West of the Ghetto: Jewish Women, Old San Francisco, and American Literary Culture
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​Repositioning women writers of the American West as formative to Jewish literature.
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Blending history, collective biography, and literary criticism, author Lori Harrison-Kahan repositions the American West as a generative space for turn-of-the-twentieth-century Jewish women's literature. This book demonstrates that California-based writers Emma Wolf, Bettie Lowenberg, Harriet Lane Levy, Miriam Michelson, and Anna Strunsky played formative roles in Jewish American literary history. Shaped by ethno-religious, gender, class, and settler-colonial dynamics of San Francisco and the frontier, their works challenge masculinist views of Jewish literature and contrast dramatically with well-known stories of the New York ghetto. Mining print and archival sources (including newspapers, magazines, novels, letters, diaries, and unpublished writings), Harrison-Kahan narrates the obscured lives of these pioneering women and considers how literary communities—from bourgeois women's clubs to socialist bohemia—sustained them. With incisive purpose and clear-eyed nuance, West of the Ghetto showcases Jewish women writers' vital and wide-ranging contributions to American literary culture.
"Harrison-Kahan's pioneering study is a significant corrective and exciting intervention into several intersecting areas of literary study focused on religion, ethnicity, race, gender, and class. Harrison-Kahan at once provides an alternative geography of Jewish literary production, focused on the far west and San Francisco in particular, and at the same time introduces a cluster of overlooked and obscured women writers whose fascinating and diverse work provides a window into the complex reformist and progressive politics of the turn of the nineteenth century."
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--Rachel Rubinstein, Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences, Springfield College
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"A fascinating study of Californian Jewish women who smash every stereotype. Radicals, institution builders, snappy reporters, and socialist shapeshifters, the writers that Lori Harrison-Kahan has rediscovered—Emma Wolf, Bettie Lowenberg, Harriet Lane Levy, Miriam Michelson, and Anna Strunsky—lead us to a more expansive American Jewish literary landscape."
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--Josh Lambert, Sophia Moses Robison Professor of Jewish Studies and English, Wellesley College
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"The romance of the American West is rarely associated with Jews—much less Jewish women—but West of the Ghetto provides an important corrective through an all-star cast of cosmopolitan, Californian, Jewish women writers whose lives and writings expand our understanding of the Gilded Age, antisemitism, and Jewish experience in America."
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--Rachel Gordan, Shorstein Professor of American Jewish Culture and Society, University of Florida
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