Overall, Adler's fascinating study provides an extremely engaging and important contribution to a much-needed genre within (not just East European) Jewish history. It represents a compelling challenge to historians to take the educational theme much more seriously and will hopefully inspire other scholars and students to pursue the topic.

In Her Hands reveals a previously unknown chapter of Jewish women's history, emphasizing the role of Jewish girls' schools in the modernization and transformation of traditional Jewish society. It is a formidable contribution to both Russian Jewish women's history and the history of Jewish education. Adler's work will greatly benefit scholars of Russian and Eastern European Jewish history and everybody who is interested in the topic.

To say that this important book by Eliyana R. Adler fills a gap is an understatement. I know of no other modern monographic treatment of Jewish women's education in Eastern Europe, and this alone should make Adler's book essential reading in a number of fields.

Eliyana Adler adds substantially to the literature about the history of Jews in the Russian Empire while doing her part to make visible a part of the narrative still too often obscured by a perspective that equates the history of Jewish men with the history of all Jews. Her carefully researched monograph benefits from archival research in major Russian and Lithuanian archives as well as at the YIVO Institute in the United States. In her impressive monograph, Adler provides a nuanced and complex record of efforts to educate young Jewish women in the multiethnic Russian Empire.

The book is well researched and well written and will surely be of use to scholars in Jewish education, Eastern European history, and Jewish life in nineteenth-century Russia.

The book adds significantly to our understanding of Jewish women in tsarist Russia, Jewish education, and modern European Jewish history writ large.

Adler's work is a fine piece of historical recovery, greatly expanding our understanding of formal Jewish education for girls before modern Jewish politics capitalized on it in their attempt to conquer the Jewish street.

Although many know of the contributions to the education of Jewish girls by Sarah Schenirer and the Bags Yaakov network that began in Cracow in the 1920s, the private schools for Jewish girls that developed in Russian lands from 1831 to 1881 are far less familiar. This gap in Jewish history is rectified by Eliyana Adler's recent book.

Adler's meticulously crafted story provides a remarkably detailed account of a neglected topic, the development of Jewish girls' schools in tsarist Russia.

The book provides a most complete and engaging analysis of all sides of the girls' Jewish schools, including the curriculum and social life.