“I Journey Far ... Unto the Promised Land”: Letter Writing and Interwar American-Jewish Zionism

This paper draws on an unusual set of sources: a complete archive of letters and photographs exchanged from 1932-1933 between Hadassah Kaplan, a twenty-year old, Jewish New Yorker (and the author’s grandmother) who travelled to Palestine under the British Mandate, her three sisters, and her parents -- including Mordecai Kaplan, a prominent rabbi who founded a modern American-based Jewish ideology and movement called Reconstructionism. During a period of national isolationism and inward reflection, when travel within the United States was far more common than abroad, Kaplan’s journey echoed the Interwar movement of American moderns to Paris. It also foreshadowed a shift within the American Jewish community from Europe, where the Jewish community would shortly be largely decimated, toward a growing special relationship between America and what would become Israel.

This paper uses the letters and photographs Kaplan exchanged with her family as a window into the social expectations, cultural assumptions, family dynamics, and political ideologies shaping her world. It argues that their correspondence served both personal and political functions. Even as they documented Kaplan’s year for her own records and kept the family up to date with one another’s comings and goings, they also reflected and strengthened the Zionist commitments of Kaplan’s relatives and those in her broader New-York social circle. The correspondence provide insight into what the Hebrew language, Jewish education, and Zionist ideology meant for a small subset of educated North-American Jews coming of age in a modern world. They also highlight how travelers such as Kaplan  both reinforced and also challenged cultural assumptions and accepted knowledge about gender, race, and class.