{"title":"Talking to the Girls: Intimate and Political Essays on the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire ed. by Edvige Giunta and Mary Anne Transciatti (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.2979/nashim.42.1.11","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/nashim.42.1.11","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Talking to the Girls: Intimate and Political Essays on the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire ed. by Edvige Giunta and Mary Anne Transciatti Melissa R. Klapper (bio) Edvige Giunta and Mary Anne Transciatti (eds.) Talking to the Girls: Intimate and Political Essays on the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire New York: New Village Press, 2022. In just fifteen minutes on March 25, 1911, a fire at the Triangle Waist Company in New York City's Greenwich Village killed nearly 150 people, most of them women, most of them young, most of them Jewish or Italian. This entirely preventable tragedy resulted in a public outcry and an uptick in union membership, but not in civil or criminal convictions and not even in better enforcement of the paltry safety regulations on the books, which might have saved at least some lives. In the century since the fire, there has been some attention to it in both the scholarly and the popular press, as well as several novelistic treatments. The fiery speech given by labor leader Rose Schneiderman at a memorial meeting shortly after the fire appears in numerous document collections focused on American, labor and women's history, as do the terrible photographs of broken bodies strewn on the pavement beneath the building or lying forlornly in the morgue. The centennial of the fire was marked in 2011 by two competing documentaries on PBS and HBO. Yet, as Talking to the Girls editors Edvige Giunta and Mary Anne Transciatti point out, the tragedy has been compounded as much by forgetting as by remembering. Garment workers across the world, predominantly women and girls, still work in unsafe conditions that have changed less than anyone would have hoped in 1911. Talking to the Girls is explicitly shaped by this presentist perspective; the book even ends with an interview with Kalpona Akter, executive director of the Bangladesh Centre for Worker Solidarity. The editors have drawn together a collection of essays that include scholarship, family reminisces, commentary by teachers and professors who integrate the Triangle fire into their curricula, and accounts of both artistic and activist tributes to the victims and survivors. This book is not a history of the Triangle fire but rather a dissection of its multiple meanings among various groups. And while Jewish women's experiences are certainly present, Giunta and Transciatti seem more intent on highlighting Italian women's experiences, which they claim have been understudied by comparison. This feature makes Talking [End Page 191] to the Girls a slightly odd choice for review in Nashim, but there are many other reasons to value the book. The division of the \"intimate and political essays\" of the title into sections entitled \"Witnesses,\" \"Families,\" \"Teachers,\" \"Movements\" and \"Memorials\" yields a rich array of short pieces on widely diverse topics, from Suzanne Pred Bass's analysis of the lasting impact on her family of her great-aunt Rosie Weiner's death in the fire to Kimber","PeriodicalId":42498,"journal":{"name":"Nashim-A Journal of Jewish Womens Studies & Gender Issues","volume":"20 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135532731","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"When Rabbis Abuse: Power, Gender, and Status in the Dynamics of Sexual Abuse in Jewish Culture by Elana Sztokman (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.2979/nashim.42.1.10","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/nashim.42.1.10","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: When Rabbis Abuse: Power, Gender, and Status in the Dynamics of Sexual Abuse in Jewish Culture by Elana Sztokman Michal Kravel-Tovi (bio) Elana Sztokman When Rabbis Abuse: Power, Gender, and Status in the Dynamics of Sexual Abuse in Jewish Culture Lioness Books and Media, 2022 When do rabbis abuse? Potentially, at any given time. What kinds of social structures and cultural tenets unfold on the occasions when rabbis abuse? Ones that facilitate the exploitation of power and the manipulation of otherwise valuable Jewish and human values. In When Rabbis Abuse: Power, Gender, and Status in the Dynamics of Sexual Abuse in Jewish Culture, Elena Sztokman asks these and other important questions, illuminating in a sincere, sensitive and lucid narrative the dynamics of abuse by rabbis, a phenomenon that is both pervasive and overlooked. This is the raison d'etre of Sztokman's book, and also its merit: It is an empirically solid, comprehensive and well-informed account of sexual abuse in Jewish communal and institutional settings. The ethnographic grounding of this account is all the more significant, given the relatively thin availability of reliable quantitative data on abuse in Jewish contexts, and the apposite research tools offered by ethnographic methodology, relying upon rapport, nuanced analysis and inductive ways of thinking. The book is based on an impressive collection of testimonies, gathered from a variety of platforms and