Alison Rose explores the ways in which Jewish women's lives in fin-de-siècle Vienna were shaped by broader cultural discourses on race, class, and gender. By targeting specific cultural spheres in which Jewish women participated, Rose argues that prevailing cultural representations of Jewish women both enabled and circumscribed their ability to contribute to the city's cultural life.

Seeking to highlight “the interaction between image and identity” (7), Rose focuses on individual Jewish women and their experiences and on the discursive landscape that shaped their lives. Hence, most chapters are structured to introduce readers not only to the activities of Jewish women in, for example, philanthropy, politics, and medicine, but also to the representations of Jewish women produced by mostly Jewish men in educational literature, political speeches, and scientific treaties. Chapter 1 examines Jewish women's memories of their childhood and school years. Rose argues that most of these writers conveyed a sense of alienation and confusion with regard to their Jewish identity. She attributes this to a lack of religious education and practice at home, as well as to the dominant Catholic environment that left them with “a lingering confusion about what it meant to be Jewish” (41).

In Chapter 2, Rose explores the new roles assumed by acculturated middle-class women in Jewish society at the turn of the century. Although religious continuity had traditionally been a male responsibility, in the course of the nineteenth century, women increasingly took on the role of spiritual nurturers. Indeed, as in other Central European communities, changes in Jewish religious practice and ideals were shaped by the Jewish elite's embourgeoisement. Moving from the Jewish community to the broader Viennese society, Rose turns her attention to women and higher education in her third chapter. She argues that despite being trailblazers with regard to enrollment in institutions for higher education, paradoxically, Jewish women did not play a significant role in the women's movement in Vienna. Rose attributes this to the feminization of the Jewish man in anti-Semitic discourse, noting that Jewish women's involvement in feminist politics—blurring the boundaries between male and female spheres—would further undermine the already battered masculinity of Jewish men (105).

Restoring proper gender roles was also a concern for the early Zionist movement and is the subject of Chapter 4. Rose convincingly demonstrates that male Zionist leaders relegated women to a domestic position in the Jewish national renaissance. Women were expected to rear healthy children, complete with a Jewish national consciousness, and raise funds for the Zionist project and were thereby marginalized in Zionist politics. Chapter 5 explores Jewish women as patients and practitioners of medicine and psychoanalysis with an extensive discussion of the representations of Jewish women in the psychoanalytic literature. In the sixth and concluding chapter, Rose studies how the middle-class ideals of several generations of male writers shaped literary representations of Jewish women.

Although Rose successfully uncovers the intense discursive preoccupation with “the Jewish woman” in Viennese society, we learn surprisingly little about Jewish women's actual lives or contributions to fin-de-siècle culture (219). Indeed, although the author sets out to reveal the interplay between image and identity, or discourse and experience, this dynamic is not adequately established. As a result, most of the chapters are divided into two somewhat disconnected parts, one focusing on women's experiences, the other on images of women. For example, in her analysis of the Zionist movement, Rose describes some of the Zionist women's organizations and their activities and includes an extensive analysis of the image of women in Zionist ideology. The author does not, however, address how Zionist women responded to the demands from the movement's ideologues that they adopt what was considered an apolitical and hence appropriately feminine role. The voices are, as throughout the book, predominantly male; and the emphasis is on representation rather than women's experiences or contributions to Viennese culture.

Another problem is the author's lack of attention to the complex social and cultural composition of Viennese Jewish society. This was a community that, as Rose mentions, experienced a tremendous growth in the late Habsburg period with Jews moving to the city from every region of the empire (56–57). Nevertheless, throughout the book, Vienna's “Jewish women” are treated as a culturally homogenous middle-class group. The author makes only a passing mention of the presence of a large lower-class Eastern Jewish population—a lack of analytical nuance that weakens the many fine observations that Rose otherwise makes. Nonetheless, with this study of Jewish women in Vienna, Rose makes a welcome contribution to the history of fin-de-siècle Viennese culture.