book talk

Join author Melissa R. Klapper for a discussion of her new book Jewish Women at Home in the World: Gender, Judaism & American Identity in the Rise of Mass Tourism with AJHS historian Andrew Sperling.
While Americans have gone abroad for leisure and education since the early days of American history, the period between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of World War II saw the rise of mass tourism, with changes in the way travel operated opening up the world in new ways for millions of people. It was during this era that a wide range of American Jewish women began to travel more extensively, experiencing their journeys through their unique intersecting national, religious, and gender identities.
In Jewish Women at Home in the World, Melissa R. Klapper documents the remarkable number of American Jewish women who traveled abroad in the mid-19th to mid-20th century. These women went to school overseas, visited relatives and hometowns, worked abroad, attended international activist meetings, and took sightseeing trips alone, with family members or friends, or with organized tour groups. The volume looks specifically at the role that gender and Jewish identity, as well as their American background, played in the women’s choices of where to go, what to do, whom to see, and how to behave.
Ticket Info: Free; register online for a Zoom link
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book talk