Reflections on the “Jewish Women and Philanthropy” Roundtable

Abstract

As an historian contemplating the roundtable at the “Jewish Women and Philanthropy” conference, I cannot help wondering what the foremothers of American Jewish social welfare would have contributed to this symposium. Hence, I would like to invite three of them into the conversation. Let me introduce our guests from the past: In her native Philadelphia, Rebecca Gratz (1781–1869) founded a series of firsts in American Jewish communal life— the first female Hebrew benevolent society outside the confines of the synagogue (1819), the first Hebrew Sunday School (1838), and the first Jewish orphanage (1855). Chicagoan Hannah Greenebaum Solomon (1858–1942) was the founding president of the Council of Jewish Women (1893), more widely known as the National Council of Jewish Women. Henrietta Szold (1860–1945) had a multifaceted career as a journalist, teacher, editor and student before founding Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization of America (1912). What would they have understood of this conversation? Some of its language would have been foreign to them. Concepts like social change, social entrepreneurship, feminism, radical egalitarianism, gendered analysis and feminist empowerment did not exist in their eras. We would have had to explain that by invoking social change, our panelists were asking how best to use philanthropy and womanpower to ameliorate social ills, and that social entrepreneurship advocates emulating business entrepreneurs in imagining new ways to solve problems. Two of our pioneering leaders of Jewish women, Hannah Solomon and Henrietta Szold, would likely have heard the word feminism before, for it first emerged in the 1910s and was then spelled with a capital F.1 However, they would have been utterly befuddled by the idea of radical egalitarianism and equally confused by the concept of gendered analysis. The panelists would have had to explain to our guests the concept of gender and that, as opposed to sex, it is seen as being socially and historically constructed.2 However, all three would have embraced the notion of feminist empowerment, once they understood that it referred to women taking charge of their own lives and projects, for that is exactly what Gratz, Solomon and Szold did in their lifetimes. Once our guests had gotten past the late twentieth-century terminology, they would surely have been delighted, but also somewhat astonished, to meet the panelists. Henrietta Szold wanted to attend college but could not leave home to do so, and no colleges