THE SCENE is set in the 1941 guide-book The Jewish Home Beautiful: the sabbath is about to commence. A publishing sensation, The Jewish Home Beautiful, initiated by synagogue sisterhoods, eschewed describing tradition and instead decided to create it. It aestheticized the sacred ritual much as guides to interior decoration aestheticized middle-class homes. But would families follow this advice? And why should they? In this essay, I answer these key questions by addressing the emergence of Jewish homemaking guidebooks, with particular attention to their description of sabbath preparation, culminating with an analysis of the feminization of the American Jewish sabbath. I argue that through a contextualized understanding of the changes in sabbath observance—including the agency of Jewish Sisterhoods in promoting a female-driven synagogue life, as demonstrated through their self-published guidebooks—the feminization of the sabbath was seen as necessary to ensure the survival of Judaism in America. This essay concentrates on the period between 1920 and 1945, as east European Jews negotiated with German American Jews, together facing the diasporic problem of maintaining cultural continuity within a dominant society that held conflicting values and norms, and mediating tradition that both connected and divided Jews as an American community.

The American Concept of Judaism

Although the United States provided greater opportunities and significantly less persecution than eastern Europe, the life of early Jewish American immigrants was not easy.