Using material made available to him by Anitta Müller-Cohen's family, Dieter Hecht has produced a carefully contextualized biography of this pioneer of modern social work. Born into a wealthy middle-class family in Vienna's Leopoldstadt, Anitta Rosenzweig became interested in welfare issues largely thanks, it seems, to liberal political acquaintances of her parents such as Julius Ofner. She was already active in the Allgemeiner Österreichischer Frauenverein from around 1909, but it was from September 1914 onward that she, still in her early twenties, rose to prominence as a central figure in the efforts to alleviate Vienna's hardship during World War I. Under the umbrella title “Soziale Hilfsgemeinschaft Anitta Müller,” she founded day-care centers, children's homes, soup and tea kitchens, vocational schools, and training courses for women. After the war, partly as a result of increasing anti-Semitism, and partly under the influence of figures such as Bertha Pappenheim, she began to aim her activities specifically at the city's Jews. She attempted to institutionalize her organizations as part of a central Jewish welfare initiative, something that was destined never to materialize in Vienna.

From the mid 1920s onward, Müller-Cohen spent extended periods of time in Tel Aviv, as well as in London and Luxembourg. In 1934, she settled in Palestine/Eretz Israel. Although once a well-known figure, as a result of these moves and the nature of her work, Müller-Cohen fell into obscurity after her death in 1962. As much as possible, given the destruction of many of the relevant sources in the Shoah, Hecht seeks to reconstruct the network of welfare organizations and associations with which she worked and those that she founded. His volume is therefore not only the first detailed study of Müller-Cohen herself, but also a valuable resource on the development of civil society in Vienna and, to a lesser extent, in Israel.

As Hecht himself points out, the lack of documentation on many Jewish women's associations from this period means that studying the lives of individuals is an indispensable means to fill in the gaps. Therefore, although Müller-Cohen was obviously an extraordinary individual in many ways, her biography throws a great deal of light onto the more general experience of Jewish women in Vienna. Hecht amply fulfills his goal of illustrating that they were by no means as “invisible” as is sometimes claimed, either within the Jewish community or in wider society. His more general meditations on Jewish women's history may not yield much that is new to the specialist, but they provide an accessible overview of the secondary literature available and make the volume as a whole more attractive to a broad readership.

Unlike other welfare pioneers of Jewish origin in early-twentieth-century Vienna, such as Eugenie Schwarzwald, Müller-Cohen was not content to remain an apolitical social worker, and she became active in international Zionist politics. However, Hecht reveals how she sometimes sought to play down this aspect of her work. The volume is therefore also an extended commentary on the limitations and contradictions still inherent in women's role in the public sphere after World War I. Although the opening chapters are conventionally chronological, giving an overview of Müller-Cohen's life, Hecht does not adhere to a linear structure throughout the volume. Instead, the second part concentrates on particular events or organizations in which she participated, including Müller-Cohen's time on Vienna city council, on the Jewish National Council founded in 1918, and at the first World Congress of Jewish Women in Vienna in 1923. A chapter is also dedicated to her journalism in the bourgeois press organs of interwar Vienna, both Jewish and non-Jewish. Hecht does not ignore Müller-Cohen's later activities in Palestine/Eretz Israel and explores her Zionist beliefs in depth. However, the emphasis of the volume in both parts remains firmly on Vienna and Europe.

Although Hecht was only able to reproduce a regrettably small selection of Müller-Cohen's articles and lectures in the appendix, he also includes a biographical timeline and a bibliography of her German publications. In addition, the volume comes with a CD recording of a speech Müller-Cohen gave at the fourteenth Zionist World Congress in Vienna in 1925. Although barely longer than three minutes, the speech gives the reader an opportunity to experience not just the written words, but also the actual voice of a biographical subject—with thoroughly genteel Viennese tones in Müller-Cohen's case, no matter how energetically she put her Zionist message.