The Lives of Jessie Sampter

Front matter

TPAS Lives OT SARAH IMHOFF

Jessie sampter _.

(eh as

Index

Acknowledgments

I have been living with Jessie Sampter for so long that sometimes I wonder if my colleagues and friends feel as though she lives with them too. Winnifred Sullivan would ask me, “How’s Jessie?” She’s still captivating, Winni.

I could never have come to know so much of Sampter were it not for the generosity and knowledge of archivists and kibbutz members. Dana Herman at the American Jewish Archives, Erin Hess at the Ira and Judith Kaplan Eisenstein Reconstructionist Archives, and everyone at the Central Zionist Archives and the Archives for the History of the Jewish People helped me track down traces of Sampter. I am especially grateful to the members of Kibbutz Givat Brenner who welcomed me when I walked up the hill, sweaty after hiking from the bus stop, trying to find the archives but at first finding only the dentist: Michal, who shared everything she knew that the kibbutz archive held; Danny, who gave me rides to the bus stop in his motorized cart after that first day; and Mimi, who brought me into her home and fed me.

I wish I could do justice to everyone by naming them, but lists are inadequate ways of expressing gratitude. So, a sampling of things for which I am grateful: Jake Beckert read all the way through a weird and sometimes disturbing novel to see what I’d missed about a character based on Jessie. Cooper Harriss has definitely heard me talk about Sampter at least five times, and he always has something productive to say. Winnifred Sullivan has been not only a cheerleader but also a sharp reader. This book owes so much to my graduate student conversation partners: Dale Spicer would pop into my office to talk about disability studies. Mihee Kim-Kort’s enthusiasm for our theoretical readings about the body inspired me. Mike Aronson, Jake

Beckert, Jakob Breunig, Steve Kaplin, Dale Spicer, and Eliana Schechter all read an early version and helped me think about the book in the context of American Judaism. Sabina Ali helped me with editing the manuscript.

I’ve been known to describe the Department of Religious Studies at Indiana University, dryly, as “remarkably functional.” And it’s true. Faculty and graduate students alike have offered advice and generous critique about so many bits and pieces that made their way into this book. But more than that, my colleagues have made it a wonderful intellectual home. I feel such gratitude for you all.

I have also found a wonderful, supportive corner of the Jewish studies world: S. J. Crasnow shared their insights on queer theory. David Weinfeld sent me correspondence between Horace Kallen and Sampter, and Sharon Musher shared a letter from Hadassah Kaplan to her father, Mordecai, mentioning her visit with Sampter. Esther Carmel-Hakim shared her historical expertise. Gregg Gardner and Dustin Atlas each responded to pleas on social media for photos and pamphlets. Lea Taragin-Zeller helped me think better about kinship. Eli Sacks, Sam Brody, Rachel Gordan, Susannah Heschel, Andrea Cooper, Paul Nahme, Alex Kay, Yonatan Brafman, and Jessica Marglin have inspired me, as conversation partners and as scholars in our little modern Jewish studies writing group.

The field of American religion has been such a source of wisdom and kindness that I hardly know where to begin: the friends and colleagues who made the Taking Exception workshops Cooper Harriss and I hosted into something really special; Samira Mehta, who knows what I’m thinking at conferences just by looking at my face; and the reading group of women who both say smart things and are willing to co-complain in the face of yet another month of a pandemic.

I also want to thank everyone who invited me to speak with them and their students: Ilana Szobel and her colleagues at Brandeis; Seth Perry, Judith Weisenfeld, and the whole Religion in America faculty and graduate student crowd at Princeton; Craig Perry and his colleagues at Cincinnati; Mark Raider, who included me in his conference about World War I; Elizabeth Shakman Hurd and Winnifred Sullivan, who hosted the lively At Home and Abroad project; the wonderful department at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte; Larisa Reznik and her religious studies colleagues at Pomona College; Hillary Kaell at Concordia University; and Melissa Wilcox, Amanda Lucia, Michael Alexander, and their colleagues at the University of California, Riverside. Those talks felt like conversations to me: I learned what students, community members, and faculty thought viii + ACKNOWLEDGMENTS about Jessie Sampter, and I wondered how I could better answer their questions in the book.

