Jerusalem Holiday

The best-known fact about Mordecai Kaplan’s family is that his oldest daughter Judith was the first young woman to celebrate a bat mitzvah, over which her father presided at the Society for the Advancement of Judaism on the Upper West Side, in 1922. Her sister Hadassah Kaplan came next and is now the subject of her granddaughter’s study of another rite of passage: her gap year in Jerusalem.

Sharon Ann Musher sees her father’s mother as representative of a generation of American Jewish women, or rather, of the small sliver of them who became intensely involved with Zionism in the early twentieth century. Of these, the most important was unquestionably Henrietta Szold, the famous founder of Hadassah, the Zionist women’s organization. The Hadassah Study Circle, which preceded the creation of the organization, actually met in the Kaplans’ living room in the fall of 1911 when Lena was pregnant with her second daughter, and Hadassah Kaplan later joked that the Zionist organization was named after her when it was officially founded in February 1912, a month after she was born, though it may have been the other way around. Whatever the case, it didn’t take her long to make her way to Zion.

Her trip to Palestine in 1932–33 was, in a sense, the original gap year, but the gap wasn’t between high school and college. It was between college and uncertainty. Hadassah had entered Hunter College at age fifteen and in 1932 was a nineteen-year-old graduate planning to become a teacher. But competing for a position in the New York City schools during the Depression—when jobs were scarce and discrimination against Jews was rampant—was hard.

Hadassah’s early graduation from college was not the achievement of a nerd. Once “driven by typical teenage pursuits: friends, sports, and boys,” she “was not a particularly serious student” at Hunter and was something of a party animal. By the time she graduated, she had matured into “a beautiful and animated woman” and had received two marriage proposals, one from a man who was already wealthy and another from a graduate student in public finance at Columbia who could promise her a secure future. But she turned them both down and headed for Palestine.

This was not an unnatural choice for a daughter of Mordecai Kaplan, a disciple of Ahad Ha’am for whom the Jewish revival in Palestine was of central importance for world Jewry. He sent his daughters to the Hebrew-speaking Camp Modin in Canaan, Maine, which was according to one observer “intensely Zionist and religiously Conservative” but according to another was a place where “the real religion . . . was Zionism.” When he visited Modin, Kaplan himself was not a completely happy camper. He didn’t think much of the minyanim or the level of Hebrew instruction. But “even if Mordecai was not excited by Modin, it had a significant impact on impressionable campers like Hadassah and her sisters,” Musher writes. Among other things, it “served as a powerful impetus for Hadassah and her peers, particularly those ‘in search of a cause.’”

Hadassah wasn’t exactly in search of a cause. Neither her time at camp nor any other experience at home in New York turned her into a farbrente Zionist. She was no Golda Meir. But she did need something to do and had been taught “by a cohort of educators . . . who viewed time spent in Palestine not as a luxury but rather as essential ‘for every Jew.’”

Hadassah’s decision to make the trip pleased both of her parents. Not only would a stay in Palestine prepare her to live a more meaningful Jewish life, they felt, but it might help make her more employable back home as a Jewish educator. “Hadassah retrospectively recalled that her decision to go to Palestine elevated her in her father’s eyes,” Musher writes. The trip to Palestine was expensive, but she had some savings of her own from substitute teaching. The Kaplans were far from rich, but they were a lot better off than most people at the time (as Musher explains in great detail) and had wealthy relatives and friends on whose resources they could draw.

So Hadassah traveled in style in first class on a luxury liner, which had comfortable accommodations, including, she wrote her parents, “‘a victrola at meals; an orchestra (to which no-one listens, but which plays from about 9:00–11:00 P.M.); a newssheet containing abbreviated news from all over as heard over the radio,’ and, in addition to regular meals, servings on deck of bouillon and crackers at 11:00 a.m. and tea and cookies at 4:00 p.m.” Far from being alone, she was chaperoned by three well-educated matrons, good friends of the Kaplans, including the then-current president of Hadassah, who had work to do in Palestine and “would collectively serve in loco parentis for Hadassah throughout her year abroad.”

