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 Mining print and archival sources (including newspapers, magazines, novels, letters, diaries, and unpublished writings), Harrison-Kahan narrates the obscured lives of these pioneering women and considers how literary communities—from bourgeois women's clubs to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