Jewish emancipation and women`s emancipation: three portraits of German-Jewish women in the shadow of the Holocaust

Three German-Jewish women, writing from the safe haven of the United States, resisted Nazi antisemitism by engaging with Jewish economic history. These women -- Selma Stern, Hannah Arendt, and Toni Oelsner, respectively, constructed, transformed, and critiqued what would become a central paradigm in post-war Jewish historiography on the economic function of the Jews. Their biographies and intellectual works illuminate the dialectics of inclusion in two coterminous emancipation movements -- that of European Jewry and that of European women. They were formed by the successes and limits of both. As refugees, they negotiated the grand failure of German-Jewish emancipation personally in their day-to-day lives. As intellectuals, they probed its historical course. As women, they were path-breakers in women`s inclusion in the academy and Jewish Studies. Yet they identified little with the women`s movement, ignoring the role that gender ideology played in circumscribing their lives, in a manner not dissimilar to secular Jews who ignored the identity that profoundly impacted their lives during the Nazi period. The similarities and differences in their lives and works illuminates a range of experiences of inclusion and exclusion at the intersection of women`s emancipation and Jewish emancipation during the first half of the twentieth century.