I could not have done this without financial support from Indiana’s Borns Jewish Studies Program, the Hadassah Brandeis Institute, New Frontiers at Indiana, and the College Arts and Humanities Institute at Indiana. Several sentences in this book also appear in my contribution to American Religion at Home and Abroad, edited by Elizabeth Shakman Hurd and Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, and a small section of chapter 4 is slated to appear as part of my essay in Over There: American Jews and World War I, edited by Mark A. Raider and Gary P. Zola.

I especially want to thank Sandra Korn, editor extraordinaire. Right from the beginning, she has been fabulous to work with. She found brilliant and generous readers who renewed my faith in the peer-review process. This is surely a better book because of them.

This book and I both owe so many of the better parts of ourselves to my family, both chosen and more conventional. Eva, your verve and snark and brilliance shaped this from the beginning. Mom and Dad, your support has always been unwavering, and I cannot thank you for that enough. I feel immense gratitude to the nonhuman animals who offered support and a kind ear every time I wanted to talk through some new idea. Jethro (z”1), Moses, and Mr. Meowgi have been the most generous listeners a writer could imagine, even if they will never be readers. And Michael, thank you for listening and loving, and most of all putting up with Jessie and with me.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS : ix

Introduction

I first met Jessie Sampter in the Central Zionist Archives in Jerusalem. It was cold, and I was fidgeting to keep warm, alternating between sitting on my hands and using them to turn the yellowed, flaking papers. I was looking for early twentieth-century American Zionists, and since Sampter had authored the ninety-five-page A Course in Zionism, a primer for understanding support for a Jewish state in Palestine, I requested some of the folders cataloged under her name. I knew that Hadassah, the women’s Zionist organization, had published and promoted the first edition in 1915. In 1920 it published Sampter’s expanded version, then called A Guide to Zionism, and in 1933 a new version called Modern Palestine: A Symposium, which tipped the scales at 411 pages and included a foreword by Albert Einstein. I knew that Hadassah approved of her work, even though the books were never great commercial successes.’ Jessie Sampter, I figured as I wished for my body to warm up, would be a good example of a typical American Zionist.

She turned out to be anything but.

I don’t remember thinking about the cold after that first folder in the archive. But I do remember thinking again and again about Jessie’s body. Sometimes it felt so present to me, even though all I had were pieces of paper and a few photographs.

As I spent more time with Sampter—with her unpublished autobiographies, with her drafts of later-published poems and essays, with her letters to friends and family, with her published books and poetry—I came to realize that Sampter’s own life and body hardly matched typical Zionist ideals: while Zionism celebrated strong and healthy bodies, Sampter spoke of herself as “crippled” from polio and plagued by weakness and sickness her whole life; while Zionism applauded reproductive women’s bodies, Sampter never married or bore children. In fact, she wrote of homoerotic longings and had same-sex relationships we would consider queer.

Sampter was also quite complex in other ways, I came to see. In late 1918 she sat with several friends and used a Ouija board to ask her dead mother: Did she approve of Jessie’s recent return to Judaism? And how did she feel about Jessie’s embrace of Zionism and plan to move to Palestine? These were pressing questions for the thirty-five-year-old. And the more I read about Sampter’s life, the more questions I asked myself. The traditional 613 Jewish commandments prohibit trying to contact the dead (no. 64, according to the medieval rabbi Maimonides) and divination (no. 62). So how did Sampter understand Judaism? And the nature of the world and the afterlife? She seemed to be full of paradoxes.

These questions drew me in. I wanted to know more about her everdeveloping inner life. I saw her not only as a writer but also as a lover of children, a conflicted pacifist, an adoptive mother, an advocate for the disabled, and an Orientalist who became too comfortable pushing Arabs to the margins of society in Palestine. She also became a puzzle: How did a queer, disabled woman become a voice of American Zionism? And how should I write about the life and embodied experiences of this woman who defied social norms and confounded available categories of sexuality? The more I turned to her, the more she turned me to bigger questions. She became a way for me to think about the relationship between an embodied life and a body of thought—and a way for me to quietly theorize how those two things are entwined in wonderful and complex ways.

