Hadassah’s Ideological Rhetoric in the Post-World War II Era

Shirli Brautbar
Nevada State College

     Founded in 1912 by social activist Henrietta Szold, Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization of America, grew to become not only the most influential women’s Zionist organization in America, but also the largest Zionist membership organization in the world.¹  Hadassah women contributed to the development of an “emancipated” Jewish American woman whose purpose in life extended well beyond the confines of the domestic sphere into the arenas of fund-raising, politics, education, and women’s social and cultural empowerment.  Jewish cultural references served as the basic language from which Hadassah members built a new discourse on gender and culture that altered Jewish women’s status from an identity based on child-rearing to one grounded in worldly pursuits.  This process however was complex.  While challenging some aspects of the status quo, Hadassah women adopted many accepted gender roles in an effort to normalize their activities and place themselves within an accepted sphere of women’s behavior. 
     During the post-World War II era, a period in American history which saw the rise of gender conservatism, Hadassah challenged the dominant ideology of domesticity.  Hadassah took domestic ideology and turned it on its head by portraying motherhood as a political and cultural mandate.²  Hadassah women were “mothers” not only to their children but to the Jewish people in America and the emergent country of Israel as well as all Jewish children in general. 
     During the 1940s and 1950s, the Jewish community in America experienced a period of complex socio-economic, demographic, and ideological transformations.   Although the psychological impact of the Holocaust had a major effect on the Jewish community--and increased acceptance of Zionism, other factors also worked to change the environment for American Jews.  Jewish earnings increased substantially due in part to post-war G.I. benefits and expanded educational opportunities, moving many working-class Jews, especially members of and descendants of the second generation into a middle-class category.
     Hadassah members engaged in a variety of political activities in the 1950s, ranging from anti-McCarthy civil liberties action to the promotion of civil rights and the support of anti-segregation legislation, to lobbying and education efforts on behalf of Israel to ensure the new state’s status as America’s major ally in the Middle East.³ This political activity required women to be highly active in the political arena at a time when mass culture and gender prescriptions encouraged them to remain at home and tend to their families.  In order to meet this challenge, Hadassah orchestrated a rhetorical campaign to legitimate women’s politicization that both encouraged women to be politically active and incorporated aspects of the mainstream focus on domesticity. Hadassah also challenged the restrictive nature of the private sphere.
     Through various programs and publications, Hadassah reached a wide audience. Hadassah ran several programs situated in the United States including American Affairs, Zionist Affairs, leadership training seminars, study circles, and educational programs. Hadassah strongly supported the United Nations.⁴  Hadassah also maintained a successful publicity department.  The New School for Social Research evaluated the Hadassah promotional materials department: “Probably no other non-profit organization in the country can match the effectiveness and scope of Hadassah’s literature.  The folders appeal to the eye and they go straight to the point with essential facts.” In 1953 alone, 1,683,000 copies of 41 different pamphlets were distributed by the Hadassah promotions department.⁵
     Several publications including Hadassah Magazine and Hadassah Newsletter (as the magazine was formerly called) were sent to over 350,000 members.  Members receiving these publications constituted the “largest single subscription group of any Anglo-Jewish publication in the world.”⁶  Hadassah Magazine which replaced Hadassah Newsletter in 1960 boasted a readership of more than a million.  In addition, Hadassah circulated to its members and potential members, hundreds of thousands of pamphlets, brochures, and kits that addressed political and social issues.  Hadassah also produced histories, videos, and cookbooks. In 1956 alone, Hadassah-affiliated researchers published 1,300 papers.⁷ In the fiscal year of 1969 Hadassah’s total budget (funds raised) amounted to a whopping $12,381,017.  Of that, over 50 percent went to the Hadassah Medical Organization, 18 percent to Youth Aliyah , 6 percent to the Jewish national fund, 1 percent to youth activities and 5 percent to Israel education.⁸
     By the 1950s, Jews as a group, for the most part, metamorphosed from an immigrant outsider community into a segment of mainstream suburban America.  So too had Zionism and Hadassah.  At its inception, when the goals of Zionism had not yet been fixed, Hadassah offered a sometimes radical approach to gender roles.  Hadassah exalted women as pioneers, and encouraged women to travel or live in Palestine, and lionized single women such as founder Henrietta Szold.⁹  By the 1950s, a time when Zionism had finally gained widespread acceptance throughout the Jewish community, Hadassah secured its new appeal by assimilating mainstream ideologies such as women’s maternalism and an ardent Americanism.  With over 300,000 members, Hadassah had become the largest Jewish women’s organization and the largest Zionist organization in the United States.  Hadassah’s appropriation of Americanism and the domestic ideal was in actuality part of an effort to cater to this new wider array of members.  However, domesticity and a new type of patriotism simultaneously and often ironically served to empower women who sought to challenge traditional gender roles and broaden their self-awareness.  In many ways the women of Hadassah encountered and created a complicated ideology that often stressed contradictory messages about the future of Jewish womanhood.
