Kaplan, Marion A

A social history of Jewish women in Imperial Germany, this study synthesizes German, women's, and Jewish history. The book explores the private--familial and religious--lives of the German-Jewish bourgeoisie and the public roles of Jewish women in the university, paid employment and socialservice. It analyzes the changing roles of Jewish women as members of an economically mobile, but socially spurned minority. The author emphasizes the crucial role women played in creating the Jewish middle class, as well as their dual role within the Jewish family and community as powerful agentsof class formation and acculturation and determined upholders of tradition.

Kaplan tells the story of Jews in Germany not from the hindsight of the Holocaust, but from the bewildered and ambiguous perspective of Jews trying to navigate their daily lives in a world that was becoming more and more terrifying. Kaplan addresses two questions as well: Why didn't the Jews leave sooner? and What did the Germans know and what did they do?.

Draws from memoirs, diaries, interviews, and letters of Jewish women and men in an attempt to understand how encroaching fascism and antisemitism affected Jews in their daily lives in pre-World War II Germany; and discusses how the Jewish people coped with the loss of friends, careers, businesses, and hope.