On board, these worthies cut her a lot of slack, at least in part because they were seasick and bedridden a lot of the time. Together with her friend Reba Isaacson, Hadassah reveled in the opportunities that an elite group of passengers presented her to, in her mother’s encouraging words, “get new ideas and ideals and broaden out mentally.” But she did so, as Musher puts it, “in ways other than Lena and Mordecai had envisioned.” 

She and Reba formed a foursome with two young and highly eligible American men who “had drinks before and after dinner together, and regularly held midnight teas.” What Hadassah did together with Alvan Henry, the fellow who favored her, in the “space where the two could circumvent the eyes of parents and chaperones” is left to our imagination. But we know from her diary that she had at least a trace of a physical relationship with Hugh Parker, a married forty-four-year-old Scotsman traveling solo, who pursued her ardently. 

When their ship docked in Marseilles on Rosh Hashanah, Hadassah toured the city with her friends but made no attempt “to locate the Grand Synagogue in the sixth arrondissement, with its elegant stained-glass windows and Romanesque arches.” Her father had good reason, it seems, to feel “his own shortcomings in not being able to persuade even his own family of the beauty and meaning in Judaism.” 

Whatever disappointment he might have felt, however, may have been assuaged by the fact that Hadassah and Reba also rented deck chairs by the Exochorda’s pool and, according to Hadassah’s letters home, sat there reading Ahad Ha’am and the Bible to each other in Hebrew.

Hadassah had a lot of connections in Palestine from the moment she arrived, including old friends from summer camp and new ones from the ship, many of whom were free to dance and party with her at the recently opened King David Hotel and other Jerusalem hot spots. This news left her mother less than thrilled, even though Hadassah had written her that at the parties “we tried to speak only Hebrew + we sang some Hebrew songs.” Lena complained:

When you were here you said that you were fed up with night clubs and dancing etc. etc. and here you are whether at Marseilles, Alexandria, Cairo [which Hadassah had visited when her ship docked in Alexandria] or Jerusalem you are doing the same thing all over again.

But Hadassah wasn’t just having a good time. Once she settled down in Jerusalem, she signed up for Hebrew lessons at the Hebrew University and Bible classes with Nelson Glueck (later to become a famous archaeologist and leader of the American Reform movement) and traveled the country visiting biblical sites. This wasn’t enough for her parents: “Lena urged her daughter to visit . . . the Jewish agricultural settlements in Palestine, and to ‘see what . . . Hadassah is doing.’” And she worried that she wasn’t meeting the right people in Jerusalem, including the Kaplans’ friends Judah Magnes, the American Reform rabbi and communal leader who had become president of the Hebrew University, and his wife, Beatrice.

Just before receiving a reminder to get in touch with the Magneses, Hadassah had in fact met their eldest son, David, on a week-long expedition to Petra, in what is now Jordan. She wrote home that he had, in Musher’s words, “showered her with chivalrous attention” and, in her own words, was “‘the biggest dope’ she had ‘ever come across.’” When he invited her to a fundraiser dance at the King David, she turned him down. 

Hadassah did, however, consort with the son of another notable figure. Although she had dropped her Hebrew class at the Hebrew University, she had continued with a private tutor and also practiced the language “while taking long walks and motorcycle rides with mostly young men, including the lexicographer Eliezer Ben-Yehuda’s son.” Still, she had to confess to her parents that she didn’t really speak Hebrew with “anyone except [her] teacher—except on rare occasions (almost once a day).”  As Musher writes:

She also feared “wasting time,” as she wrote home, “without accomplishing what I set out for—+ most of all what you [Lena] + papa expect. I know you expect me to be a different person when I come home—Perhaps I am changing, but I am so materialistic I’d like to see it immediately. I’ll die if you’re disappointed when I return. So please don’t expect too much—remember there wasn’t much to begin with!”

