UC Riverside

This project illuminates Anglo-American Jewish women writers’ (AAJWW) critical appropriation of counter-history—which David Biale argues is a Jewish hermeneutic for transvaluing historical records to expose the ethical structures of the present—in their writings to critique and expand definitions of citizenship and emerging Jewish nationalisms in England and the United States between 1880 and 1923. In chapter one, “Contingent Sympathies: Politics and Poetics of Pseudepigrapha,” I examine Amy Levy and Emma Lazarus’s use of counter-history and pseudepigraphic dramatic personation to challenge the gender and racial biases of authorship and citizenship with their poetry. In chapter two, “Exposing the ‘Secret History’: Translation and Biblical Midrash,” I utilize translation theories put forward by AAJWW to expose how each relied on a counter-history hermeneutic to expand the role of women within and beyond their Jewish communities. In chapter three, “Novel Counter-histories: Contesting the ‘Jewish Type’ in the works of Amy Levy and Israel Zangwill,” I examine Levy and Zangwill’s novels as counter-histories to Joseph Jacobs and Francis Galton’s composite photographs of the “Jewish type” and expose how imperialist narratives mobilize the gender and racial bias of liberal subjectivity. In chapter four, “Counter-Photography: History as Identity in Early Alternative Zionist Discourses,” I trace the legacy of Jacobs’s “Jewish type” in early political Zionist “fauxtographic” histories—which aimed to rewrite the discourse of modern Jewish identity—and then contrast these histories with AAJWW’s historical works to expose what was being left out of this discourse of identity, namely Jewish women and indigent Jewish refugees. In chapter five, “From Plotzk to Boston: Mary Antin’s Human Document: Immigration, Genre, and Citizenship,” I situate Russian-Jewish author Mary Antin’s memoir within the transatlantic contexts of British and American fin-de-siècle immigration policies and the burgeoning literary sub-genre of invasion fiction to claim her work as a counter-history of the “invasion of America” by Jewish immigrants. In the coda, “On the Edge of Empire: Hannah Barnett Trager & Citizenship in Pre-Mandatory Palestine,” I foreground Trager’s 1923 memoir, Pioneers in Palestine, as a counter-history of pre-mandate Palestine that challenges the gender, class and racial biases of political Zionism’s vision of Jewish nationalism.