View the target=_blank>Table of Contents. Read thetarget=_blank>Introduction.Provides a revealing glimpse into the lives of adolescent girls at the turn of the century. Klapper's exhaustive search for the diaries of young Jewish women has produced a harvest of insights into their relationships to religion, to education, to domestic lives, and to girl culture.--Alice Kessler-Harris, author of In Pursuit of EquityMelissa Klapper's pioneering volume, based on an astonishing wealth of primary sources, uncovers more than we have ever known about the upbringing and education of Jewish girls in America from the Civil War to World War I. Covering everything from religious education to sex education, it explores what it meant to be a Jewish girl aged 12-20 during one of the most tumultuous eras in American history.--Jonathan D. Sarna, Joseph H.

& Belle R. Braun Professorof American Jewish History, Brandeis UniversityBrings to life the lives of the 'ordinary' young women whom we encounter in these pages. By exploring the diaries of Jewish girls who used these private and personal sources to think about their conflicting ideas about identities, families, and futures, Melissa Klapper has shown them to be historical actors, and as such anything but ordinary. By combining intellectual matters of several literatures-the history of education, women's history, American Jewish history, the history of the United States over the course of a crucial six decade period-Klapper has made a substantial contribution to our understanding of the past and those who peopled it.--Hasia Diner, Paul S. and Sylvia Steinberg Professor of American Jewish History, New York UniversityKlapper offers a thoughtful book on subjects too often ignored in both the literature of Jewish-Americans and of American girls. -- Journal of the Guilded Age and Progressive EraJewish Girls Coming of Age in America, 1860-1920 draws on a wealth of archival material, much of which has never been published--or even read--to illuminate the ways in which Jewish girls' adolescent experiences reflected larger issues relating to gender, ethnicity, religion, and education.Klapper explores the dual roles girls played as agents of acculturation and guardians of tradition.

Their search for an identity as American girls that would not require the abandonment of Jewish tradition and culture mirrored the struggle of their families and communities for integration into American society.While focusing on their lives as girls, not the adults they would later become, Klapper draws on the papers of such figures as Henrietta Szold, founder of Hadassah; Edna Ferber, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Showboat; and Marie Syrkin, literary critic and Zionist. Klapper also analyzes the diaries, memoirs, and letters of hundreds of other girls whose later lives and experiences have been lost to history.Told in an engaging style and filled with colorful quotes, the book brings to life a neglected group of fascinating historical figures during a pivotal moment in the development of gender roles, adolescence, and the modern American Jewish community.