Saturday, November 22, 1997

Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia

By ELINOR J. BRECHER

Knight-Ridder Newspapers

Silver screen star Theda Bara, Jewish?

Josephine (Mrs. Wyatt) Earp, Jewish?

Mama Cass Elliot, Marjorie (Mrs. Woody) Guthrie, Ayn Rand, all Jewish?

Who knew?

Writer Deborah Dash Moore, for one. Along with Paula E. Hyman, she edited "Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia," a new, two-volume set (Routledge, $250) that's the most comprehensive reference work to be produced on the subject.

Three years in the making, the 1,770-page compendium profiles Jewish women who contributed significantly to American life, in ways religious and secular. They are intellectuals and interior designers, cantors and choreographers, athletes and actresses, educators and entrepreneurs, politicians and philanthropists, Nobel Prize winners and nurses, social activists, lawyers, doctors, writers, sculptors, Zionists.

There's at least one of everything, it seems, including an astronaut (Judith Resnick, who died on the Challenger), a blues singer (Libby Holman, 1904-1971, who, by the way, was the inventor of the strapless gown), a chess player (N. May Karff, International Female Master and U.S. Women's Open champion), a Supreme Court justice (Ruth Bader Ginsberg); a Miss America (Bess Myerson); and a madam (Polly Adler, 1900-1962, whose famous New York bordello catered to big-time gangsters and the wealthy).

"We couldn't do 'the first' of everything because the number would have been too large," says Moore, a professor of religious studies at Vassar College whose previous books include "To the Golden Cities: Pursuing the American Jewish Dream in Miami and L.A."

So, instead, the editors looked for "bests." Women who excelled. Women who accomplished. Women who had an impact. "This is a book about the experiences of extraordinary women," says Moore.

Beyond the basics, the mini-biographies in the books get into questions like: To what degree did a woman's Jewish identity influence her personally and professionally? What motivated her commitment? How did her contributions affect her fields and the broader social landscape?

Moore says she and Hyman were careful not to neglect the unifying experiences of "ordinary" American Jewish women. These are explored in essays covering a multitude of topics, including Yiddish theater, suburbanization, poetry, intermarriage and conversion, the labor movement, Holocaust studies, birth control and women's groups like Hadassah.

The editors relied on experts in numerous fields and areas of the the country for advice on whom to include, and Moore says they read the obituaries closely.

Ralph Carlson, who served as project director for the books, collected the hundreds of black-and-white photos that accompany the entries. His own massive work, "Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia," served as a blueprint for this one, which was sponsored by the Jewish Historical Society.

Moore and Hyman, a professor of modern Jewish history at Yale University, enlisted 400 writers and researchers for the project, all of whom worked gratis.

"It was truly a labor of love," says Moore, 50, who dedicated the encyclopedia to one grandmother, Bella Golden, who recently died at age 101, and used a photo of her other grandmother, Rose Seiler, who died in the 1950s, on the cover.

The criteria for inclusion? "It helps if you were dead," jokes Moore, because that made it easier to evaluate a life's work. "If you lived in the 18th or 19th century, you're more likely to be included than if you lived in the 20th."

Though there are some exceptions, most of those included were born before 1936. And most of the exceptions are in entertainment and politics: Barbra Streisand, Goldie Hawn, Bette Midler and Roseanne, as well as Los Angeles Congresswoman Jane Harman; California Senator Barbara Boxer and Elizabeth Holtzman, the former congresswoman and New York City comptroller.

"We had debates over two critical issues," says Moore. "Who was Jewish? And who was American?"

In the end, the editors and contributors decided that those born abroad who made their mark in the United States, as well as those born here who built reputations abroad, would be considered "American."

To be considered Jewish, a woman need not have been born Jewish; some are converts (although neither Marilyn Monroe nor Elizabeth Taylor made it).

The other big debate was over inclusion of the "women who were left-wing" - the Internationalists, Communists and Socialists perhaps not as recognizable as, say, turn-of-the-century anarchist Emma Goldman. "If we excluded them, we would be giving a skewed sense of politics," Moore says.

Though many of the women in the books are renowned, even more are relatively obscure. Alongside Golda Meir, Gloria Steinem, Judith Krantz, Beverly Sills and Estee Lauder, you'll find Rose Laub Coser (1916-1994), a medical sociologist; Helen Tanzer (1876-1961), who translated archaeological textbooks; Rosanna Dyer Osterman (1809-1866), who pioneered the first Jewish community in Texas; Senda Berenson (1868-1954), known as the "mother of women's basketball"; and Judith Eisenstein (1909-1996), daughter of Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, founder of the Reconstructionist Movement, and, in 1922, the first girl to celebrate a bat mitzvah in America.