Women Writing Jewish Modernity, 1919–1939

"The book shows that no new work on modernism should go forward without serious engagement with women and feminist theory. In offering an account of women and Jewish modernism, the book contributes to the larger project of theorizing modernism and writing its history from the perspective of women writers who catalyzed the aesthetic and political transformation of modernism." —CHOICE

“Women Writing Jewish Modernity is a work of vital and substantial scholarship. It is—remarkably—the first study to frame the fiction written by women in Yiddish and Hebrew in the early twentieth century as a body of work that deserves consideration in its own right. Working against a strong current of misogyny, Schachter reveals, these authors were reflecting on the possibilities of storytelling to capture their experiences, desires, and aesthetic pleasures, and to imagine new forms of artistic and political community.” —Na’ama Rokem, author of Prosaic Conditions: Heinrich Heine and the Spaces of Zionist Literature (Northwestern University Press, 2013)

“In the 1990s and early 2000s there was a flowering of feminist critical writing about Hebrew and Yiddish women poets. Schachter’s book picks up where these various studies left off, focusing on important, neglected works of fiction that resisted nationalist, religious structures and conventional forms. Schachter attends to the details and experimental artistry of the writers’ fiction, widening the lens to consider as well how the works speak to and respond to broader social and cultural aspects of modernism.” —Wendy I. Zierler, author of And Rachel Stole the Idols: The Emergence of Modern Hebrew Women's Writing