West of the Ghetto

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 Mining print and archival sources (including newspapers, magazines, novels, letters, diaries, and unpublished writings), Harrison-Kahan narrates the obscured lives of these pioneering women and considers how literary communities—from bourgeois women’s clubs to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.

Author Biography

Lori Harrison-Kahan is a professor in the English department at Boston College. She is the editor of multiple books, including Matrilineal Dissent: Women Writers and Jewish American Literary History, which was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Awards, and The Superwoman and Other Writings by Miriam Michelson (both Wayne State University Press). She is also the author of The White Negress: Literature, Minstrelsy, and the Black-Jewish Imaginary and has published widely on Jewish American women’s literature.