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 (founder of Hadassah in 1912) on her life-altering visit to Mandate Palestine in 1909
In the decades between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of World War II, American Jewish women took advantage of a rise in mass tourism that reduced travel costs all over the world. They went overseas to sightsee, visit relatives and homelands, study abroad, pursue international activism, and work. They also traveled to British Mandate Palestine in surprisingly large numbers—a decision that was impossible to separate from their Jewishness, whether they defined that in religious, cultural, national, familial, ethnic, or historical terms. Palestine became a place where American Jewish women tested their ideals in a complex religious, social, and political setting.
Professor Melissa R. Klapper, a groundbreaking scholar of American Jewish women’s history, will share findings from her forthcoming book, Jewish Women at Home in the World: Gender, Judaism, and American Identity in the Rise of Mass Tourism (NYU Press, Fall 2026). These women’s stories illuminate how international travel could both destabilize and reaffirm their religious, cultural, ethnic, national, and gender identities, sparking new ways of thinking about themselves as Americans, women, and Jews.
Melissa R. Klapper is professor of history and director of women's and gender studies at Rowan University. She is the author of numerous books about American Jewish women and the history of American childhood, including Ballots, Babies, and Banners of Peace: American Jewish Women's Activism, 1890 –1940 (NYU, 2013), which won 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 history at Rutgers University in 2001.