Sarah Gracombe, Pledging Allegiance?: Adapting the Book of Ruth in American Literature and Culture

When and Where

Monday, September 30, 2024 4:00 pm to 6:00 pm
Room 100
Jackman Humanities Building
170 St. George Street

Speakers

Sarah Gracombe (Stonehill College)

Description

David Lipson Memorial Lecture 

Sarah Gracombe (Stonehill College) 

“Pledging Allegiance?: Adapting the Book of Ruth in American Literature and Culture”

In an 1898 article on the Book of Ruth in The American Jewess, Rabbi Julius Magil urged readers to “look into this beautiful story and learn a lesson.” He was not alone. For American writers frequently turned to the figure of Ruth to offer “lessons” not just about how to be a dutiful daughter-in-law or faithful convert but about immigration, intermarriage, and national belonging. From the 1850s-1920s, many writers saw key questions about American-Jewish identity refracted through the Book of Ruth, particularly Ruth’s famous pledge to Naomi (“Where you go, I will go...your people shall be my people, and your God my God”) and marriage to Boaz. Can immigration and intermarriage be beneficial? Does joining a new “people” require joining a new faith? Can “my people” pledge allegiance to “we the people” without losing their Jewishness (and what exactly is that Jewishness)?  

I explore these questions in part by examining how writers interpreted Ruth’s story as a possible template for successful Jewish immigration, integration, and intermarriage in America. Texts considered include Israel Zangwill’s drama The Melting Pot (1908), which popularized that much-debated metaphor; Emma Wolf’s admired novel Other Things Being Equal (1892), which takes on interfaith marriage and Jewish-American belonging; and a variety of poems, religious commentaries, and images that illustrate how resonant the issues in the Book of Ruth were in a geographically and conceptually expanding America cast as a “new Israel” (but not always a welcome one) for the roughly two million Jews who arrived between 1880-1925 and their descendants. I conclude by briefly considering how the Book of Ruth has been employed in our own cultural moment, one in which the relationship between immigration, religion, and what “makes American great” are central to national debates.

 

Since earning her Ph.D. from Columbia University, Sarah Gracombe has been a professor of English at Stonehill College near Boston. Until recently she served as the director of the college’s Moreau Honors Program and before that the Director of the IDEAS Program for democratic education. Her teaching and research interests include Victorian representations of national belonging, race, gender, psychology, and religion, particularly constructions of Jewishness. This research has been supported by organizations including the Whiting Foundation, the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, and University of Pennsylvania's Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies (where she was a fellow during the year exploring Jews and conversion). Her work has appeared in journals such as Nineteenth-Century LiteratureRomantic CirclesPhilological QuarterlyProoftextsVictorian Periodical Review and the Blackwell Encyclopedia of Victorian Literature, as well as the collections George Du Maurier: Illustrator, Author, Critic (Ashgate 2016) and Bastards and Believers: Jewish Converts and Conversion from the Bible to the Present (University of Pennsylvania Press 2020). Her current project is Reimagining Ruth: the Book of Ruth in English and American Culture1800-today.

 

 

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This event will be delivered in-person in JHB100 (170 St. George Street) on Monday, September 30, 2024 at 4 PM.

Sponsors

David Lipson Memorial Lecture

Map

170 St. George Street

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