Hadassah and the Gender of Modern Jewish Thought: The Affective, Embodied Messianism of Jessie Sampter, Irma Lindheim, and Nima Adlerblum

Abstract

Hadassah and the Gender of Modern Jewish Thought:The Affective, Embodied Messianism of Jessie Sampter, Irma Lindheim, and Nima Adlerblum* Cara Rock-Singer (bio) In the first third of the twentieth century, a cohort of American women activist-thinkers emerged who engaged seriously with messianism. They were among the founders and influential early leaders of Hadassah, the Women's Zionist Organization of America,1 and included Jessie Sampter (1883–1938), a writer and educator;2 Irma Levy Lindheim (1886–1978), Hadassah's second national president, a writer, and rabbinical student;3 and Nima Adlerblum (1881–1974), philosopher, educator, and the founder and director of Hadassah's National Cultural and Educational Program.4 Hadassah's leaders were among the cultural critics who reckoned with the magic and loss of scientific and technological progress, lived with the lingering legacies of Platonic distinctions that elevated form over matter, [End Page 423] and wrestled with whether Judaism was an ethical, universal religion or a particular, national, and biological identity.5 They theorized Judaism in terms that exceeded the dominant framings set by male religious elites, like Stephen S. Wise and Mordecai Kaplan, with whom they collaborated. Furthermore, in an intellectual climate that presumed that secularization had unstoppable momentum, Hadassah's leaders located vitality within Jewish tradition that could bring light to the world in a time of darkness. Hadassah's thinkers engaged in metaphysical and epistemic questions about the Jewish people as constituents of social, historical, and biological systems and harnessed the intellectual resources of the Jewish tradition to nurture redemption in the physical, material world. And yet, you have likely never heard of them. If these women have been recognized at all, it has been for their involvement in American Zionism. Women's intellectual contributions to Zionist thought have undoubtedly been underappreciated. This article, however, does not primarily seek to address a problem within social or intellectual history focused on Zionism. Rather, it makes a bolder claim: Sampter, Lindheim, and Adlerblum were modern Jewish messianic thinkers. Their work to imagine and build a more perfect world through Jewish political and religious traditions has gone unrecognized as such because of the fundamentally gendered constructions that undergird these traditions and their study. The subfield modern Jewish thought is at once capacious and limiting, inconsistently inclusive of Jewish philosophy and theology, as well as of Jewish intellectuals engaged with political and social questions. According to The Cambridge Companion to Modern Jewish Philosophy, it is an open question "whether there is and has been such a thing as modern Jewish philosophy," and, if so, "what it is." Who "fit[s] that categorization" remains unsettled. One thing, however, seems clear: it is a male domain.6 [End Page 424] As Mara Benjamin has shown, the most recognized modern Jewish thinkers "assumed adult male subjects" and transformed "'daily life' or 'everydayness' into a philosophical abstraction."7 Recognizing Sampter, Lindheim, and Adlerblum as Jewish thinkers whose work remains rooted in their embodied, emotional lives, is a step toward toppling the "tyranny of the same," the patriarchal investment in reproducing the image of man.8 This article is a theoretical and methodological critique, the main goal of which is to model how to think with other forms of Jewish thought in which embodiment is central. To do so, I amplify alternative voices to more fully understand how intellectuals have reckoned with the Jewish place in modernity, which I take to be the defining feature of modern Jewish thought.9 Several factors combine to explain why the women I study have not been considered as Jewish thinkers. Not only were they women who were active intellectually during the first half of the twentieth century, but they lived and worked in the United States and the Yishuv, writing primarily for American audiences. In addition, they expressed their ideas through poetry and prose, performances on stage and in the public and private practices of their everyday lives. The reason it is hard to think of these women as messianists is related to the reason it is hard to consider them as thinkers writ large: we continue to live in a world, as they did, shaped by the "pernicious cultural and intellectual legacy of Greek...