American Jewish women’s international travel and activism at the turn of the twentieth century

Abstract

ABSTRACT During the decades between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of World War II, the democratization of travel meant that going abroad became an increasingly common experience for women from all over the United States, including American Jewish women. In an era of international migration, travel as another form of international movement played a role in processes of modernization that helped shape American society. Exploring the travel experiences of American Jewish women illustrates these broader trends while also attending to the American, Jewish, and gender identity that animated their intertwined tourism and international activism. Women’s travel facilitated social and political activism and encouraged them both to observe the connections between and among diasporic Jewish communities and to note the similarities and differences among women from many countries and parts of the world. Just as travel underlined the complex interweaving of various elements of American Jewish women’s identity—national, ethnic, religious, class, cultural, gender—so, too, did it enable their explicitly political work within both feminist and Jewish international contexts.