     On the surface, Hadassah appears to have adopted many facets of the 1950s maternal-domestic ideology that scholars have linked to the rise of a greater American suburbia. In her study of middle-class white Protestant women in the 1950s, historian Elaine Tyler May has shown how an ideology of “domestic containment” emerged in response to the Cold War and growing suburbanization in the post-war era.10  The home served as a bulwark against communism and a perceived decaying of American society.  The family unit, with women in the private sphere as the domestic nucleus, would sustain the American culture against an onslaught of immorality. 
     Hadassah’s empowering messages that encouraged women to develop their minds and challenge husbands, who would have rather had their wives at home, were often coupled with the concepts of womanhood so prominent in the popular culture of the 1950s. In “This is Your Life,” a brochure designed to inspire current members and recruit new members to Hadassah, the writer emphasized a restrictive suburbia-bound maternal role for women by stressing the essential contribution Jewish women played in transmitting Jewish culture to their children: “AS A JEW you have this duty: to safe guard the cultural and religious treasures of your people.  This is part of your life in Hadassah.¹¹”  Hadassah backed up this call to the ranks of Jewish motherhood throughout literature of the era by promising to educate women and provide them the essential tools needed for them and their children to embrace their Jewish heritage.  Within the same brochure, however, women were urged to safeguard their liberties as educated American women and mothers and to keep in mind their foremothers had historically lacked access to a Jewish education, let alone the right to serve as bearers of the cultural heritage:

There have been times when men questioned your right to live by the teachings of your Jewish past. But in the United States, where strands from every corner of the earth are woven to make a democracy, your right is also your responsibility.¹²

The argument made in much of Hadassah’s discourse was that Jewish women had been given an opportunity to educate themselves and their fellow Jews on Jewish cultural history and through Hadassah they could accomplish this goal and in the process become good American Jewish mothers.
     Zionism also served as an avenue for an individual to express her mastery of Jewish heritage and identity and to connect to the generations of struggle in the past and the existing struggle in Israel.  Hadassah offered women a message of empowerment: Women—not men—had the power and the responsibility to educate themselves and others about Israel.  This responsibility granted them the extension into the public sphere and also served to legitimate Jewish women’s public and political expressions of their identity.  However, these messages of empowerment often were coupled with more traditional notions of women’s gender roles.
     Jewish women’s importance as maternal and cultural care takers served as a legitimating principle for much of Hadassah rhetoric in the 1950s.  An educated and active Jewish woman, Hadassah ideology expounded, could provide the proper education to her children.   As neo-Victorian and new suburban notions of domesticity emerged during the 1950s, so too did the idea that Jewish women as mothers bore the responsibility to assure that Jewish cultural dissemination continued to be transmitted to future generations through children’s education.¹³

What happens when you join Hadassah?... YOU BECOME A BETTER JEW… Examining your Jewish heritage, you learn your peoples glorious heritage. You understand current problems better. You get a ‘perspective.’ Education through Hadassah gives you the basic certainties you need to live constructively and to guide your family toward a richer Jewish life.¹⁴

Through Hadassah women could find a place for themselves within the Jewish community and create importance to their lives and their family’s life.  Indeed, Hadassah “Makes You Important” was a major slogan of the period, with brochures of a “June Cleaver” look alike on the cover advertising that Hadassah offered more meaning to the life of the average housewife.
