The Diane Feigenson Lectureship in Jewish Literature "Intimate Radicals: Gender, Jewishness, and Revolution in the American Popular Imaginary”

The Diane Feigenson Lectureship in Jewish Literature 

"Intimate Radicals: Gender, Jewishness, and Revolution in the American Popular Imaginary”

Dr. Ashley Walters - is an assistant professor of Jewish Studies and director of the Pearlstine/Lipov Center for Southern Jewish Culture. She is co-editor of Matrilineal Dissent: Women’s Writing and Jewish American Literary History (2024), which was a finalist for the 2025 National Jewish Book Award in Women’s Studies. Her second book, Intimate Radicals: East European Jewish Women and Progressive American Desires, will be published next year. She is currently researching the history of Jewish chain migration from the Polish town of Kałuszyn to Charleston, South Carolina.

In the early 1900s, a handful of unconventional romantic relationships emerged within the American radical Left. Progressive settlement houses, socialist gatherings, and literary bohemias provided an ideal setting for individuals from diverse backgrounds to meet and, in some instances, fall in love. 

Prof. Ashley Walters will tell the story of a group of young, East European Jewish women and white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant men—all of whom became notable figures in American literature, domestic and international affairs, or early Hollywood—and how they imbued their romantic lives with revolutionary principles.

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 correspondence, newspapers, literature, and film, Prof. Walters reveals the political and cultural contingencies of desire, and how the public reception of these relationships lent credence to a new cultural mythology of Jewish womanhood.