The Lives of Jessie Sampter: Queer, Disabled, Zionist by Sarah Imhoff (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Lives of Jessie Sampter: Queer, Disabled, Zionist by Sarah Imhoff Hannah Zaves Greene (bio) The Lives of Jessie Sampter: Queer, Disabled, Zionist. By Sarah Imhoff. Durham: Duke University Press, 2022. ix + 272 pp. It is by now all too familiar to declare that academia is the life of the mind. But—as Sarah Imhoff would have us learn from her magisterial monograph, The Lives of Jessie Sampter: Queer, Disabled, Zionist—it is the life of the body, too. Both our historical subjects and we ourselves as scholars inescapably have bodies, and those bodies are critical to how we exist in the world as actors and thinkers alike. When we neglect to attend to those bodies, or embodied selves, the histories we write are necessarily incomplete. In warm, dynamic prose, Imhoff records her practice of embodied scholarship, explaining that "bodies, senses, and feelings are important sources of knowledge" (3). As she elucidates, drawing on paradigms [End Page 499] emerging from disability studies, "it is a privilege to be able to ignore your body, a privilege to pretend that your autonomous thoughts and carefully planned actions are where the real (historical and philosophical) action is at" (9). Though Imhoff's meticulously researched biography of Jessie Sampter engages thoroughly with the textual, from poetry to prose, enabling Sampter's own voice to shine through—even when maladroit or lackluster—it extends beyond that. From the garden to the kibbutz, from paper-cutting to trekking across India, from Spinoza to the Nation, Imhoff immerses herself in the many ways Sampter lived her own life and others refracted it. Crucial to that life were Sampter's experiences of childhood polio and her father's untimely death. Each experience taught Sampter about loss, whether loss of a dearly beloved parent or loss of normative physical function. Not only did polio permanently shape Sampter's body and bodily encounters, it also remained inseparable from her philosophical, religious, and political outlooks. Sampter found that her experiences of chronic pain and impairment turned her increasingly toward questions of mortality and theodicy. Evoking the Latin root religio that means "to bind together," Sampter gradually developed into what Imhoff refers to as a "religious recombiner" (42). Without calling her deeply felt Jewishness into question, Sampter lived a vibrant religious and spiritual life that drew from a variety of faiths and traditions, similar to many of her American contemporaries, Jewish and otherwise. Using Sampter as a model, Imhoff calls for us to reconsider the way we conceptualize American religion away from notions of diversity and pluralism that divide religion into discrete analytic boxes and toward a more fluid, integrated understanding of religion as an evolving, intertwining, cohesive process. This theme of recombination animates not only Sampter's many lives, but The Lives of Jessie Sampter itself. Rather than structuring her book chronologically, Imhoff devotes each chapter to a central aspect of her subject's identity, demonstrating how Sampter's religious perspective, disability, queerness, and politics intersected to form a coherent whole. The author treats time in a multidimensional manner truer to life, exploring how the variegated facets of Sampter's life circularly interwove with and influenced each other. Invoking the concepts of nonlinear "crip time" and "queer time," Imhoff illuminates how Sampter's disabled and queer body fundamentally shaped her experience of time—and, in the process, the reader's sense of time in the book—alternately rewinding and fast-forwarding it, moving it in unexpected directions, and orienting it toward societally unconventional goals and purposes. Sampter resisted easy categorization. And she knew it. Her queerness extended beyond her sexuality to encompass her overarching approach [End Page 500] to life, her ability to comprehend and relate to the world differently. Sampter was neither productive in the customary sense because of her corporeal impairment, nor reproductive in the customary sense because of her homoromantic relationships. She was, however, an ardent Zionist who lived in Palestine for the last decades of her life with her long-term partner Leah Berlin. Her Zionism deviated from the norm, incorporating space for disabled bodies that did not fit the mold of the robust and vigorous "New Jew." In Sampter's "cripped" Zionism, to use...