As I Know Them.
[Judaica]. Kohut, Rebekah. As I Know Them: Some Jews and a Few Gentiles. New York: Doubleday, Doran & Company, Inc., 1929.
8vo; 305 pp.; decorated end papers; glue residue and rubbing to the front paste down; original black cloth, front board with title, author and the Star of Bethlehem in reverse on a green field; spine with the author, title, Star of Bethlehem and publisher in reverse on green fields; tan dust jacket printed in green; head and tail bumped; dust jacket with wear edges, loss of 3/4" along bottom of spine with loss to publisher's name; closed 2" tear on front cover, loss of 1/8" along the head without loss to text; 1/2" chip at top left of front cover; minor loss to the upper front corner; good .
First Edition. Rebekah Bettelheim Kohut (1864-1951) was a social welfare worker, educator, reformer and organizer. She worked with Jewish American communities, was one of the developers of volunteer Jewish women's organizations, an early supporter of national unemployment insurance, and a patron of Judaic scholarship. Her father was a Rabbi, and the family lived in Philadelphia, Richmond and San Francisco. She met and married Rabbi and scholar, Alexander Kohut. She became involved in community work and, as she states in her autobiography, My Portion, "It appeared to me that my real mission in life should be as a worker in the front ranks of American Jewish women to innovate volunteer work, chiefly among Jewish organizations and organizations and within the Reform synagogues." By 1893, she had become so well known that she delivered an address to the first Congress of Jewish Women held at the Chicago World's Fair.
Three years later, Kohut became President of the New York section of the National Council of Jewish Women and gave the opening address at its first convention. She also founded the Kohut School for Girls and gave her late husband's collection of Middle Eastern literature, along with scholarship endowments, to Yale. In 1914, she established the Employment Bureau of the Young Women's Hebrew Association and later chaired the employment section of the Woman's Committee for National Defense. She also had a position in the newly formed United States Employment Service and volunteered her organizational skills to similar government agencies during President Wilson's administration. After the war, she went to Europe numerous times to help Eastern European Jews. For her service, both in America and abroad, she was elected president of the World Congress of Jewish Women in 1923. This work is noted by NAW as one of Kohut's more important writings.
Four Centuries of Jewish Women's Spirituality, pp. 12, 17, 111, 140-2.
NAW Modern Period, pp. 403-5.
Three Outstanding Women, by Askowith, Umansky & Ashton (Eds.).
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