In her talk entitled ‘Women’s Internationalism and Jewish Literature’, Allison Schachter highlights the fact that women’s absence from the canon of Jewish Modernism means that we know less about Jewish Modernism than we think. Her research makes use of a holistic approach to women’s writing in Jewish Modernism that puts the emphasis on reading different Jewish women writers as well as non-Jewish women associated to Jewish modernism together and in their own contexts in order to bring to light the broader experience of women writers in Jewish modernism. This not only broadens what we might think of as Jewish Modernism but also forces a shift of what is already known, as it highlights the fact that the conception we have of Jewish modernism as it is formed mostly by Jewish male writers and artists has to be reevaluated in light of what is being excluded.

   In her talk Schachter underlines the tendency to characterize Jewish women writers as ‘hysterical’, which raises several questions. What is it about the position of Jewish women writers that is so alienating? How do Jewish modernist women writers fit in a wider context of women modernist writers being labeled as hysterical? How does this topic of female hysteria in modernism fit into a longer history of this term? Are there separate histories of the term dependent on the other identities of women writers, such as being Jewish or African-American?

   Allison Schachter indicates that although new rights and freedoms were appearing for women writers during the modernist period, these were only maintained for those included in and protected by citizenship, which in many places would have excluded Jewish women as well as African-American women. Her attempt to think in terms of intersectionality about what it means to be a women, while also being a writer, while also being Jewish or African American, brings to light the attempted project of the book ‘Outsiders Together: Virginia and Leonard Woolf’ by Natania Rosenfeld. Rosenfeld, attempts to study how these identities interact when they are not united in one person but rather in one marriage. Allison Schachter focuses specifically on writers such as Lorraine Hansberry who are examples of modernist women writers on the fringes of Jewish Modernism. Hansberry was an African-American writer and was married to a Jewish man, thus thinking of her in the context of Jewish Modernism in some sense mirrors Rosenfeld’s project in ‘Outsiders Together’ as her association to Jewish Modernism, is – as it is for Virginia Woolf – an association through marriage. Schachter suggests that Hansberry experienced both antisemitism and racism, and that much of her writing was left unpublished, which was typical for women writers associated with Jewish Modernism. To explore these processes of exclusion and its consequences on Jewish modernist writers and writing is to historicize the creation of the canons of Jewish modernist writing we read today and to take part in the creation of a new, more inclusive literary history.