To Write Her Life

Why write a life at all? I am an academic, after all, and we generally leave the writing of presidential biographies and celebrity lives to more popular writers. Academic historians can be dubious of biography as a genre. To many, it seems small, amateurish, insufficiently analytic, unworthy. To others, it smacks of the kind of “great man” histories that paint the world as a place where events are driven by a tiny elite, as if the course of history could always be understood by looking closely enough into the lives of these few, usually white, men. Biography rarely serves as a way to rethink the well-trodden paths of established methods.

And yet here I am, writing a book that centers on a single person from the past. It is not primarily because I think Sampter has been neglected, though I do think that is true. During her life she was extremely well connected, and her work was read in both the United States and Palestine. Yet understanding Sampter will not make us see the causes of World War I differently, will not radically change our perspective on the British Empire's dealings in the Middle East, and will not force us to rewrite the history of poetry. I do not think that Sampter transformed the world by the sheer force of her intellect or actions, and so this is not a biography in the “great man” style that claims that its subject is important for making sense of a larger historical narrative. My point is in some ways much smaller and in other ways much bigger: analyzing her life illuminates a sometimes invisible aspect of the human condition—that our embodied selves do not always neatly line up with our religious or political ideals. My point is also a theoretical one, though it lurks beneath the text more often than on its surface: bodies, senses, and feelings are important sources of knowledge.

Maybe this isn’t a biography, then. Historian Jill Lepore differentiates between the foundational assumptions and goals of two genres of writing: “If biography is largely founded on a belief in the singularity and significance of an individual’s contribution to history, microhistory is founded upon almost the opposite assumption: however singular a person’s life may be, the value of examining it lies in how it serves as an allegory for the culture as a whole”? Sampter offers this opportunity: her distinctive embodied experience points to the far wider cultural phenomenon of the complex relationship between the body and religious thought. Writing a microhistory about Sampter means staking a theoretical claim that embodiment is a critical piece of even the most intellectual lives. And yet this book is still life-writing, and I identify it with this etymological sense of biography. The relationship to biology resonates with attention to physical bodies and embodiment, even as what it means to write a body into textual existence has never been as clear as what it means to write a philosophical analysis or a history. I have come to think of this book as belonging to a slightly off-kilter genre: weird biography.

I wrote this weird biography about Sampter because I am fascinated by her—and also because I believe that historians and other scholars should think more and better about embodiment, and one of the best ways to do this is through a single person. A single body. Of course, even a single body implicates other bodies: familial bodies, social bodies, and the body politic all make significant appearances here. Still, Sampter’s body, with all its relationships and permeability and vulnerability, remains the center for my thinking about bodies more generally. When I call for greater attention to embodiment, I think I can best show its importance through one life rather than through the data of many bodies. My first book was largely about American Jewish men and their bodies and why the construction of those gendered bodies matters to our histories of religion, politics, and gender. Though the many men in those pages could illuminate general historical trends, they could not provide the same insight that this intimate look at one woman can: to show us how the body is ever present and fundamentally intertwined with the mind, the soul, religion, politics, and ideology.

An Embodied Method

Many academic books include a self-disclosure: the writers share with their readers that they write “as a middle-class white woman who grew up in upstate New York,” “as a gay Black man,” or “as an Indian who came to the United States as a child”? What is the meaning of these proclamations? Well, if we’ve learned anything from both physics and literature, it must be that an observer is never outside the system she observes. A chronicler is never objective. These writers seek to acknowledge that for their readers: I am a particular person with a particular identity, and so this book is particular to me.

How would you read this book differently if I told you I was a middle-class white woman? How do you determine which attributes are the ones that matter for understanding the me in this book? Some are clearly germane. For instance, my name and my American accent helped me gain access to materials and forge relationships at the kibbutz that I might not have been able to if I had an obviously Muslim name or an Egyptian passport, say.

