AHA Session 296
Sunday, January 10, 2027: 11:00 AM-12:30 PM
Galerie 4 (New Orleans Marriott, 2nd Floor)
Chair:
Frank Tobias Higbie, University of California, Los Angeles
Papers:
Session Abstract
Historians of the United States have increasingly begun to foreground the American state’s practices of anti-radical repression in the early twentieth century, while modern Jewish historians have begun to re-evaluate the early twentieth century Jewish left. But many Jewish women radicals in the United States devoted themselves to organizing non-Jews, distancing themselves from the left-wing organizations and institutions typically recognized as Jewish, even as both the American state and radical movements frequently overlooked women as political actors. As a result, neither historians of anti-radical repression nor historians of the Jewish left have considered these radical Jewish women’s experiences. These panelists will propose creative new ways of uncovering the attitudes, opinions, and interior lives of radical Jewish women as they navigated the apparatus of state repression in the years during and after WWI. How might we build a “rebel archive” of radical Jewish women’s experiences by drawing on records of state violence such as prison records and intelligence files, as well as archives created by male, non-Jewish radicals? Moreover, how can bringing Jewish women radicals into view amid sweeping anti-radical violence push historians to reconsider the relationships among American Jewishness, gender, and the American state? Together, these panelists will show that centering radical Jewish women can expand our understanding of the parameters of anti-radical state violence, broadening its temporal scope as well as demonstrating that disciplining racial, gendered, and sexual deviance has been essential to anti-radical repression.
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