A worthwhile history given the difficulties of capturing such a wide-ranging population.
The distinct diaspora story of Jewish women in America.
Nadell (Women’s and Gender History, Jewish Studies/American Univ.; Women Who Would Be Rabbis, 1998, etc.) presents a sweeping history of American Jewish women beginning in the mid-17th century. Focusing on specific individuals and even specific families, the author presents a personalized story that is slanted toward progressive Jewish women and the legacy of Reform Judaism. Nadell follows a natural and predictable progression through the history of American immigration. The first American Jews were few in number and, despite opposition from some quarters, managed to live alongside their non-Jewish neighbors in relative harmony. The Revolutionary and Civil wars punctuate their family stories, and though Jewish women largely lived out domestic roles, they did manage to win certain new freedoms and places of influence in their communities. In the late 1800s, Jewish women took part in many of the era’s social reform movements and laid the groundwork for important work that would be required with the coming wave of immigrants in the early 20th century. These new Jewish immigrants, mainly fleeing Russian pogroms, lived difficult lives in precarious economic times, but many managed to succeed even in the face of increased anti-Semitism. Throughout these years, Jewish women entered the ranks of political and social progressives. A final wave of immigrants, survivors of the Holocaust, added new complexity to the American Jewish community. In the postwar era Nadell explores the lives of such diverse Jewish women as Joyce Brothers, Betty Friedan, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, among many more less-famous individuals, whose roles in popular culture, politics, and social trends have been significant. The author largely succeeds in providing a fascinating portrait of American Jewish women, though her subject matter is definitely slanted toward Reform and even secular Jews. She offers little examination of Orthodox or even Conservative Jewish women’s lives, especially in the modern era.
A worthwhile history given the difficulties of capturing such a wide-ranging population.Pub Date: March 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-393-65123-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Nov. 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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