Jewish Journeys: American Jewish Women and Jewishness Abroad, 1865-1940

• In Event: Jewish Travel and Tourism in the Modern Era

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 American women from a range of social strata, including Jewish women. In an era of international migration, tourism 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 travel for the purposes of education, sightseeing, work, activism, and exploring family heritage.

Regardless of their initial purpose in traveling, for American Jewish women virtually every type of travel abroad elicited further expressions of Jewishness because almost anywhere in the world they went there was Jewishness to be found. From the 1870s through the 1930s, American Jewish women travelers’ sense of Jewish identity extended beyond the familial, which might have sent them to particular homelands, to the communal, which led them to go to all manner of Jewish sites whenever they traveled overseas. They visited synagogues, Jewish quarters, kosher restaurants, Jewish cemeteries, and historic ghettoes. They marked Jewish holidays and found other Jewish travelers with whom to socialize. American Jewish women travelers were especially alert to the status of women in the Jewish communities they encountered and the Jewish spaces in which they spent time. Even if their primary motivation for travel was not as fundamentally Jewish as returning to homelands or visiting family, Jewishness still played a central role in their experiences abroad.

Author

• Melissa Klapper, Rowan University