Sisterhood Shabbat: Featuring Professor Pamela S. Nadell
“The Two Worlds of America’s Jewish Women"
Friday, March 9 – Saturday, March 10

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As Sisterhoods throughout the country celebrate the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Women’s League for Conservative Judaism by Mathilde Schechter, Professor Pamela S. Nadell, a scholar of Jewish American and women’s history, will speak about the two distinct groups of intrepid Jewish women who peopled America in the mid-19th to early 20th centuries.

The first group came to the U.S. in mid-19th century from Germany and other countries and called themselves “American Jewesses.” They founded organizations like Hadassah and Women’s League for Conservative Judaism.

The second group, Russian and other Eastern European Jewish immigrants fleeing poverty and violent pogroms, began coming to America en masse at the end of the 19th century. Speaking Yiddish, they lived in tenement flats in crowded ghettoes, sewed in firetrap factories until their aching fingers bled, and determined that their children would have better lives. Once America slammed shut the gates to Jewish immigration in the 1920s, the two groups, the American Jewesses and the East European Jewish immigrant women and their daughters, saw their worlds converge.

Professor Nadell is director of the Jewish Studies Program at American University. She has won numerous awards and worked as a consultant for the Library of Congress and the National Museum of American Jewish History on Philadelphia’s Independence Mall. She is currently president of the Association for Jewish Studies.