West of the Ghetto: Jewish Women, Old San Francisco, and American Literary Culture
Repositioning women writers of the American West as formative to Jewish literature.
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 Mining print and archival sources (including newspapers, magazines, novels, letters, diaries, and unpublished writings), Harrison-Kahan narrates the obscured lives of these pioneering women and considers how literary communities—from bourgeois women's clubs to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."
--Rachel Rubinstein, Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences, Springfield College
"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."
--Josh Lambert, Sophia Moses Robison Professor of Jewish Studies and English, Wellesley College
"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."
--Rachel Gordan, Shorstein Professor of American Jewish Culture and Society, University of Florida