How were the feminist and Zionist aspects of Reconstructionist Judaism influenced by founder Mordecai Kaplan’s experience of raising four daughters? And when the second, Hadassah, spent a year in British Mandate Palestine, how did her travels – and her peers’ – impact American Jewish culture?

In the spring of 2013, just after the funeral of my 101-year-old grandmother, Hadassah, I found myself opening the small drawers of her elegant, wooden-nook desk, looking to recover traces of the vivacious woman she had been before dementia overshadowed her final years. Tucked inside a mail-order catalogue, between the sections on sweatshirts and bras, was a letter dated April 6, 1925, from her father, Mordecai Kaplan. The founder of Reconstructionist Judaism, my great-grandfather was also known for pioneering the idea of a Jewish community center and – with his eldest daughter, Judith – the bat mitzvah, a rite of passage now more than a century old.

In his letter, sent from Jerusalem, Mordecai apologized to his wife, Lena, for not writing more, explaining that existing between two languages – English and Hebrew – had made him inarticulate. Having just delivered a Hebrew lecture on “the nature of the Jewish self-consciousness” at the opening of the Hebrew University, he promised, upon returning to New York, to translate a detailed account from his Hebrew diary, recorded five days earlier (M. Kaplan to L. Kaplan, April 1, 1925, in Communings of the Spirit: Exploring the Journals of Mordecai M. Kaplan, 1913–1934 [Wayne State University Press, 2002], p. 204).

 

Trip of a Lifetime

I wondered what other gems were squirreled away among my grandmother’s papers. I knew that the diaries her father had kept for sixty-two years had been preserved in the archives of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College and the Jewish Theological Seminary. The value and quantity of the personal correspondence in Hadassah’s possession, however, remained unclear. I asked my parents, as they sorted through her records, to keep an eye out for her datebooks from the year she spent in Palestine in the early 1930s as a nineteen-year-old New Yorker.

Grandma first spoke to me about her travels in 1994. We spent a lot of time together that summer in her log cabin in Fairfield, Connecticut. I had just finished college and was heading to graduate school to study history. At eighty-two, she still stayed up late, drove fast, beat me at tennis, skinny-dipped regularly (her friends knew never to show up unannounced), and could distinguish a blue jay from a northern cardinal by their songs. In my green leather journal that summer, I recorded some of our conversations, especially about her life when she was just a few years younger than I was at the time.

Like many young Jewish women of her generation, Hadassah had wanted to be a teacher. When she was fifteen and a half, she entered Hunter College, known as the “Jewish Girls’ Radcliffe” (Harvard’s female counterpart). Three years later, Hadassah graduated with a bachelor’s degree and a teaching certificate. Shortly before beginning her second year of teaching, in mid-August 1932, she found out that the school would not rehire her. In the depths of the Great Depression (1929–39), Hadassah’s prospects for finding work were slim. For the next two years, school officials banned all new hiring. They also furloughed instructors, slashed wages, instituted loyalty oaths, and distributed the remaining work among substitute teachers. Assumptions based on gender, age, and religion discouraged schools from employing the plethora of trained young, Jewish, female educators. Instead, positions were offered to jobless men.

With no job or life partner, Hadassah decided it would be a “grand thing” to go to Palestine. Her cousins Dorothy and Naomi Rubin laughed at her; nevertheless, her diary recalls her parents’ similarly resolving, during a Sabbath walk, that she should spend the year abroad. Over the next ten days, Hadassah bought a one-way ticket, found chaperones and a friend to travel with, packed her bag, and boarded the Exochorda bound for Jaffa. She spent nine months living in Jerusalem, studying Hebrew, and traveling through Mandatory Palestine, followed by a two-month return trip through the Middle East and Europe.

Women’s history is often dismissed and quite literally discarded. When the task of sorting through the fragments of a life falls to an overextended younger generation, such papers are rarely preserved. I imagined that Grandma’s cryptic datebooks might provide a window into the private realm, insights into the operations of a house full of strong women and how they influenced their father’s thinking. Reading between the lines, I aspired to uncover an intimate portrait of Hadassah and her world.

The young woman who emerges from both my memory and her records was a striking, blue-eyed brunette with a dazzling smile, whose exuberance was magnetic. Despite being the daughter of immigrants, she was a born-and-bred New Yorker with no easily discernible accent. Hadassah was an athlete, a social dancer, a lover of theater, art, and movies, and an extrovert. She was also a letter writer, keeper of diaries, and unofficial family archivist. She maintained particularly thick documentation of her year abroad, which she described as “the year of [her] life” (H. K. Musher, interview by Marilyn Price, New York, August 19, 2002). In addition to datebooks, she saved her correspondence with her three sisters and parents, meticulously labeled photographs, a composition book in Hebrew and English, a detailed budget, and even receipts. 

Hadassah’s archive reveals the role of a Jewish homeland in the imagination of American Jewish women in the early 20th century, before such connections became normative. She joined a relatively small but influential group of adventurous female peers with the resources to travel, who studied, worked, volunteered, and in some cases settled in Mandate Palestine. By contributing to the development of a living Judaism in this way, such women could challenge cultural norms while remaining “good Jewish” daughters, wives, and mothers