The American Jewess (1895–1899) described itself as "the only magazine in the world devoted to the interests of Jewish women." It was the first English-language periodical targeted to American Jewish women, covering an evocative range of topics that ranged from women's place in the synagogue to whether women should ride bicycles. The magazine also served as the publicity arm for the newly founded National Council of Jewish Women. The American Jewess was a periodical “published in Chicago and New York between 1895 and 1899” in order to represent the ideas that were important to the American Jewish community during this time. This magazine, though it is not widely remembered in modern society, “was the first Jewish women's journal edited by women that were independent of any organizational or religious ties,” along with the “first English-language journal independently edited by women.”. During the magazines “four years of publication, The American Jewess presented items on contemporary politics, literary figures, aesthetic issues, and… practical matters” along with “book reviews and a children's department." In all of its publications, the magazine engrained its contents with “a Jewish political agenda as well as a feminist agenda,” both of which were often combined “to produce both a strongly Zionist and an early feminist publication." During its time in publication, the magazine published 46 issues throughout four and a half years, producing a circulation totaling approximately 31,000. History During 1890 to 1920 “thousands of Jewish immigrants” came to the United States, seeking “respite from persecution, a place safe from repression and pogroms, and an opportunity to make a decent living.” By the end of the nineteenth century, many Jewish Americans “were in a position to live as other bourgeois Americans did” and “emulate the lifestyle of middle-class WASPS." Specifically, “middle-class Jews of both sexes were emulating the folkways of the WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) community but were not integrated into it. They dressed, entertained and furnished their homes according to the patterns set by the majority but they celebrated different holidays and often found themselves unwelcome in gentile society." Rosa Sonneschein (1847–1932), an enterprising woman from St. Louis, founded and edited the periodical. The American Jewess offered the first sustained critique, by Jewish women, of gender inequities in Jewish worship and communal life. Sonneschein gained support for the magazine during the Jewish Women's Congress at the World's Colombian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. The first issue was