Promised Lands
Hadassah Kaplan and the Legacy of American Jewish Women in Early Twentieth-Century Palestine
Sharon Ann Musher
New York University, 2025, 261 pages
Sharon Ann Musher’s detailed analysis of her grandmother’s letters and diaries dating from her nine-month visit to British Mandate Palestine is unique in several ways. First and foremost, as the subtitle suggests, the author contends that this journey imbued Hadassah Kaplan with a lifelong commitment to the State of Israel. Musher maintains that her grandmother represented a relatively small but influential cohort of young women whose Israel experiences made them diehard Zionists, forging a bedrock of American Jewish support for the Jewish state.
Promised Lands also provides fascinating insights into Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, founder of Reconstructionist Judaism and Hadassah’s father. When Zionism was anything but a given among American Jews, Kaplan managed to translate Ahad Ha’am’s conception of Zion – as a cultural focal point inspiring Jewish revival worldwide – into a universalist utopian vision of a Jewish model society. Kaplan and his followers saw their efforts to develop a Jewish homeland as bettering the world – the tikkun olam now so popular among progressive Jewish communities – rather than creating issues of dual loyalty for American Jewry.
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