Pioneering Jewish Women Writers in the Progressive Era

FAIN: FT-249217-16

Lori Harrison-Kahan
Boston College (Chestnut Hill, MA 02467-3800)

A book-length study of a group of American women Jewish writers based in San Francisco.

“The Deghettoization of American Jewish Literature: Pioneering Women Writers in the Progressive Era” examines a group of turn-of-the-twentieth-century, San Francisco-based writers whose work provides alternatives to the ghetto tale that has long dominated scholarship on early Jewish American literature. Broadening our understanding of pre-World War I Jewish literary history and American women’s writing, this project tells the stories of forgotten women writers (Emma Wolf, Bettie Lowenberg, Miriam Michelson, Harriet Lane Levy, Anna Strunsky, and Rose Strunsky) who made important contributions to American and transnational literary culture during the Progressive Era. The work of these writers may be over a century old, but their writings and careers offer fresh perspectives on Jewishness and gender and compel us to consider how and why certain voices have been excluded from the American literary and cultural canon and from ethnic literary history.