Jewish Women at Home in the World

Vividly reveals how American Jewish women's travels transformed both their personal identities and the meaning of diaspora itself

While Americans have gone abroad for leisure and education since the early days of American history, the period between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of World War II saw the rise of mass tourism, with changes in the way travel operated opening up the world in new ways for millions of people. It was during this era that a wide range of American Jewish women began to travel more extensively, experiencing their journeys through their unique intersecting national, religious, and gender identities.

In Jewish Women at Home in the World, Melissa R. Klapper documents the remarkable number of American Jewish women who traveled abroad in the mid-19th to mid-20th century. These women went to school overseas, visited relatives and hometowns, worked abroad, attended international activist meetings, and took sightseeing trips alone, with family members or friends, or with organized tour groups. The volume looks specifically at the role that gender and Jewish identity, as well as their American background, played in the women’s choices of where to go, what to do, whom to see, and how to behave.

This highly readable book charts how spending time abroad enhanced American Jewish women' s status and often challenged conventional gender roles by expanding their autonomy. Moreover, it explores how going abroad reinforced their Jewish identity, particularly in the face of unsettling encounters with antisemitism. Drawing on a treasure trove of previously unexamined diaries, memoirs, letters, reports, periodicals, scrapbooks, and photographs, Jewish Woman at Home in the World provides an engaging analysis of travel as a crucial mechanism for solidifying a diasporic identity, allowing American Jewish women to create and maintain connections with Jews worldwide.