American Jewish women’s international travel and activism at the turn of the twentieth century

ABSTRACT

During the decades between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of World War II, the democratization of travel meant that going abroad became an increasingly common experience for women from all over the United States, including American Jewish women. In an era of international migration, travel as another form of international movement played a role in processes of modernization that helped shape American society. Exploring the travel experiences of American Jewish women illustrates these broader trends while also attending to the American, Jewish, and gender identity that animated their intertwined tourism and international activism. Women’s travel facilitated social and political activism and encouraged them both to observe the connections between and among diasporic Jewish communities and to note the similarities and differences among women from many countries and parts of the world. Just as travel underlined the complex interweaving of various elements of American Jewish women’s identity—national, ethnic, religious, class, cultural, gender—so, too, did it enable their explicitly political work within both feminist and Jewish international contexts.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Hannah Greenebaum Solomon, “Travels in Europe, 1927,” Box 7, Folder 7, Hannah G. Solomon Family Collection (HGS hereafter).

2 Helen Solomon travel diary, June 3, June 17, 1904, Box 1, Folder 13, HGS.

3 Hannah Greenebaum Solomon travel diary, undated July, July 23, 1904, Box 1, Folder 13, HGS.

4 For more on this dynamic, see Klapper, Ballots, Babies, and Banners of Peace.

5 Hannah Greenebaum Solomon travel diary, December 20, 1923, January 11, 13, 14, 15, 1924, Box 2, Folder 1, HGS.

6 Hannah Greenebaum Solomon travel diary, July 23, 24, 25, 26, 28, 29, August 4, 5, 9, 1930, Box 2, Folder 3, HGS.

7 For a useful overview of new American interest in such engagement and its relevance to activism, see Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings.

8 Rupp’s Worlds of Women makes this point about the inextricable links between women’s “leisure” travel and internationally focused political work, arguing that the development of the international women’s movement during the late 1800s and early 1900s both resulted and depended on women’s travel across national borders.

9 Studies of Americans travelling abroad include Adler, “Origins of Sightseeing”; Caesar, Forgiving the Boundaries; Kilbride, Being American in Europe, 1750–1860; and Stowe, Going Abroad.

10 Smith, Moving Lives, 2 ff.

11 On women, gender, and travel, see Bassnet, “Travel Writing and Gender”; Harper, Solitary Travelers; Roberson, “American Women and Travel Writing”; Smith, Moving Lives; and Steadman, Traveling Economies.

12 Books that do contain some information on American Jewish women’s travel for activist purposes include Klapper, Ballots, Babies, and Banners of Peace; Kuzmack, Woman’s Cause; and McCune, “The Whole Wide World Without Limits”.

13 Setty Swartz, London, to Simon Kuhn, Cincinnati, July 2, 1888, Box 1, Folder 7, Setty Swartz Kuhn Papers (SSK hereafter).

14 Rose Freed Hertz, account of trip to Palestine, 1925, March 31, Levin Family Papers. Hertz was married to the Chief Rabbi of England, but she was American and never stopped identifying as such.

15 Twain, The Innocents Abroad.

16 Pratt, Imperial Eyes.

17 Hannah Greenebaum Solomon travel diary, January 9, 11, 1924, Box 2, Folder 1, HGS.

18 Although focused on a very different set of encounters among various groups of Ashkenazi, Sephardi, and Mizrahi Jews in pre-state Palestine, early Israel, and North African Jewish communities in places like Algeria and Morocco, Yaron Tsur’s reference to “a special—internal—case of orientalism” that resulted from a combination of colonial attitudes, ethnic-based nationalism, and shared Zionist and/or religious ideology suggests a similar space for engagement among Jewish groups that was neither hegemonic nor coequal. Further research will be required to evaluate how useful this concept is to the case of American Jewish women who travelled to Palestine and other non-western Jewish communities. See Tsur, “Israeli Historiography and the Ethnic Problem,” 231–77, esp. 265 ff.

19 Helen Solomon travel diary, May 23, 1904, Box 1, Folder 13, HGS.

20 Hannah Greenebaum Solomon, “Travels in Europe, 1927”; Antler, The Journey Home, 62. For more on Constance Lady Battersea and the Jewish Association for Protection of Girls and Women see Kuzmack, Woman’s Cause.

21 Iphigene Bettman, unpaginated travel journal, 1931, Box 1, Folder 12, Bettman Papers.

22 Soyer, “The Travel Agent as Broker Between the Old World and the New,” 356–7, 350.

23 On the development of tourism at the end of the nineteenth century, see MacCannell, The Tourist, 60 ff; Smith’s introduction in Hosts and Guests; and Zuelow, A History of Modern Tourism.

24 For example, Sarah Adler Goldman, Paris, to her children, June 1, 1920, Box 1, Folder 27, Sanborn Papers and Hannah Greenebaum Solomon, “Travels in Europe, 1927.”