encounters. Brought together, they present an unflattering portrait of the malaise of sexual violence and trauma in Jewish spaces and of the too slow, too late responses to it by stakeholders in Jewish organizations and communities. Given the thick silence that clearly saturates the issue of sexual abuse in Jewish and other settings, Sztokman's book performs an important service to the Jewish public at large, which, like many other publics, would rather not know about the horrifying things happening in its midst or, even worse, knows about it but chooses nevertheless to remain silent. Writing against the grain of silence, denial and a culture of cover-up, Sztokman insists on bringing the voices of victim-survivors into the public sphere and on listening to them without searching suspiciously for gaps in coherence and validity. In so doing, she is attuned not only to these critical and suppressed voices, but also to what sociologist Eviatar Zerubavel calls \"the social sound of silence.\"1 [End Page 188] The book is framed as a prod for a collective demand for justice and accountability. It is an expression of engaged scholarship, urgently fusing activist and academic perspectives, claiming and demonstrating their synergetic force. In fact, Sztokman's interest in abuse developed from her lifelong activist, feminist engagement with mesuravot get—Jewish women denied divorce by their husbands—her anthropological sensibilities and skills deepening her understanding of this particular phenomenon. Both these elements, th","PeriodicalId":42498,"journal":{"name":"Nashim-A Journal of Jewish Womens Studies & Gender Issues","volume":"202 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135532735","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A Jewish Reclaiming of German-Jewish Women Thinkers","authors":"Elisa Klapheck","doi":"10.2979/nashim.42.1.05","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/nashim.42.1.05","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: The following essay describes a typical uneasiness with regard to the reception of the intellectual legacy of German-Jewish women thinkers like Hannah Arendt, Bertha Pappenheim, Regina Jonas and Margarete Susman. The material reality of the large role played by such Jewish women thinkers may have vanished in the Shoah. Their Jewish intellectual descendants in Germany today have built upon their work, but that work takes place in contested territory, where other, non-Jewish scholars also lay claim to this legacy. In this personal reflection, I analyze the different motivations of non-Jewish and Jewish feminists in post-Shoah Germany to engage with Jewish thinkers. Certainly, the conflicts are also about academic power and the control of interpretation. Yet, they have a political quality that is interesting in and of itself, one that underlines the far-reaching impact of the intellectual legacy of Jewish women thinkers in societal discourse in Germany today.","PeriodicalId":42498,"journal":{"name":"Nashim-A Journal of Jewish Womens Studies & Gender Issues","volume":"20 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135533341","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Talking to the Girls: Intimate and Political Essays on the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire ed. by Edvige Giunta and Mary Anne Transciatti (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.2979/nsh.2023.a907312","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/nsh.2023.a907312","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Talking to the Girls: Intimate and Political Essays on the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire ed. by Edvige Giunta and Mary Anne Transciatti Melissa R. Klapper (bio) Edvige Giunta and Mary Anne Transciatti (eds.) Talking to the Girls: Intimate and Political Essays on the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire New York: New Village Press, 2022. In just fifteen minutes on March 25, 1911, a fire at the Triangle Waist Company in New York City's Greenwich Village killed nearly 150 people, most of them women, most of them young, most of them Jewish or Italian. This entirely preventable tragedy resulted in a public outcry and an uptick in union membership, but not in civil or criminal convictions and not even in better enforcement of the paltry safety regulations on the books, which might have saved at least some lives. In the century since the fire, there has been some attention to it in both the scholarly and the popular press, as well as several novelistic treatments. The fiery speech given by labor leader Rose Schneiderman at a memorial meeting shortly after the fire appears in numerous document collections focused on American, labor and women's history, as do the terrible photographs of broken bodies strewn on the pavement beneath the building or lying forlornly in the morgue. The centennial of the fire was marked in 2011 by two competing documentaries on PBS and HBO. Yet, as Talking to the Girls editors Edvige Giunta and Mary Anne Transciatti point out, the tragedy has been compounded as much by forgetting as by remembering. Garment workers across the world, predominantly women and girls, still work in unsafe conditions that have changed less than anyone would have hoped in 1911. Talking to the Girls is explicitly shaped by this presentist perspective; the book even ends with an