And it’s true. I am a middle-class white woman. I also grow echinacea and roses, I hike, I write sitting cross-legged on the couch, my knee doesn't hurt anymore where I tore my Act, I scuba dive, I dream of being a migrating whale shark or a tiny cleaner shrimp, I will stop in my tracks to watch a red-tailed hawk fly overhead, I love an afternoon nap, I don’t eat meat, I still feel it in the pit of my stomach when I think about holding the lifeless body of my first dog, I can’t reach high places but I can do pull-ups, I want to be a runner but I am so. darned. slow. Maybe those are the things you need to know to understand the me in this book. Maybe not.

There are other things you'll find, too, interspersed with my accounts of Jessie Sampter. They are integral parts of my method—an embodied method in which I seek different kinds of knowledge. Not just what she wrote, or what philosophy or history means. That, too, of course. In my research for this book, I explored not only texts and material objects—the things scholars usually interpret through reading and seeing—but also what we apprehend by other senses and feelings: what the air feels like on a hot July day on the top of the hill at the kibbutz, the sting when the soft flesh of my forearm is snagged by a rose thorn while I prune, the taste of fresh dates, the joy of creation when a seed sprouts, and the frustration when leg muscles have nothing left to give. Each of these is its own kind of knowledge.

Take a familiar example about riding a bike: although you could read how-to manuals, learn how the gears work, feel all the parts of a bicycle, and watch all the videos you wanted, you would still know something more by learning to ride the bicycle. After riding the bike, you could tell about the feeling of balance, the way something just “clicks” when the bike gets to a certain speed, the contraction of certain muscles, the extra oomph needed to get up a steep hill, and the compelling mix of nervousness, joy, and accomplishment during the first successful ride. (The phrase “It’s like riding a bike” partakes in this same shared sense that physical memories can stick with us in ways that differ from cognitive memories.) Some philosophers have explained the difference between “knowing that” and “knowing how.” The embodied knowledge in this book includes some “knowing how” and also goes beyond it to include sensations and perceptions. These sensations, perceptions, and physical knowledge matter for the way a person sees the world—in Sampter’s case, how she thinks about the relationship of nature and God, how she thinks about the social roles people with disabilities should play, and why she thinks Palestine is a homeland for her people.

I sought all of these kinds of knowledge. And I did so because I learned from it: I saw new things, I asked new questions, and I understood more. This method was the right one for this book. I am convinced that experiential knowledge shapes how we can understand Sampter, her world, and our world. It might not be the right approach for every book, and it certainly has its limitations. I’m quite critical of the idea that you can, for example, wear a blindfold for an hour or two and thereby know what life is like for a person who is blind. In many ways, this is a new approach in religious studies scholarship, but it is hardly sui generis. I have learned from the methods of other scholars who have insisted on going beyond textual and visual evidence, including focusing on bodily senses, affect, and materiality.*

Yet the search for embodied knowledge also reminds me of all the things I can't know: I can’t smell the streets of Jerusalem in 1919, I can't hear the sound of Jessie’s voice, I don’t know what it’s like to wake up wondering if I will be able to get out of bed or walk beyond the kitchen, and I certainly can’t feel the physical pains of polio. I can’t experience the past firsthand. And I can’t live in someone else’s mind and body. But that’s not new; that’s the challenge for all scholars who write about the past, or about anyone other than themselves, really. I want to get a little closer. And bringing my readers a little closer, strangely, sometimes means bringing them closer to me.

I think that, for all humanistic writers, careful attention to embodiment should be the rule and not the exception. The mind is inherently embodied. As the philosophers George Lakoff and Mark Johnson remind us, contra to Western philosophical assumptions that mind and body are fundamentally different and separate, human thought actually “arises from the nature of our brains, bodies, and bodily experience.” Brain science has shown that the neural and cognitive mechanisms that we need to move our bodies are the same ones that we need to think, conceptualize, and reason. The things that make movement possible also make metaphors possible.

