The Lives of Jessie Sampter: Queer, Disabled, Zionist
The Lives of Jessie Sampter: Queer, Disabled, Zionist
by Sarah Imhoff
Duke University Press, 2022 eISBN: 978-1-4780-2267-1 | Cloth: 978-1-4780-1543-7 | Paper: 978-1-4780-1806-3 Library of Congress Classification PS3537.A567Z676 2022
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC | REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
ABOUT THIS BOOK
In The Lives of Jessie Sampter, Sarah Imhoff tells the story of an individual full of contradictions. Jessie Sampter (1883–1938) was best known for her Course in Zionism (1915), an American primer for understanding support of a Jewish state in Palestine. In 1919, Sampter packed a trousseau, declared herself “married to Palestine,” and immigrated there. Yet Sampter’s own life and body hardly matched typical Zionist ideals. Although she identified with Judaism, Sampter took up and experimented with spiritual practices from various religions. While Zionism celebrated the strong and healthy body, she spoke of herself as “crippled” from polio and plagued by 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. By charting how Sampter’s life did not neatly line up with her own religious and political ideals, Imhoff highlights the complicated and at times conflicting connections between the body, queerness, disability, religion, and nationalism.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Sarah Imhoff is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington, and author of Masculinity and the Making of American Judaism.
REVIEWS
“Sarah Imhoff presents the remarkable story of Jessie Sampter, whose life breaks with all the conventional associations of a Zionist pioneer. Disabled due to polio, living with a woman in mandate-era Palestine, and a pacifist and internationalist with right-wing Zionist politics, Sampter violated expectations and flouted conventions. Using feminist theory and crip theory, Imhoff reconstructs Sampter’s life and the vital challenges she presented in her day and in our own.”
-- Susannah Heschel, Eli M. Black Distinguished Professor of Jewish Studies, Dartmouth College
"Sarah Imhoff’s The Lives of Jessie Sampter is a thought-provoking exploration ... [Imhoff's] attention to method and multifaceted storytelling succeed in getting us closer to understanding all of Sampter’s complex queer, disabled, and Zionist lives."
-- Sarah Imhoff Material Religion
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgments vii Introduction 1 1. A Religious Life 27 2. A Life with Disability 68 3. A Queer Life 106 4. A Theological-Political Life 144 5. Afterlives 193 Notes 223 Bibliography 249 Index 263
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