American Jewish Women’s Travel to Mandate Palestine within the Early 1900s

Supported by the Sagner Family Foundation

“The climate is perfect, the land as wondrously beautiful as the poets and prophets and idealists have described it to be.”

–Henrietta Szold (founding father of Hadassah in 1912) on her life-altering go to to Mandate Palestine in 1909

In the a long time between the tip of the Civil War and the start of World War II, American Jewish ladies took benefit of an increase in mass tourism that lowered journey prices everywhere in the world. They went abroad to sightsee, go to family and homelands, research overseas, pursue worldwide activism, and work. They additionally traveled to British Mandate Palestine in surprisingly giant numbers—a choice that was not possible to separate from their Jewishness, whether or not they outlined that in non secular, cultural, nationwide, familial, ethnic, or historic phrases. Palestine turned a spot the place American Jewish ladies examined their beliefs in a posh non secular, social, and political setting.

Professor Melissa R. Klapper, a groundbreaking scholar of American Jewish ladies’s historical past, will share findings from her forthcoming e-book, Jewish Women at Home within the World: Gender, Judaism, and American Identity within the Rise of Mass Tourism (NYU Press, Fall 2026). These ladies’s tales illuminate how worldwide journey may each destabilize and reaffirm their non secular, cultural, ethnic, nationwide, and gender identities, sparking new methods of fascinated with themselves as Americans, ladies, and Jews.

Melissa R. Klapper is professor of historical past and director of girls’s and gender research at Rowan University. She is the writer of quite a few books about American Jewish ladies and the historical past of American childhood, together with Ballots, Babies, and Banners of Peace: American Jewish Women’s Activism, 1890 –1940 (NYU, 2013), which gained the National Jewish Book Award in Women’s Studies; Ballet Class: An American History (Oxford, 2020); and, with Dianne Ashton, The Civil War Diary of Emma Mordecai (NYU, 2024). Dr. Klapper earned her Ph.D. in historical past at Rutgers University in 2001.