Milwaukee, and especially its Jewish community, sometimes seems like a slightly overgrown small town, in which everybody knows almost everybody’s business. You would think that no corner of Jewish life here could possibly remain obscure.
Yet for 100 years, a small group of mostly Jewish women has devoted itself to studying social and political subjects — and done it quietly, known to few besides members, their families and their friends.
This group calls itself the Social Science Club, and it will be celebrating a century of existence with a luncheon on Wednesday, May 22, noon at the Wisconsin Club.
Some of its members didn’t know the club existed until the day they were invited to join. Belle Anne Freund, the current president, said, “I had lived in the North Shore for 35 years and had never heard about [the club]” until her friend Rona Gahr, current program chair, told her and offered to sponsor her about four years ago.
In fact, being invited and sponsored by another member is the typical way to join the club, according to Gahr, a member for the past five years. Moreover, according to Marianne Epstein, the SSC’s unofficial historian, that was how the club began, when 12 women invited 12 other women to create the group.
Once in, members seem to like to stay a long time. Epstein has been a member since the mid-1970s. Among the current 35 or so members are about 10 who have been in the club for more than 30 years. At the centennial luncheon, the club hopes to honor Dorothy Heilbronner if her health permits; she has been a member since 1928.
Research and writing
So what do members of the Social Science Club do? They research, write and read to the club papers about social and political topics.
This club does for pleasure what most people feel they have had enough of in high school and college. But these women love it.
“I like study groups like this,” said Gahr, who has an education degree she said she never used. “It keeps your mind sharp.”
“I’m a natural-born learner,” said Epstein, who has a degree in economics and wrote for the U.S. Army’s education department during World War II. This club “is the only place where I’m forced to focus research and set a body of knowledge down on paper. I resent doing it, but I love doing it. I become totally immersed in it.”
Freund, a former teacher of learning disabled children in the Milwaukee Public Schools, finds the club “very stimulating. The people are very bright. There are always interesting things to learn from each other.”
Each year, the club chooses a broad subject. This past year, the topic was the juvenile justice system.
Other topics, according to a list Epstein provided, have included parts of the world, U.S. political institutions and national and global political issues. Though the Middle East and the Islamic world have come up, only once, apparently, has the club focused on a specifically Jewish subject, studying the new state of Israel for the 1949-50 season.
Each member must commit to researching, writing and reading one paper every other year on an aspect of that year’s topic. (The requirement is waived after 30 years of membership.) The papers are read at the club’s monthly meetings, which are mostly held at members’ homes.
The exception is the first meeting of the season, a luncheon held at a larger venue and featuring a guest speaker providing an overview of that season’s topic.
In a sense, the coming centennial luncheon will be a homecoming. The club was founded in the Wisconsin Club, which in 1902 was known as the Deutscher Club, according to Epstein.
The founding location was also significant in that the 24 women who created it were nearly all German Jewish women — though even during the early years, there were a few non-Jewish members.
Some of the first members came from the very first Jewish families to settle in Milwaukee, such as the Adlers. At least one of the founders was a local celebrity, Elizabeth Black Kander, the social activist and teacher who led the creation of the famous “Settlement Cook Book.”
The club in its own name has never tried to be a shaping force in the community. “The club writes and reads papers. We don’t do anything else,” said Gahr. “We are not political and non-fund raising. That means being president is a simple job.”
Yet that doesn’t mean the club simply produces “knowledge for knowledge’s sake,” according to Epstein. Some members — from Kander to these three — have taken their knowledge out of the club into other organizations. “You find names [of members] spread in the general and Jewish community,” Epstein said.
For more information about the club, call Freund, who will be next year’s membership chair, at 262-783-7373.
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