with Sharon Musher
Sunday, September 14, 2025 at 3pm Eastern Daylight Time (EDT)
In 1922, Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, the founder of Reconstructionist Judaism, first initiated the Bat Mitzvah as a rite-of-passage for Jewish girls. Characterized as a lifelong supporter of women’s rights, Kaplan’s family, including his wife and four daughters, played a role in shaping his ideas about women, Jewish law, and Zionism. This was especially true of his second daughter, Hadassah Kaplan, who joined a small but influential cohort of American Jewish women who studied, worked, and volunteered in British Mandate Palestine. This talk, by a granddaughter of Hadassah Kaplan Musher and a great granddaughter of Mordecai Kaplan, draws on Sharon Ann Musher’s recent book Promised Lands: Hadassah Kaplan and the Legacy of American Jewish Women in Twentieth Century Palestine, which was selected as one of the Jewish Women’s Archive’s Book Picks and also twice for Hadassah Magazine’s Shabbat Bookshelf. Promised Lands draws on a rich personal archive of diary entries, photographs, and letters, to follow Hadassah’s journey to Palestine and illustrate how travel shaped a cohort of American Jewish women who went on to shape American Jewry.
Sharon Ann Musher is Professor of History at Stockton University. She writes and teaches social, cultural, and oral history with a focus on the New Deal, Jewish women, and motherhood. Her most recent book Promised Lands: Hadassah Kaplan and the Legacy of American Jewish Women in Early Twentieth Century Palestine (New York University Press, 2025) draws on the records of her grandmother, a daughter of Mordecai Kaplan – founder of Reconstructionism. It 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. Promised Lands was selected as one of the Jewish Women’s Archive’s Book Picks and also twice for Hadassah Magazine’s Shabbat Bookshelf. Sharon is also the author of Democratic Art: The New Deal’s Influence on American Culture, which traces a range of aesthetic visions that flourished during the 1930s to outline the successes, shortcomings, and lessons of the golden age of government funding for the arts. Beyond academia, Sharon is on the boards of the Jewish Publication Society and the Living New Deal. She lives in Philadelphia with her husband, two of her three daughters, and her dog.
Readers can purchase the Promised Lands book from NYU Press for a 30% discount using the code NYUAU30. In addition it’s available through Amazon and other major booksellers.
Sharon Musher’s website with links to purchase the book and other events is available at her website https://sharonmusher.com/.