interview with Kalpona Akter, executive director of the Bangladesh Centre for Worker Solidarity. The editors have drawn together a collection of essays that include scholarship, family reminisces, commentary by teachers and professors who integrate the Triangle fire into their curricula, and accounts of both artistic and activist tributes to the victims and survivors. This book is not a history of the Triangle fire but rather a dissection of its multiple meanings among various groups. And while Jewish women's experiences are certainly present, Giunta and Transciatti seem more intent on highlighting Italian women's experiences, which they claim have been understudied by comparison. This feature makes Talking [End Page 191] to the Girls a slightly odd choice for review in Nashim, but there are many other reasons to value the book. The division of the \"intimate and political essays\" of the title into sections entitled \"Witnesses,\" \"Families,\" \"Teachers,\" \"Movements\" and \"Memorials\" yields a rich array of short pieces on widely diverse topics, from Suzanne Pred Bass's analysis of the lasting impact on her family of her great-aunt Rosie Weiner's death in the fire to Kimber","PeriodicalId":42498,"journal":{"name":"Nashim-A Journal of Jewish Womens Studies & Gender Issues","volume":"39 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135533677","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"\"I Am a Conscious Jew and an Austrian\": Austrian Jewish Women Survivors in Post-Shoah Austria","authors":"Eleonore Lappin-Eppel","doi":"10.2979/nsh.2023.a907305","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/nsh.2023.a907305","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: This paper presents the life stories of six Jewish women who were born in Vienna, survived the Nazi persecution there or in camps, and stayed in Austria after the war. The subjects were chosen in an effort to reflect a diversity of fates, reactions and coping strategies and to offer a representative overview. I will discuss why these women did not leave Austria after the Nazi takeover, how they managed to survive the years of persecution, why they subsequently decided to remain in Austria, and how their sufferings influenced the course of their lives after liberation. As Marion Kaplan has shown for Germany, I argue that gender, class, age and family ties were important reasons for their choices to stay, both before and after the war.","PeriodicalId":42498,"journal":{"name":"Nashim-A Journal of Jewish Womens Studies & Gender Issues","volume":"50 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135533681","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Shaping of Military Nursing in Israel: 1947–1958","authors":"Ronen Segev","doi":"10.2979/nsh.2023.a907308","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/nsh.2023.a907308","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Unique realities influenced the development of the military nursing profession in Israel. While other countries, such as the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada, established military hospitals staffed by separately trained military nurses, conditions in Israel led to the development of interlocking military and civilian healthcare sectors, as the young country responded simultaneously to healthcare needs brought on by war, ongoing attacks on civilians, and massive waves of immigrants, including European Holocaust survivors and Jews from Arab countries. Relying on an analysis of documents in multiple archives, contemporaneous newspaper articles and interviews conducted with nurses who served in the 1948 Arab–Israeli War and the 1956 Sinai Campaign, this paper describes the development of the nursing profession in Israel through 1958, when military nursing was fully established as part of the civilian health sector, a reality that continues to the present.","PeriodicalId":42498,"journal":{"name":"Nashim-A Journal of Jewish Womens Studies & Gender Issues","volume":"9 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135533675","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"From the Jewish Provinces: Selected Stories by Fradl Shtok, Jordan D. Finkin and Allison Schachter (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.2979/nsh.2023.a907310","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/nsh.2023.a907310","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: From the Jewish Provinces: Selected Stories by Fradl Shtok, Jordan D. Finkin and Allison Schachter Anastasiya Lyubas (bio) Fradl Shtok From the Jewish Provinces: Selected Stories translated from the Yiddish by Jordan D. Finkin and Allison Schachter Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2022. 