Bonnie J. Morris. Lubavitcher Women in America: Identity and Activism in the Postwar Era. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998. x, 186 pp.

Abstract

Four years ago, when I first read Bonnie Morris' Lubavitcher Women in America, the book was in manuscript form and I was directing a women's studies program at a regional university in Kentucky. As a Jewish feminist educator, I was asked by SUNY Press to review the book and make a recommendation about publication. The ultra-Orthodox represent a closed community: difficult to observe from the outside and rarely reported on from the inside, and I was fascinated by Morris' study of Lubavitcher women's postwar contributions to the spiritual life and growth of their Hasidic community. Along with another reviewer, I recommended publication, and the book came out in late 1998. Just under two years later, I again read Lubavitcher Women in America for the purpose of writing this review. What has changed is not my high regard for this skilled examination of the impact of American feminism on the lives and roles of women within this particular Hasidic community. Rather, it is my proximity to ultra-Orthodoxy.