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Jewish Girls Coming of Age in America, 1860-1920. By Melissa R. Klapper. New York: New York University Press, 2005. x + 310 pp.
Analyzing firsthand accounts of girls negotiating the opposing forces of tradition and modernity in their lives, Jewish Girls Coming of Age in America adds a new dimension to a central narrative of the American Jewish experience by presenting the conflicts of acculturation and cultural retention through the historical prism of Jewish female adolescence. Melissa R. Klapper's extensively researched study covers the sixty-year span from roughly the Civil War through World War I, describing how Jewish girls encountered and responded to shifting expectations for their roles in family and society. In great detail, Klapper weaves together the experiences of Jewish girls aged twelve to twenty from across class strata to create a collective story of adolescents relating to the evolving American girl culture and forging pathways to the future of American Jewish womanhood.
The strength of this study lies in its rich and varied source material. In addition to relying on the more accessible papers of well-known women, Klapper has unearthed a wide array of girls' diaries that would otherwise go unnoticed by historians. The book lends authentic voice to the realities of girls' lives, including everything from leisure activities and social pressures to work, family, education and religion. Unlike other gender histories or biographies that focus on the experiences of one young woman or a group of young women of similar background, Klapper...