     Education programs designed at strengthening Hadassah member’s sense of Jewishness centered on Zionism but also included political awareness programs.  In addition to political education, Hadassah members learned through panels and publications about Jewish history and holidays.  Some local chapters even included a “Hadassah Prayer” in their Yearbooks which asked G-d for guidance “in our task of aiding and providing for the spiritual needs of the community.”¹⁵  Hadassah programs ranged from Jewish education workshops on history and the Bible.  To studying Hebrew and explanations of holidays, some chapters even held a “Jewish Home Beautiful” event which showcased appropriate table setting for various Jewish holidays alongside a member’s performance of Holiday songs.¹⁶
     One of the most successful programs of Hadassah in the 1950s was the Youth Aliyah program.  Youth Aliyah was envisioned at its inception in the 1930s as a program to help youth emigrate from Europe to Palestine and join in the pioneer movement.  However, the looming anti-Semitic fervor in Germany shifted the emphasis from an immigrant aid program to a rescue mission.   Spearheaded by Hadassah, the Youth Aliyah program rescued 12,332 Jewish children and youth from Hitler’s Germany between 1934 and the end of the war and also brought over 4,000 children to Palestine from Africa and Asia.¹⁷  During the post-war era and well into the 1960s, Youth Aliyah served as an important conduit for Hadassah to widen its focus to new regions of the world and to minister to troubled youth already within Israel.  The maternal emphasis of Youth Aliyah—American club women helping disadvantaged foreign youth—served to attract new membership, and after Hadassah was  named the official liaison for Youth Aliyah in America in 1943, its chapters increased in numbers from 272 to 375.¹⁸ “Hadassah,” one brochure argued, “is rescuing Jewish children from Arab lands and Iron Curtain countries through the Youth Aliyah movement which functions in 300 cooperative settlements and a network of special schools in Israel.”¹⁹  Articles and publications written about Youth Aliyah in Hadassah in the 1950s stressed the importance of women as nurturers and mothers and the need to protect them from anti-Semitism in all areas of the world including the countries enclosed by the Iron Curtain.
     Youth Aliyah invited Hadassah members to figuratively adopt a child in need.  “WANTED A MOTHER EMA” (ema means mother in Hebrew) was used in brochures designed to motivate American women to participate more fully in Youth Aliyah programming or to join Hadassah.  Beside the caption in one such brochure was a picture of three children of varying ages.  A short entry about each child explained their particular economic plight.
     Discussions of youth and children’s programming thus carried messages about proper Jewish womanhood.  Implicit in these messages was the notion that women naturally bear the responsibility for children by virtue of their maternal nature:  “CHILDREN SUFFER AND YOU RESPOND. You know from your own children and those around you that there is no future for the world if any of the world’s children is insecure.”  Therefore womanhood predisposes one to have a greater appreciation for children.  Although Hadassah in many ways challenged traditional gender norms by allowing women a political and public voice and by stressing the importance of women to Jewish cultural understanding, at the same time it utilized traditional gender roles of the day that stressed the importance of women as the caretakers of the family. Rather than remaining in the private sphere as Elaine Tyler May contends in her study of Protestant women, the Hadassah family was extended very publicly to include children, youth, the Jewish people, and the entire state of Israel.  Thus a contradictory approach to gender was employed. On the one hand, it challenged restrictive notions about women’s roles and, on the other hand, it reinforced notions of maternalism.  Jewish women, through Hadassah, were uniquely poised to rescue Jewish children and by extension Judaism itself from anti-Semitic hatred. “So through Hadassah,” argued the literature, “you take on the sweetest task a woman can assume: you work for youth. . . . Being a woman you also know that without love and unceasing vigilance, even a rescued child hurt by fear, poverty and orphan hood will not become a child again.  So you watch and guide. . .”²⁰
     Drives to raise money for other Hadassah activities such as its hospital fund also stressed the importance of programs that benefited children. An advertisement that ran in the Hadassah Newsletter showed a picture of a nurse caring for a sick child with a large caption: “IT”S YOUR CHILD TOO!”  The ad went on to suggest that this child “in Israel is fighting for her life” and that Hadassah members cannot stand by and not help.  The advertisement further drew a parallel between the helpless and sick child and Israel.  “All Israel is engaged in a fight for ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ today. And you are a part of it.”  Thus Israel is equated within this text to a helpless child with all of Hadassah serving as the responsible maternal caretaker.²¹
     References to patriotism infused Hadassah’s gender discourse with another layer of meaning.  “YOU ARE IMPORTANT BECAUSE It’s Good Americanism: Hadassah members believe, ‘we have not only responsibility but a duty to foster the democratic way of life at home and abroad . . . As American citizens, Hadassah women are expected to make up their own minds.  We give them information to help them think.  Their own zeal, intelligence and patriotism do the rest to keep them sensitive, responsive to their citizenship duties.”²²  Good American women should be educated and take active civic, political and cultural roles.  Democracy and America itself worked to legitimate Jewish women’s political and social action.
