Raz - Month # 6

While Freidenreich’s Female, Jewish, and Educated and Rose’s Jewish Women in Fin de Siècle Vienna address similar issues, they present readers with very different approaches. Freidenreich’s book calls to mind “her-story” methods of feminist scholars (according to Scott), who sought mostly to uncover the role of women in historical narratives centered on male figures. However, this outdated approach – focused on social history and descriptions – adds little in the way of analysis. Indeed, Freidenreich has produced a historical account with no real theoretical framework – certainly not one in the forefront of research in the humanities and social sciences in the past decade. In fact, Freidenreich’s major insight addresses a sad situation: in the beginning of the 21^st century, many women who seek to establish academic careers, face similar obstacles, problems, and limiting public and popular discourses as their predecessors a century ago. While this state of affairs no doubt deserves scholarly attention, Freidenreich’s book addresses mostly the past – and besides uncovering much information about a specific group of women, she has failed to point to and inquire about possible implications and meanings of the many details that readers encounter.   

            By contrast, Rose has made an effort to offer a novel interpretation that not only presents the marginalized women in the existing narratives but challenges the latter fundamentally (Rose, p. 2, for example). This method applies to received wisdom on fin de siècle Vienna’s Jews as well as on the city’s non-Jewish “…cultural, social, and political climate …” (p. 219). Rose’s double perspective – Jewish women as well as images of Jewish women (i.e., subject and object – Rose, p. 7) – turns the spotlight on intriguing intersections in fin de siècle Vienna between issues of gender and collective identifications. Indeed, Rose joins growing trends of research in many fields, which interpret the rise and paths of modern national movements through the lenses of masculinity and femininity. But one of Rose’s major points – male Jews in Vienna displaced anxieties that mirrored anti-Jewish stenotypes in Viennese society onto Jewish women – hardly comes as a great novelty. Likewise, Rose’s discussion of Zionism and Jewish women stands on well-treaded soil. Therefore, even though Rose’s method and approach differ from Freidenreich’s, both books mainly point in directions still in need of much research.