It’s not just that having a body is necessary for thinking and reasoning— though of course it is—it’s also that the material of the body shapes these thought processes. Lakoff and Johnson write, “The very structure of reason itself comes from the details of our embodiment.”® I propose to take them seriously. By telling Jessie Sampter’s life as stories about the body and the mind—and insisting that we cannot tell those stories separately—we see a life more clearly. We do not, of course, see her brain’s synapses at work, but we see the profound integration of body and mind. My hope is that my readers, and especially scholars who write about people we call thinkers, recognize that this profound integration is not distinctive to Sampter. Having a body is a universal human experience, even though the particulars of that experience are different for each person. Bodies are how we experience the world, whether through eyes or fingertips or other senses, as well as shaping how we experience the world, such as through our physical capacities, race, or gender.

Studying the ways minds and bodies work also means seeing that they work imperfectly. Philosopher Jacqueline Rose summarizes the work of trans theorist Susan Stryker: “There is no body without debilitation and pain. We are all made up of endlessly permuting bits and pieces which sometimes do, mostly do not, align with each other.” This book, then, is about Sampter, but it’s also about the human condition—the condition of having a mind and a body and the condition of imperfection, internal conflict, and debilitation.

Shortly after she moved to Palestine, Sampter momentarily fantasized about being a mind but not a body: “Escape from the body, its pains, shames, and humors, prompted at times a curious disgust of the human life that at other times I idealized. Were not secretion, defecation and even eating revolting as well as troublesome? Were we not physically as noisome as the spider or caterpillar one squashes against the wall?” Yet the flesh, even with its disgust-inducing processes and properties, could not be jettisoned. Despite the appeal of getting rid of the yuckiness of a body, Sampter dismissed the very possibility of a disembodied person. That would be no person at all. She then turned her musings toward having a body without imperfection: “Then I romanced myself into a magic life, in which I would neither eat, drink, sleep, throw off waste, tire nor grow old. I should have golden-red hair and violet-blue eyes and be beautiful; or only be as I was without defect, with unfilled teeth and no deformity. I should go about the world, immortally young, incessantly active, working for the benefit of mankind.”® But she quickly dismissed this as well. Her mind and her body were one. To think otherwise was to get lost in a reverie.

Even stripped down to a handful of facts, Sampter’s life was remarkable. Born in New York in 1883, she developed an early interest in religious topics and the craft of writing, both nurtured by her beloved father, Rudolph. When she was twelve, she contracted polio, a poorly understood disease at the time. For the rest of her life, she would live with scoliosis, deformed hands and wrists, weakness, and later what we now call post-polio syndrome.

As she grew to be an adult, her interest in religion deepened, and she published two philosophical books, The Seekers and The Great Adventurer. Her own seeking brought her to Judaism and Zionism. She joined Hadassah, the American women’s Zionist organization, ran their educational department, and wrote A Course in Zionism. During World War I, she wrote two more books, the prose-poetry Sefer ha-Goyim (The Book of Nations) and the poetry collection The Coming of Peace.

She settled in Palestine on September 22, 1919. She went as an unmarried woman with no family there but with the blessing of the Zionist Organization of America. In the beginning, she lived in Jerusalem with Leah Berlin, a Russian Zionist who quickly became a central fixture in her life. She later moved to Rehovot, at that time a small town outside of Tel Aviv, where she had a house built for herself and Tamar, the Yemenite Jewish toddler she adopted in 1926. She published essays, poetry, and books—everything from children’s fiction to political essays about life in Palestine. Though she visited the United States in 1925 and 1930, she would never again call anywhere but Palestine home.’ Then, in the winter of 1933-34, she and Leah moved to Kibbutz Givat Brenner, where she used her inheritance to establish a vegetarian rest home for workers. When Tamar wasn't at boarding school in Tel Aviv, she, too, called the kibbutz home. By the end of her life, Sampter had published eleven books, dozens and dozens of poems, and hundreds of articles, including pieces in English and Hebrew. In 1938 Sampter left her room at Givat Brenner to get treatment for an illness and died at the Hadassah hospital.