     The emphasis on Hadassah’s traditional gender roles relied heavily on the extension of women’s maternalism into the public sphere.  Jewish women would be important not only to their own children but to children all over the world, and they would care for a newborn nation-Israel.  In Hadassah literature very little emphasis was placed on the importance of women as wives. 
     While much of Hadassah’s activities were geared towards its work in Israel, it also had many programs in the United States directed toward educating the youth in Hadassah values.  Again Hadassah members were to assume the responsibility for engaging American Jewish youth in Jewish cultural education and in Zionism as a vehicle for preserving Jewish identity.  “As a woman your responsibility to youth is also basic for a fully rewarding way of life.  So through your work for Zionist youth in this country, Hadassah makes it possible for you to ‘connect’ with the younger generation, among whom may be your children.”²³
     References to patriotism infused Hadassah’s gender discourse with another layer of meaning.  “YOU ARE IMPORTANT BECAUSE it’s Good Americanism: Hadassah members believe, ‘we have not only responsibility but a duty to foster the democratic way of life at home and abroad . . . As American citizens, Hadassah women are expected to make up their own minds.  We give them information to help them think.  Their own zeal, intelligence and patriotism do the rest to keep them sensitive, responsive to their citizenship duties.”²⁴  Good American women should be educated and take active civic, political and cultural roles.  Democracy and America itself worked to legitimate Jewish women’s political and social action.
     In fact, Hadassah literature not only argued that women should empower themselves, their children, and the Jewish community, but also that the world needed rescuing.  Through education, action, and fund-raising, properly American “Hadassah ladies” would be well informed and well-equipped for the challenge. “You BECOME A BETTER CITIZEN  through Hadassah’s American Affairs program.  You receive information on the United Nations and on issues facing you as an individual American Citizen…. Thus you are ‘armed’ to help protect democracy in the United States and foster freedom and justice elsewhere throughout the world.”²⁵
     Hadassah also utilized education programs to define American Jewish womanhood to its members. Through Zionism and Jewish education provided by Hadassah, Jewish women would gain “importance” as better women, “better Americans, and better Jews.”  The culmination of Hadassah’s work lay in the development of a woman who knew who she was, in addition to knowing her history and her political affiliation. Her Jewish identity could then successfully be handed down to the next generation of Jews:

The Hadassah education program here is designed to give our members a sense of Jewish history and a high degree of responsibility for the continuing of a great tradition.  It is not enough to be born Jewish—we must live as Jews. And we must give to our children the knowledge—the tools and the instruments—to make them want to live a positive Jewish life.  It is not enough to pride ourselves on being the “People of the Book”— we must know these people and know this book. Pride in a great tradition can degenerate into complacency, unless we take seriously our responsibility for safe-guarding and re-interpreting the tradition.  This implies knowledge, understanding and growth.”²⁶

While maternalism and Americanism acted as strong forces in the shaping of Hadassah women’s identity and platform, absent from the rhetoric was the domestic ideology of women’s importance as wives.   To the contrary, Hadassah women were instructed in ways to challenge their husband’s authority and to demand respect for their activities through Hadassah. Hands of Healing, a promotional film released by Hadassah in 1951, detailed the experiences of one “Hadassah husband” as he visited Israel on a business trip.  “Ordered by his wife, who works hard for Hadassah, to take a look at my work too, while your there Joe… he has one of the greatest emotional experiences of his life.²⁷”
     Hadassah husbands were encouraged to support their wives’ activities.  Movies were made and literature was written to introduce Hadassah husbands to Hadassah concepts and defend their wives’ right to participate in such a worthy cause.  One Hadassah husband spoke of how his support for his wife had become “a career” in and of itself, a vehicle through which an everyday business man was able to expand beyond the realm of his daily work life.  “It has been my privilege to address many evening meetings of Hadassah chapters, and always there is a goodly sprinkling of Hadassah Husbands.  Their very presence tells a story—a story of mutual participation with their wives in being part of this great movement.”²⁸  A Hadassah husband would have to follow the lead of his wife or at the very least “look upon his wife with respectful puzzlement” and think to himself, “How did this housewife become so knowledgeable in international affairs so able a defender of civil rights. . .”²⁹  Hadassah women thus challenged the dominant and traditional gender norms of the day that defined women as mothers and housewives and occasionally made husbands the passive spectators in their own wives’ lives.
