From Margins to Make Believe: Emily Solis-Cohen, Jr. and the gendered challenges of authority

• In Event: The Time and Space of Feminism: Women Renarrating Jewish Authority and Leadership

Abstract

Emily Solis-Cohen, Jr. (1886-1966) penned many works in her lifetime—books, children’s anthologies, poetry, plays, and newspaper columns. Ironically, among historians of Jewish Americans, she is nearly as well known for what she did not publish as for what she did. Solis-Cohen left behind manuscripts of not just one, but two unfinished biographies of Isaac Leeser (1806-1868). This paper draws upon Solis-Cohen’s marginalia in her manuscript drafts to examine how authority and scholarship take place in not just public, but also private, spaces–and in process, not just in final products. It also considers how Solis-Cohen both invokes and subverts various kinds of rabbinic authority in her essays describing her travels for the Jewish Welfare Board, in her children’s literature, and in her compiled handbook on women and Jewish law.
Although the origins of this paper come from work for the 2023 Oxford Summer Institute in Jewish Studies, I have already analyzed more marginalia than I had done at that time; by the time of the AJS meeting I will have visited (at minimum) two more archives, providing more extensive context; and I will be looking more closely at her work with the Jewish Welfare Board, which was minimal in the original paper.

Author

• Jodi Eichler-Levine, Lehigh University