Hungary, New York, Detoit: The Transatlantic Odyssey of Elsie Kohut Sulzberger

• In Event: Navigating Transnational Modes of Jewishness in 20th Century America

Abstract

Hungary, New York, Detroit: The Transatlantic Odyssey of Elsie Kohut Sulzberger
This paper will explore the life and communal leadership of Elsie Kohut Sulzberger, the youngest daughter of Alexander Kohut and stepdaughter of Rebeka Bettleheim Kohut. Using her unpublished autobiography ("The Ugly Duckling"), archival records from Temple Beth El in Detroit (where she was head of the Women's Auxiliary during the 1920s), and her essays in the Jewish Chronicle (the weekly newspaper of the Detroit Jewish Community), the paper will focus on three aspects of her life and how they shaped her outlook as a Hungarian Jewish immigrant in early twentieth century America. First, the paper will examine her transition from a closely knit Jewish community in a small town in Hungary to the burgeoning life of Manhattan during the Gilded Age and the way she struck a balance between a powerful nostalgia for the life she left behind and the challenges and opportunities of being a young woman in New York City and a student at Barnard College. Second, the paper will look at the challenges of growing up in the shadows of a father who was a world class Jewish scholar and rabbi and a stepmother who was a noted communal activist and feminist, and how her own worldview blended elements of her father's and stepmother's outlook (and her critique of both). Finally, the paper will consider her role as a prominent leader in the rapidly growing Jewish community of Detroit (including her ambivalence toward Zionism and the Balfour Declaration) and what this reflected about the possibilities and limits of women as Jewish communal leaders in an American Jewish Community during the 1910s and 1920s.

Author

• Howard Lupovitch, Wayne State University