Young scholars are re-exploring through contemporary thought, practice and tradition, politics,literature, film, and culture. Beth Elohim invites some of these scholars to discuss their cutting-edge work, in dialogue with Rabbi Daniel Bronstein, as part of our Bagel Brunch series

A Gentlewoman’s Agreement: Jewish Sororities in Postwar America

Shira Kohn
Ms. Kohn’s research traces how sorority members on both the local and national levels encountered America’s political and social agendas in the decades after World War II. By analyzing the choices these women made in their self-representation, new light is cast on how Jewish women responded to pressures of American beauty ideals, domestic anti-communist activism, and the battle over desegregation in the nation’s colleges and universities. Ms. Kohn’s project enriches our understanding of a complex group of more than 10,000 women. Their negotiations over what it meant to be female, to be Jewish, and to be American called upon them to defy then-common perceptions of Sisters as being merely “flighty and flirty.”
$5 class fee