     Through their public articulations and politicization, Hadassah women’s conceptions of womanhood differed from those studied by May, who saw the private sphere as the only acceptable arena for women’s activity.  While they may have used concepts of motherhood to defend and legitimate their cause, they simultaneously challenged the very foundations of domestic ideology.  In relation to their roles as housewives, they espoused a gender consciousness that sought to gain respect and deference from their husbands.
     Hadassah introduced Jewish American women to a form of gender consciousness that incorporated traditional notions of maternalism in order to empower women to channel their maternal authority in to new male-dominated territory such as politics, Jewish education, and Zionism.  At the same time women were encouraged to see themselves as breaking new ground as women.  On the Jewish cultural front, they would take on the role of cultural dissemination once attributed to men.  Unlike the women of the past, concerned primarily with beauty and pleasing men, Hadassah argued women responded to “modern society’s” new approach to the gender roles.  “For the social revolution of the last century has placed women on a more or less equal footing in the competitive world and has moved her to the forefront of organized communal life.”  The typical Hadassah woman shared in this social revolution.  The article tells us she is “fascinating, aggressive, knowledgeable” and most importantly she no longer defines herself as only  wife, for she realizes that a “shrinking physical world has expanded her original purpose from companion of man to companion of mankind.”³⁰  Thus Hadassah women, we are told, share in this new uniquely 1950s form of womanhood with “an added ingredient—a deep consciousness of her Jewish roots.”³¹  The Hadassah woman represented the quintessential modern 20th century “emancipated woman.”³²   “And so, the question, who is she? Can be answered with: She is an alert daughter of the 20th century, she is a conscious Jewess–and a soldier.”³³

1. Erica Simmons, Hadassah and the Zionist Project (Rowman and Littlefield, 2006); For more on women’s history and Jewish scholarship see Shulamit Magnus, “‘Out of the Ghetto’: Integrating the Study of Jewish Women into the Study of Jews,” Judaism 39, no. 1 (1990): 28-36; Susannah Heschel, “Women’s Studies,” Modern Judaism 10 (1990): 243-258.  For a more recent analysis see Robin Judd, “Religion, Agency and Power in Jewish Gender Studies,” Journal of Women’s History 15 (spring 2003): 227. Hasia Diner and Beryl Lieff Benderly, Her Works Praise Her:  A History of Jewish Women in America from Colonial Times to the Present (New York: Basic Books 2002); Charolette Baum, Paula Hyman, and Sonya Michael, The Jewish Woman in America (New York: New American Library 1975); June Sochen, Consecrate Every Day the Public Lives of Jewish American Women (Albany, N.Y.:  State University of New York Press, 1981).  For an oral history approach, see Joyce Antler, The Journey Home: Jewish Women and the American Century (New York: Free Press, 1997);  Paula Hyman and Debra Dash Moore, Jewish Women in America: A  Historical Encyclopedia (New York: Routledge, 1997).  Jacob Marcus, The Jewish American Woman; 1654-1980 (New York: Ktav, 1981); Karla Goldman, Beyond The Synagogue Gallery:  Finding a Place For Women in American Judaism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000).  See also these collections of essays: Jonathan Frankel, ed., Jews and Gender the Challenge to Hierarchy (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 2000); Pamela Nadell and Jonathan Sarna, eds., Women and American Judaism: Historical Perspectives (Boston:  Brandeis University Press, 2001).
2. Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families on the Cold War(New York, Basic Books, 1988); Wini Breines, Young White and Miserable: Growing up Female in  the Fifties (Boston 1992); Susan Douglas, Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass Media (New York: Times Books, 1994); Lynn Spiegel, Welcome to the Dream House: Popular Media and Postwar Suburbs (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001).
3. Shirli Brautbar, dissertation “Not Just Ladies That Lunch: Hadassah and the Formation of a Jewish Women's Consciousness in Post-World War II America,” (Ph.D. diss., University of Southern California, 2005).
4. Hadassah, Face Toward the Future, booklet (New York: Hadassah, October 1953),  25.
5. Hadassah, Face Toward the Future, 26.
6. “Hadassah 1968-1969 Annual Report,” call no. 3, box 28, folder 2, Hadassah Archives at the Center for Jewish History (HA), New York, New York.
7. “Facts about Hadassah,” 1956, call no. 17, box 10, HA.
8. “Hadassah 1968-1969 Annual Report.”
9. Naomi Lichtenberg, “Hadassah’s Founders and Palestine, 1912-1925: A Quest for Meaning and the Creation of Women’s Zionism,” (Ph.D. dissertation, Indiana and Hadassah, 1995); Mary McCune, “Social Workers in the Muskeljudentum: ‘Hadassah Ladies,’ ‘Manly Men’ and the Significance of Gender in the American Zionist movement 1912-1928,” American Jewish History 86, no. 2 (June 1998): 135-165.
10. Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families on the Cold War(New York, Basic Books, 1988).
11. “This is Your Life,” brochure, 1954, 5, in call no. 17, box 8, “1950s”  folder, HA.
12. “This is Your Life," 5.
13. Lois Banner, American Beauty (New York: Knopf, 1983).
14. Hadassah, “On You It’s Becoming,” brochure, 1953, 4, in call 17, box 8, “1950s” folder, HA.
15. Austin Yearbook, 1948, p. 1, RG 15, folder 17, HA.
16. “Across the Country Wires,” 7, call no. 15, box 13, “Conferences 1954-1959” folder, HA.
17. Marlin Levin, It Takes a Dream: The Story of Hadassah (Gefen Books, 1997), 169.
18. Levin, It Takes, 172-173.
19. Hadassah, “On You It’s Becoming,” 8.
20. “This is Your Life,” 8.
21. “It’s Your Child TOO,” in-house advertisement, Hadassah Newsletter (October 1950): 4.
22. Appears in both “Hadassah Makes You Important,” 3, and “Hadassah A Way of Life,” 5, in call no. 17, box 8, “1950s” folder,  n.d., HA.
23. “This is Your Life,” 5.
24. “Hadassah Makes You Important,” 3, and “Hadassah A Way of Life,” 5, both in call no. 17, box 8, “1950s” folder, HA.
25. Hadassah, “On You It’s Becoming,” 5.
26. “Mrs. Rosensohn’s address,” speech, Opening Session Convention, 26 October 1952, 9, in call no. 3, box 17, folder 6, HA.
27. “Hands of Healing,” Hadassah Newsletter (Jan 1951): 5.
28. Josselyn Shore, “My Career as a Hadassah Husband,” Hadassah Newsletter (Sept 1953): 7.
29. Shore, “My Career,” 7.
30. Miriam Fierst and Lili Eller, “Who is She: An Appraisal of the Composite of the Hadassah Member,” Hadassah Newsletter, October 1958,  9.
31. Fierst and Eller, “Who is She,” 9.
32. Fierst and Eller, “Who is She,” 9.
33. Fierst and Eller, “Who is She,” 9.