This nineteen-year-old who was also writing letters to her father—in Hebrew!—was too hard on herself. In one she describes a Habima performance of a translation of a Sholem Aleichem play and the reception afterward at the Vienna Café, at which Nahum Sokolow gave a learned talk (and into which she had sneaked). Musher describes Sokolow as merely a “Jewish journalist,” but he could better be described as the father of modern Hebrew journalism and was, in fact, at that moment the president of the World Zionist Organization and the Jewish Agency for Palestine. Before hearing his remarks, Hadassah wrote to her father, “I never thought you’d be able to be happy here . . . but I was actually extremely sad that you were not here yesterday evening.” Whatever gratification Mordecai Kaplan might have obtained from hearing Sokolow’s lecture would probably not have matched the elation he felt when he read his daughter’s Hebrew letters. They thrilled him, her mother told her, beyond words.

By the end of December, Hadassah wanted a break from the Jerusalem winter, and together with Reba Isaacson and another camp friend, she joined a group of tourists headed for Cairo and Luxor. There they met up with two of her Palestine-based chaperones as well as a couple Musher rather oddly introduces as “non-Zionist philanthropists and Society for the Advancement of Judaism (SAJ) members Frieda Schiff [Warburg] and Felix Warburg.” They were, in fact, the power couple of the New York German Jewish elite.

These grandees weren’t the only wealthy people Hadassah encountered in Egypt. Cairo residents Esther Levy, a New York friend of the Kaplans, and her husband, Joseph, a New York Times correspondent, rescued her from the “dump” where her Jerusalem friends were staying and put her up in their house, where she “experienced new levels of luxury and privilege.” Among other things, they supplied her and another young American female guest with a Chrysler (and presumably a driver) that ferried them “to archeological sites, bazaars, the zoo, public gardens, lunches, tea, movies, and other social affairs.” They also “invited the young women to ‘terribly swanky’ parties and cabarets filled with ‘everybody of any importance,’ including ‘very dignified’ German, French, and English officers.”

Understandably enough, Hadassah was in no hurry “to return to her cold flat in Jerusalem without central heating.” But her mother, agreeing with Mrs. Warburg that she wasn’t in “the right environment” and “should come more in contact with the real life of Palestine,” urged her to go back. By the time she received this advice, she had, in fact, already done so. And once she was there, she resumed her Hebrew readings and lessons with greater ardor:

Dialing down her social engagements, she finished Ahad Ha’am’s essays, noting in her diary the need for a spiritual renewal through Hebrew culture and calling for “revival of [the] Hebrew spirit thru [the] creation of [a] concrete Jewish Life in Palestine.”

In March, she read Judah Magnes’s controversial arguments in favor of a binational state in Palestine, one in which Jews and Arabs would coexist as equals, and seems to have been influenced but not persuaded by them. After finally following up on her parents’ advice to meet with him, she “reported home that the two ‘discussed Palestine vs. America; America’s present tsorus etc.’” “I do wish,” she added, “he’d invite me to his Seder!” That never happened, though, perhaps because Magnes knew that she had snubbed his son.

Hadassah’s first observations of the religious life in the country had left her cold. What she did enjoy were the public celebrations of Shabbat and holidays, especially Purim, which she spent in Tel Aviv. But nothing she saw prevented her from writing to her father that Palestine was “the least religious place in the world.”

After Purim, Hadassah finally headed for the nascent world of the kibbutzim. She was enthusiastic about what she found there, especially at Geva, in the Jezreel Valley, where she relished the informality, the fieldwork, and the intimacy and spirit of everyday life. Instead of being a Seder guest of the Magneses, Hadassah spent the evening at a two-year-old settlement established by immigrants from Detroit, where she “enjoyed a ‘very pleasant’ but ‘not Seder-like’ Passover, including meat and potatoes, soup with ‘hard knedlach [matzah balls], wine and cakes,’ followed by singing and circle dances, including the horah and polka, as well as ‘very funny’ skits about people in the settlement.” It was all very exciting, but, she decided, it wasn’t for her. About Palestine itself, however, she wasn’t so sure and vacillated for a while about remaining there:

On the one hand, she loved the “freedom—the feeling that you’re in a new country and seeing it being built—and trying to help it grow.” . . . At the same time, she worried about leaving her friends and family in the United States. “I often have the feeling,” she reflected, “that were I to stay here I’d probably be very happy now—but grow lonely later on.”

