Lee Shai Weissbach

The Jewish Elite and the Children of the Poor: Jewish Apprenticeship Programs in Nineteenth-Century France

The desire of the Franco-Jewish elite to foster the acculturation of French Jewry during the nineteenth century is a theme that has been explored in considerable detail in recent years. Historians of French Jewry have described the development of an ideology that identified Judaism primarily as a religion, have analyzed the attempts of various communal institutions to mitigate Jewish distinctiveness, and have demonstrated that the leaders of French Jewry adopted a policy of social integration both because they were attracted to the mainstream culture of France and because they felt that acculturation was the implied price of empancipation.

Community and subcommunity in small-town America, 1880–1950

Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the American Jewish population was heavily concentrated in the large and mid-size cities of the United States. At the same time, however, tens of thousands of Jews lived in Americas smaller cities and towns as well. This essay examines how some of the basic features of Jewish life in the immigrant era were manifested in Americas less visible Jewish centers. It discusses the nature of East European Jewish culture in small towns, and demonstrates that factors such as kinship, residential and occupational patterns, the use of Yiddish, and local institutional frameworks all promoted more highly integrated and intensively Jewish ethnic communities than might have been expected in small-town America. The essay also examines the relationship between German Jews and East Europeans in small towns and considers various other aspects of communal dynamics. In doing so, it describes how in some places a kind of cooperation and creative compromise developed that did not emerge in larger communities, and it reveals how in other places communal divisions persisted despite environmental factors that should have promoted their moderation. Ultimately, this essay demonstrates that the communities of Americas smaller cities and towns in the decades before World War II were not simply miniature versions of the communities of larger metropolitan areas, and it suggests that for those interested in the dynamics of Jewish communal life, smaller Jewish settlements can provide valuable laboratories in which to study the role of place in conditioning the American Jewish experience.

Growing Up in France: From the Ancien Régime to the Third Republic (review)

Several themes give the book conceptual unity. One involves an increase in life expectancy and affluence, which raised individuals’ expectations for fulfillment and allowed more individuals to experience multiple transitions in their family lives, such as divorcing or marrying more than once. A second key theme involves the proliferation and legitimization of alternatives to a dominant cultural definition of family. A third major theme involves the lack of welldeveloped norms and laws surrounding the rapidly expanding alternatives to “traditional” marriage, so that the rights and obligations of stepparents or cohabiting partners remain ambiguous. Challenging the notion that the contemporary family is an institution in decline or crisis, the authors argue that it is more accurate to emphasize an increase in diversity and a breakdown in the normative, expected sequence and timing of life events. Encyclopedic in coverage, the volume contains capsule histories of domestic architecture, household appliances, cooking and diet, and family vacations. The authors do an effective job of placing present-day controversies into historical perspective, balancing evidence of continuity and change, and identifying long-term trends and processes that impinge on today’s families. The book also provides a useful introduction to concepts and terms that sociologists use to understand the family. A reference book rather than a narrative history, the volume does not present a systematic argument about the cultural, demographic, economic, political, and psychological factors that lie behind the radical late twentieth-century transformations in gender roles, sexual behavior, living arrangements, or childcare. Nor does it advance a thesis about the causes or implications of class, ethnic, and racial diversity in family life. But it certainly fulfills its goal of providing students with a reliable, readable, even-handed introduction to the America’s diverse, ever changing families.