25 Clara Lowenburg Moses, “My Memories,” 173; Alice Pentlarge travel diary, May 24, July 4, July 11, July 20, July 28, October 6, 1909, Box 1, Loeb Papers.

26 See Las, Jewish Women in a Changing World.

27 Kohut, My Portion, 283.

28 There were complicated internal gender politics around this delegation. NCJW sent a group of women under its own auspices after the Jewish Welfare Board and other communal organizations refused to include women in their delegations. See McCune, “The Whole Wide World Without Limit” and Antler, The Journey Home, 53–4

29 For somewhat dated but still useful histories of the JDC, see Handlin, A Continuing Task and Bauer, My Brother’s Keeper. Granick’s studies of international Jewish relief represent a fresh take on this history. See her articles “Waging Relief” and “The First American Organization in Soviet Russia.”

30 Sarah Adler Goldman, Paris, to her children, May 28, June 1, 1920, Box 1 Folder 27, Sanborn Papers.

31 Rose Freed Hertz, account of trip to Palestine, 1925, March 30, 31. On the suffrage movement in Palestine, see Shilo, Girls of Liberty. For an overview of the history of Hadassah, see Simmons, Hadassah and the Zionist Project.

32 Clara Lowenburg Moses, “My Memories,” 173–4.

33 Jennie Franklin Purvin, Berlin, to “Friend,” August 10, 1926, Box 15, Folder “Travels,” Purvin Papers.

34 For more on Kuhn and Reyher’s 1929 trip, see Klapper, “The Great Adventure of 1929.”

35 Sandell, The Rise of Women’s Transnational Activism, 137–8.

36 Setty Swartz Kuhn’s travel journal, September 9, 1929, Box 4, Folder 1, SSK; Rebecca Hourwich Reyher’s travel journal, October 22, November 8, November 14, November 15, November 23, 1929, Box 11, Folder 6, Reyher Papers; Reyher, “Search and Struggle for Equality and Independence,” Part VIII, “Career Stepping Stones.”

37 See Klapper, “The Great Adventure of 1929.”

38 For more on these trips, see Bosch with Kloosterman, Politics and Friendship and Jacobs, Memories, 151–63.

39 Agnes Goldman, Alexandria, to her family, June 30, 1918, Box 1, Folder 50, Sanborn Papers. It is unclear from her letters whether she was referring to the longstanding Egyptian Jewish community in Alexandria or the eastern European Zionist pioneers who had made Aliyah but were expelled from Palestine to Alexandria during World War I, but the latter is most likely.

40 On the social dynamics of voyages see Renella and Walton, “Planned Serendipity.”

41 Selma Robinson, on board Excambio, to Aaron and Eli Robinson, June 13, 1935, Robinson Papers.

42 Rebecca Hourwich Reyher’s travel journal, August 23 24, 25, 26, 28, 31, September 28, September 29, 1924, Box 10, Folder 9, Reyher Papers.

43 Cecilia Razovsky, Berlin, undated but early 1920s, to Malckan, Boz 1, Folder 1, Davidson Papers.

44 Hannah Greenebaum Solomon, “Travels in Europe, 1927.”

45 Judd “A Journey to Poland,” 2–3.

46 Schneiderman with Goldthwaite, All for One, 168.

47 Nathan, Once Upon a Time and Today, 273–5.

48 In Worlds of Women, Rupp is one of the few historians of turn-of-the-century international women’s movements who even acknowledges this issue. The tragic irony of Rosa Manus’s observations is that within five years of this IWSA trip, she would be murdered at Ravensbruck, a victim of the Holocaust that revealed the depths of antisemitism even in countries like the Netherlands where it had seemed limited and ineffectual. For more on Manus, see Everard and de Haan, eds., Rosa Manus.

49 Steadman, Traveling Economies, 4–5.

50 Renella and Walton, “Planned Serendipity,” 366.

51 Ella Sachs, with AEF in France, June 1, 1918, Plotz Letters.

52 Selma Robinson, on board Excambio, to Aaron and Eli Robinson, June 2, 1935, Robinson Papers.

53 See Klapper, “The Great Adventure of 1929.”

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Melissa R. Klapper

Melissa R. Klapper is Professor of History and Director of Women's & Gender Studies at Rowan University in Glassboro, New Jersey. She is the author of Jewish Girls Coming of Age in America, 1860–1920 (NYU Press, 2005); Small Strangers: The Experiences of Immigrant Children in the United States, 1880–1925 (Ivan R. Dee, 2007); and Ballots, Babies, and Banners of Peace: American Jewish Women's Activism, 1890–1940 (NYU Press, 2013), which won the National Jewish Book Award in Women's Studies. Her most recent book is Ballet Class: An American History (Oxford University Press, 2020). She is currently working on a book about American Jewish women who travelled abroad between the Civil War and World War II.