But lives are about more than a chronicle of events. Sampter not only wrote and participated in political movements but also thought, felt, loved, hurt, despaired, and mourned. How, as a woman living a century later, do I know what I know about Jessie Sampter? Can I ever know what she thought and felt? Not fully, of course. But I have spent a lot of time with Sampter’s words, photographs, reading materials, and other things from the world around her. I have read all of the books she wrote, published and unpublished, in all of their editions. She wrote to her sister, Elvie Wachenheim, at least once aweek from when she moved to Palestine in 1919 until she died in 1938. These letters were often six or eight pages long, and rarely fewer than four. She praised her niece Jessie (her namesake) when she became one of the first woman airplane pilots in the United States, shared intimate details of her life in Palestine, and declared the errors of the British Empire in its handling of political violence. She wrote to colleagues and friends, including Henrietta Szold, Mordecai Kaplan, and dozens of others. “Letters are the hub of life? she once declared.!° More than a thousand of her letters survive, and I have read them all (unless I haven’t—there could always be one or two or seventeen in another archive or in a trunk in someone’s attic). I have read her essays, poems, and articles that were published in the Palestine Post, the Maccabaean, the Hebrew-language Davar, and more than a dozen other newspapers and magazines. I have also studied many of those articles and poems in their infancy since Sampter saved her marked and edited drafts. She was the animating personality behind her kibbutz newsletter and frequently wrote about her reactions and political ideals, discussing everything from day-to-day kibbutz life to world politics in both English and Hebrew. Rarely, such as when she wrote to Albert Einstein, she used German. I read those letters too.

“ps. It seems probable that letters are still being censored,” she wrote to her sister in May 1920." The immediate context was the riots earlier that spring, and yet the letter suggests something more fundamental: Sampter’s own writing is only part of the story. Although her own voice is central to this book, it is also crucial to listen to other voices around her, and so these stories also rely on the letters and publications of her friends, associates, family, and even intellectual opponents. To see her lives more clearly, I also read what she read: everything from Sigmund Freud to Benedict de Spinoza to the books that inspired Lawrence of Arabia to the Nation and the monthly magazine Asia.

I also pursued other ways of knowing: not only reading but also doing. I spent time at her kibbutz, met its schoolchildren, saw some of its agricultural work, and talked to its aging members. As much as I could, I did what she did and used the stuff that she used: I grew nasturtiums, roses, zinnias, and one (very sad) citrus tree. I tried my hand at paper-cut silhouettes. I looked at old ads for Bayer’s Compral, and I even tried to get a tube of Kondon’s Cattarhal Jelly—not the other brand, as she frequently reminded her sister in her letters requesting the medicinal gel. (No luck.)

These physical bits and pieces, the smell of the roses, the feel of a new Burpee catalog, the natural landscapes, and the built environments shaped her life profoundly. They affected not only her moods but also her religious philosophy and her Zionism.

This method of attending to the body, even when it is not on the surface of the narrative, is part of the critique disability studies makes: it is a privilege to be able to ignore your body, a privilege to pretend that your autonomous thoughts and carefully planned actions are where the real (historical and philosophical) action is at. It is also at least partly an illusion. Nancy Eiesland’s groundbreaking book The Disabled God puts it this way: “An accessible theological method necessitates that the body be represented as flesh and blood, bones and braces, and not simply the rationalized realm of activity.” That method of knowing through the body is reflected in Eiesland’s own autobiographical writing, as well as others’. She explains, “Unwilling and unable to take our bodies for granted, we attend to the kinesis of knowledge.” And scholars should too. This book shows a woman with a sophisticated set of philosophical ideas that were shaped by her embodied experience as well as her intellect—and also shows the friction among her political, intellectual, and embodied experiences. In writing this way, I also suggest that others’ lives, whether they are disabled or not, are more strongly shaped by embodied experiences than historians or scholars of religious thought often presume.