SOURCE: Pratt, Norma Fain. “Culture and Radical Politics: Yiddish Women Writers in America, 1890-1940.” In Women of the Word: Jewish Women and Jewish Writing, edited by Judith R. Baskin, pp. 111-35. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1994.

In the following essay, Pratt presents a brief history of Jewish and Yiddish female writers whose works appeared in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century, noting that their writing is reflective of the social issues they were confronting.

During the first two decades of the twentieth century, the cultural traditions East European Jewish immigrants brought with them to America were fundamentally recast, yet few cultural historians have considered the extent to which these transformations were an expression of class and gender. This study, based on the lives of some fifty Yiddish women writers whose extensive literary works appeared in the United States during the first half of...