From Fashion to Politics

Not only fashion and politics, but scholarship, gender, religion, discrimination – every hot button issue is examined in the story of the triumphant rise of Hadassah. A fascinating and important book.|Brautbar is at her best in depicting Hadassah’s use of traditional gender roles to promote effective participation by women in the public sphere...Hadassah members can take pride in and learn a great deal about their organization’s achievements, both for American Jewish women and for Israel, from [this] thoughtful [book].|"In her history of Hadassah in the postwar period, Brautar shows how a very narrow definition of the political has constrained the scholarship on the US Jewish women’s Zionist organization. She demonstrates how Hadassah actively influenced US sentiment and policy on the new state of Israel, communism, civil rights, and Soviet Jewry. Her study also illuminates larger questions, such as how Zionism moved from a peripheral ideological position among US Jews to a mainstay in much of US Jewish life. […] Brautbar demonstrates why Hadassah, as the largest US Zionist organization, deserves continued attention […] Recommend. All academic levels/libraries."—S.E. Imhoff, Indiana University|“By reevaluating Hadassah’s philanthropic mission, public service work, educational efforts, and rhetoric in the context of world and domestic events, Brautbar presents a revisionists history that questions further the accuracy of the idea, popularized by the waves metaphor, that the postwar period was a nadir in feminist history. . . . Through painstaking research in the minutia of daily operations, Brautbar is able to relate Hadassah’s aspirations to become an important force in domestic politics and foreign affairs.” —Kathleen A. Laughlin, in The American Jewish Archives Journal 2013 Vol. LXV Nos. 1 & 2