked Jewishness unless that Jewishness came with a male body. If things have changed, there is a long shadow, and we are digging into its depths.

Acknowledgements

Thank you to each anonymous reviewer for this special issue; your insights helped all the authors improve their pieces in countless ways. A particular thanks to Abigail Green for co-editing this issue with me. Many thanks to all the participants in the 2018 “Gendering Internationalism – Gendering Jewish Internationalism” workshop for contributing to discussion of this topic.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

Thank you to the Arts and Humanities Research Council Humanities Research Council [AH/N006631/1 and AH/S006656/1] and the British Academy [NF150206] which supported the “Gendering Internationalism – Gendering Jewish Internationalism” workshop at the University of Oxford in March 2018 and my research. This research was also made possible by the support of the Rothschild Foundation Hanadiv Europe.

Notes on contributors

Jaclyn Granick

Jaclyn Granick is Senior Lecturer in Modern Jewish History at Cardiff University in Wales, UK. She is the author of International Jewish Humanitarianism in the Age of the Great War (Cambridge University Press, 2021), a National Jewish Book Award Winner. She is beginning a book on Jewish women and international activism across the twentieth century, and is co-investigator of the AHRC-funded project “Jewish Country Houses – objects, networks, people.”

Notes

1 Sluga and James, Women, Diplomacy and International Politics.

2 Green, “Spirituality, Tradition and Gender: Judith Montefiore”; Green, “Religious Internationalisms”; and Granick, International Jewish Humanitarianism in the Age of the Great War.

3 For example, ChaeRan Y. Freeze, Dvora Hacohen, Deborah Hertz, Sarah Imhoff, and Susan Gilson Miller.

4 Fink, “Review of Nathan A. Kurz.”

5 Brettschneider, Jewish Feminism and Intersectionality.

6 Green, “Liberals, Socialists, Internationalists, Jews”; and Green, “1848 and Beyond,” 355.

7 As in Hochschild, The Second Shift.

8 Sluga, Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism.

9 Leff and Kurz, “A History of International Jewish Aid.”

10 Antler, Jewish Radical Feminism.

11 Blumenthal, Right to Reparations, 108–9.

12 Las, Jewish Women in a Changing World.