As scholar Melissa R. Klapper explains near the start of her ambitious and wide-ranging historical study, “recovering the experiences of American Jewish women abroad” can help us to understand the general process of modernization in American society during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, “while also shedding light on the particular transnationalism that led Jewish women to identify with other Jewish women they met while crossing borders.” Written with a historian’s eye for detail, Jewish Women at Home in the World covers Jewish women’s international travel from the mid-1800s, following the end of the Civil War, to the mid-1900s. One of the book’s greatest strengths is its inclusivity. Klapper gathers the voices of American Jewish women from diverse ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds, different degrees of religious observance, and who exhibited a variety of ways of connecting to Jewish culture and history.
Divided into seven chapters, Jewish Women at Home in the World carries readers around the world, beginning with journeys taken on transatlantic liners, the “grand steamers” that seemed to nineteenth century travelers more akin to “floating palaces” than to mere ocean vessels. Later, Klapper leads us into the Soviet Union, introducing readers to political or ideologically-motivated sightseeing. Visiting Egypt, Jewish women were struck inevitably by the irony of “returning to the place where, as the Bible had it, their ancestors had been enslaved and had then broken free.”
Near the end of the book, we see Jewish women venturing back to their homelands — particularly the shtetlach of Eastern Europe — for reasons of nostalgia. These voyages were not always happy, thanks to the “endemic poverty, limited opportunity, and persecution” that American Jewish travelers encountered during returns to the heymland. The book’s closing chapter examines Jewish women’s experiences of visiting the Holy Land (prior to the formation of the modern state of Israel). Klapper considers the ways in which a visit to Mandatory Palestine was for many Jewish women “more than merely a pleasure trip;” such an excursion could function as religious pilgrimage, an exploration of renowned archeological sites, or an encounter with Zionism.
Meticulously researched with ample use of letters, diaries, and other personal ephemera, Jewish Women at Home in the World offers readers fascinating insights into a group of travelers previously overlooked by historians. As tourists overseas, Jewish women expanded their world views, deepened their involvement in Jewish communal life, and even strengthened their intersecting identities as Americans, women, and Jews. Most importantly, Klapper illuminates how travel allowed Jewish communities to build relationships across the diaspora, linking populations that had long been separated and forging connections that have remained well into the twenty-first century.