105 pp. This volume initiates two critical conversations. The first is with Fradl Shtok, the author, and her brilliant Yiddish texts, published in New York almost a century ago, launching Shtok's literary career and sealing her literary legacy. The second engagement is with the few texts translated into English two and more decades ago by various translators. Finkin and Schachter translate Shtok in a new way and for a new generation of readers. The present collection presents a significant number of Shtok's stories from Gezamelte ertsehlungen (1919) in a single book, facilitating appraisal of the author's modernist style by twenty-first-century readers. Fradl Shtok (1890–1990?), born in Skala, Galicia, on the border between Austria-Hungary and Russia, immigrated to New York at 17 and published her collected stories at 29. The book was harshly criticized by poet and critic Aaron Glantz-Leyeles, who saw in Shtok not a deft stylist but a woman writer whose contributions to Yiddish he disparaged. She published nothing more in Yiddish after her debut and instead switched to English; her novel Musicians Only appeared in 1927. Shtok lived with mental illness and was institutionalized. The biographical note on her in the Leksikon fun der nayer yidisher literatur, edited by Shmuel Niger and Jacob Shatsky et al., indicates that she died at a resort sometime in the 1930s, but she seems in fact to have lived to a ripe old age. The introduction to From the Jewish Provinces provides insight into details of Shtok's complex life and literary destiny, and it illuminates the inadequate reception of her literary work: Critical engagement with her poetic output pigeonholed her as a writer of sonnets; her narrative-prose talents went unrepresented in various anthologies of Yiddish writing; and, ultimately, she was excluded from the canon of Yiddish letters. The English-language selection of Shtok's prose provided by Finkin and Schachter has two principal parts: European Stories and American Stories. The title, From the Jewish Provinces, captures aspects of Shtok's lived experience [End Page 184] in the Old World and the New and highlights, more broadly, the Jewish experience of the many immigrants from the Austro-Hungarian provinces who settled in New York's Lower East Side. The short third section, which contains just one story, \"A Fur Salesman,\" stands apart. Published in 1942 in the Forward and discovered by Joachim Neugroschel in 2002, it epitomizes the maturation of Shtok's style of free indirect discourse, even as it departs from her focus on women as the main characters of her previous stories and instead centers on the masculinist ethos of the fur sale","PeriodicalId":42498,"journal":{"name":"Nashim-A Journal of Jewish Womens Studies & Gender Issues","volume":"482 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135533679","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Invisible Anikó Szenes","authors":"Andrea Pető","doi":"10.2979/nsh.2023.a907303","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/nsh.2023.a907303","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: This article discusses the circles of forgetting of the memory of Anikó (Hannah) Szenes (1921–1944) in Hungary, from the end of World War II through the illiberal turn in memory politics that began in the 2010s. This process of forgetting resulted in a canonized history of her life, highlighting different elements of her story in different periods while omitting other parts and condemning her to oblivion in postwar Hungary, her native land, where she spent 19 of her 23 years. These different memory circles are bound up with much-debated elements of twentieth-century Hungarian, European and Israeli history that intersect precisely in the narration of Szenes's tragically short life story. As a leftist, a Jew, a woman, a left-wing Zionist and a writer, Szenes was too much and too complex to digest for the traumatized postwar history of Hungarian Jewry, which rests on silencing and forgetting. I first present the methodological problems of gendered memory and then map the intersecting circles of forgetting of Szenes's life. I conclude by analyzing the memorial events in Hungary around the 100th anniversary of Szenes's birth in 2021 as an example of illiberal memory politics.","PeriodicalId":42498,"journal":{"name":"Nashim-A Journal of Jewish Womens Studies & Gender Issues","volume":"20 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135533684","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Women's Impact on the Development of Israel's Healthcare System: The Contributions of Nurse Ida Wissotzky","authors":"Dorit Weiss","doi":"10.2979/nashim.42.1.06","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/nashim.42.1.06","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: Ida Wissotzky is among the nurses who made important but often overlooked contributions to the development of Israel's healthcare sector in the pre-state and early state years. Apart from her leadership roles in the young country's emergent hospital system, her career including working with Jewish refugees in British internment camps in Cyprus after the Holocaust, caring for wounded soldiers during and after the 1948 war, and supervising the care of new immigrants in Israel's absorption camps. This article describes some of the most important junctures in Israel's nursing history, from the last decade of the British Mandate in Palestine through the early decades of the State of Israel, as they were experienced by one determined and compassionate woman who aspired to combine pioneering nursing work with involvement in the political and ideological struggles of the nation-building years. It thereby contributes to a better understanding of women's impact on the development of nursing in Israel.","PeriodicalId":42498,"journal":{"name":"Nashim-A Journal of Jewish Womens Studies & Gender Issues","volume":"97 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135533531","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}