It was not in Jerusalem (where she had spent most of her time) but in Tel Aviv that she finally made up her mind. There ‘“all you do,’ she explained, ‘is walk on the beach on Yom Tov—+ it’s more crowded than Coney Island.’ ‘I am almost certain,’ she wrote her father in Hebrew, ‘that Tel Aviv . . . will soon be like West End Avenue.’” If that was the case, she may have reasoned, why not return to the real thing? On June 16, she did.

Musher has written an insightful, colorful, and loving account of a key stage in her grandmother’s formative years. Despite its undoubted uniqueness, it seems in many respects like the prototype of the youthful encounters with life in the Holy Land of many American Jews over the past century. The sequel to this year, which Musher only sketches, also resonates. After returning to the US, and a brief career in the public schools, Hadassah found her place:

Like many women of her generation with the means to do so, Hadassah focused on her family and brought much of what she had learned in Palestine—her Hebrew, travel savviness, and commitment to building a Jewish civilization—to her teaching, volunteer work, and lay leadership.

She did so for many years at the SAJ, where she “imbued her love of Jewish art, music, dance, and the Hebrew language into the synagogue’s Women’s Division and the Hebrew school’s parent-teacher association, which she led.” When her husband, Sidney Musher, cofounder of the beauty product company Aveeno, retired, he became the managing director and chairman of the Palestine Endowment Fund, which had been founded in 1922 to channel charitable funds to Palestine (and later Israel). Hadassah traveled regularly with him to Israel and continued to go there every year after his death, until she was well into her eighties. “She also remained an active Hebrew speaker.” Indeed, “for three weeks near the end of her life,” when she suffered from dementia, “Hadassah entirely switched to speaking Hebrew, seemingly having forgotten her English.”

Promised Lands is, on the whole, an illuminating tribute to Hadassah Kaplan, but it is not really the account of American Jewish women in early twentieth-century Palestine that its subtitle implies. How could it be, when the most consequential such woman, Henrietta Szold, the founder of Hadassah, only figures peripherally? We learn more (and many interesting things) about Hadassah’s sister Selma, who had no particular interest in Zion, than we do about all but one or two of the many American Jewish women with strong Zionist concerns in this period.

Musher’s own concern with Zion is, at bottom, a rather ambivalent one. It’s evident from her treatment of Hadassah’s interaction with Judah Magnes that she herself has at least a lot of sympathy for his opposition to the path taken by the Zionist movement. She laments the fact that her grandmother seems to have been “more persuaded by the Junior Hadassah Primer,” which downplayed the significance of Arab nationalism, “than by Magnes.”

This sort of wry condescension with respect to her grandmother’s myopia recurs fairly often in her narrative, most notably in her account of the month she spent on kibbutzim. When she was staying at Ein Harod, “might she have used her recent reading of Magnes to interrogate the kibbutz’s foundation or its use of power for self-maintenance?” If she had, she would have learned that the process of purchasing the land from absentee landlords involved the removal from it of “largely Arab Palestinian tenant farmers who worked the land but had no legal right to it.” As a result, Musher tells us:

Ein Harod’s conflicts with its Palestinian Arab neighbors were ongoing. Battles over the growth of the kibbutz would instigate military engagements, including night raids on Arab Palestinian villages, and their resistance through attacks on kibbutz members and setting fire to their fields.

Hadassah’s failure to anticipate these last developments is something for which Musher cannot rightly hold her grandmother to account. They took place years after she had left Palestine. Moreover, the night raids to which Musher refers are no doubt those launched by the famous British-Jewish Special Night Squads in 1938, in retaliation against the violence of the Arab revolt. They marked the first attempts on the part of the Jews to take the fight, which began in 1936, onto Arab terrain. Previously, they had engaged only in self-defense, as Musher might have noted.

Sharon Ann Musher does an excellent and informative job of reconstructing her grandmother’s year in Palestine and lifelong involvement in the Zionist movement. She highlights the way in which this commitment contributed to her grandmother’s personal growth but does so, it seems, while entertaining, and occasionally expressing, serious but not always sound historical and political misgivings.