Hadassah Kaplan’s Story
How do you center the stories of women who are famous in part because they are related to famous men? This is one of the challenges that Sharon Ann Musher (a long-ago Lilith intern now a history professor) faces head-on in her captivating new book Promised Lands: Hadassah Kaplan and the Legacy of American Jewish Women (NYU Press, $35.00) Part biography, part personal family history, part travelogue, part sociological analysis of the lives of American Jewish young women in the Depression, Musher tells the story of Hadassah Kaplan’s year in Israel, bookended by a bird’s eye view of Kaplan’s father Mordechai, the founder of Reconstructionist Judaism.
Yes, this is an academic work, but don’t be afraid—it’s also compulsively readable, a rich peek into daily lives from a different time that also feels seem eerily familiar. For instance: like so many young Jewish women today, Kaplan had a bat-mitzvah—except her father invented them (!) and her sister had the very first one.
Hadassah Kaplan also went to Jewish summer camp (Camp Modin in Maine, in case you were wondering) and forged life-long friendships. Feeling a bit aimless after a difficult time finding a job, Kaplan opted for the classic Jewish Middle Eastern year abroad, but at this point it was in Palestine, as it was referred to at the time and in the book, rather than modern-day Israel. She felt frustrated by her Hebrew, which was too good for the entry-level classes but not quite up to Hebrew U. scratch. Kaplan was expecting this Holy Land to be permeated with Judaism everywhere all at once, and… it wasn’t.
She debated staying a second year, but ended up coming home. She traveled to Egypt and Europe, she counted her pennies to make them stretch. She had adventures. And through it all, Kaplan wrote letters, and it was this treasure trove, rare and precious to the historian’s eye, that Musher discovered, allowing her to tell Kaplan’s story with a level of detail often missing in the lives of historical women.
As Musher emphasizes, “Women’s history and the history of those who did not hold significant public position is often dismissed and quite literally discarded.” Not here. Musher brings her deft historical touch to Kaplan’s experiences, offering rich context. For instance, not only does she explain the experience of an Atlantic crossing, but tells us what cruise lines and travel companies had to do to weather the Depression, complete with a discussion of changing accommodations and ticket prices.
Ultimately, this is Hadassah Kaplan’s story, and—through her, Rabbi Mordechai Kaplan’s story. But it’s also in part the story of Hadassah’s mother, whose own letters Hadassah kept despite her mother’s wishes. And it’s the story of Hadassah Kaplan’s friends and chap- erones and the strangers she met along the way.
And this book is also Musher’s own story, stunningly personal and proximate, because Hadassah Kaplan was her much-beloved grandmother. This isn’t just a work of history or a compelling story: it’s a family odyssey.
It also hits hard. As a historian myself, I feel Musher’s excitement at discovering her grandmother’s letters: what a gift to be able to recapture a woman’s experience, particularly a relative she knew and loved! I also don’t envy Musher the task of writing about Palestine and, necessarily, Zionism, in this particular moment. But, and I write this with full appreciation and perhaps a little bit of envy: Musher pulls it off. Her account is not just balanced and empathetic, it does the hard and delicate historical work of situating Hadassah Kaplan’s experience of Zionism in the interwar period, which today may be all but unrecognizable to many.
For instance, Musher reminds us that “One year before Hadassah’s travels, the 1931 Census of Palestine recorded that nearly 85 percent of Palestinians were Muslim or Christian, whereas only 17 percent…were Jewish.” At the same time, Musher is careful to emphasize that Mordechai Kaplan was “focused on rebuilding the nation of Israel and Jewish people to ensure the continuity of Judaism.”
And in this, Musher deploys another of the historian’s tools, perhaps the most important: contexts. Context changes. Meanings change. And, at the same time, as Musher’s book and Hadassah Kaplan both show, some people’s stories feel fresh and important, even through the fog of time.
Sharrona Pearl is the Andrews Endowed Chair of Interdisciplinary Studies at TCU. Her most recent book is Mask (Bloomsbury Academic.)
