West of the Ghetto: Jewish Women, Old San Francisco, and American Literary Culture

Repositioning women writers of the American West as formative to Jewish literature.

Blending history, collective biography, and literary criticism, author Lori Harrison-Kahan repositions the American West as a generative space for turn-of-the-twentieth-century Jewish women's literature. This book demonstrates that California-based writers Emma Wolf, Bettie Lowenberg, Harriet Lane Levy, Miriam Michelson, and Anna Strunsky played formative roles in Jewish American literary history. Shaped by ethno-religious, gender, class, and settler-colonial dynamics of San Francisco and the frontier, their works challenge masculinist views of Jewish literature and contrast dramatically with well-known stories of the New York ghetto. Mining print and archival sources (including newspapers, magazines, novels, letters, diaries, and unpublished writings), Harrison-Kahan narrates the obscured lives of these pioneering women and considers how literary communities--from bourgeois women's clubs to socialist bohemia--sustained them. With incisive purpose and clear-eyed nuance, West of the Ghetto showcases Jewish women writers' vital and wide-ranging contributions to American literary culture.

Author: Lori Harrison-Kahan
Binding Type: Hardcover
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
Published: 01/20/2026
Pages: 320
Weight: 1.25lbs
Size: 8.99h x 5.99w x 1.11d
ISBN: 9780814352311