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Promised Lands: Hadassah Kaplan and the Legacy of American Jewish Women in Early Twentieth-Century Palestine
(New York University Press, April, 2025)
Drawing on the records of Hadassah Kaplan, this work shows how travel to Palestine in the Interwar period shaped a cohort of American Jewish women who went on to center Zionism in American Jewish institutions and communities. Hadassah was the author’s grandmother as well as the second daughter of Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan—founder of Reconstructionist Judaism and initiator of the bat mitzvah with his eldest daughter.
Promised Lands was selected as one of the Jewish Women’s Archive’s 2025 Book Picks and also twice for Hadassah Magazine’s 2025 Shabbat Bookshelf (April 18, 2025 and July 4, 2025). It has been reviewed by the Jewish Review of Books (here and here), Lilith Magazine, The Jewish Book Council, Hadassah Magazine, and Segula Magazine.
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Democratic Art: The New Deal’s Influence on American Culture
Throughout the Great Recession American artists and public art endowments have had to fight for government support to keep themselves afloat. It wasn’t always this way. At its height in 1935, the New Deal devoted $27 million—roughly $461 million today—to supporting tens of thousands of needy artists, who used that support to create more than 100,000 works. Why did the government become so involved with these artists, and why weren’t these projects considered a frivolous waste of funds, as surely many would be today?
Democratic Art was selected by Choice, a publication of the Association of College and Research Libraries, and reviewed in The American Historical Review, Journal of American History, Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art, The Annals of Iowa, The Living New Deal Newsletter, Mid-Atlantic New Deal Newsletter, National New Deal Preservation Association Newsletter.