In the early 1900s, a handful of unconventional couples emerged within the American radical Left. In Intimate Radicals, Ashley Walters tells the story of a group of young, East European Jewish women and white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant men— such as Jack London, Sinclair Lewis, and William English Walling, among other notable figures in American literature, domestic and international affairs, and early Hollywood—and how they imbued their romances with revolutionary principles. The relationships captivated the public and became a source of intrigue, largely driven by the growth of human-interest journalism. Through individual biographies, historical narrative, and literary analysis, Walters reveals the cultural and political contingencies of desire.

 As Progressive Era radicals rebelled against the constraints of an earlier era, East European Jews—and Jewish women in particular— came to embody a new cosmopolitan ideal and European revolutionary spirit. Drawing on letters, newspapers, literature, and film, Walters shows how the public reception of these patrician-immigrant relationships lent credence to a new cultural mythology of Jewish womanhood. The men’s desire for East European Jewish women, she also points out, can be viewed as a form of “radical tourism,” in which men who enjoy a degree of privilege pursue an alluring Other in the hope of obtaining a more worldly identity.

This book is published with the support of the Jordan Schnitzer First Book Publication Award, administered by the Association for Jewish Studies.

Ashley Walters is Associate Professor of Jewish studies and Director of the Pearlstine/Lipov Center for Southern Jewish Culture at the College of Charleston. She is a co-editor of Matrilineal Dissent: Women’s Writing and Jewish American Literary History.

Contents
List of Illustrations
List of Abbreviations
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Chapter 1 - "Love Letters of a Socialist": Anna Strunsky, Jack London, and Desire in the Library Archive
Chapter 2 - “Like a Zangwill Heroine”: Patrician-Immigrant Marriages and Progressive Era Celebrity Culture
Chapter 3 - Romancing the Revolution: Anna Strunsky, William English Walling, and the 1905 Russian Revolution
Chapter 4 - "Rose of the Revolution": Sinclair Lewis and Arthur Bullard Discover a Revolutionary Muse
Chapter 5 - War on the Home Front: The Dissolution of the Patrician-Immigrant Marriages
Chapter 6 - Scripting the Immigrant Woman: The Rise of Sonya Levein
Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
About the Author
Index