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 Jessica Carr Sarah Imhoff. The Lives of Jessie Sampter: Queer, Disabled, Zionist. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022. 288 pp. In this study of Jewish life and thought in the early twentieth century, Sarah Imhoff uses a method that centers “embodied knowledge,” that is, the idea that “sensations, perceptions, and physical knowledge matter for how a person sees the world,” which includes how Jessie Sampter “thinks about the relationship of nature and God, how she thinks about the social roles people with disabilities should play, and why she thinks Palestine is a home for her people” (5). Imhoff draws an intimate connection between the nonverbal of body and movement and the verbal: “The things that make movement possible also make metaphors possible” (6). Imhoff uses the voice of Sampter and her own words to respond to the myths of Zionism prior to 1948. Unlike in the phrase “a land without a people,” [End Page 469] at the end of chapter 4, Imhoff concludes that “the desert was not deserted before Sampter or even the earliest wave of Zionist immigrants got there. . . . This, alongside certain British governing styles and policies, set the stage for conflict between Jews and Arabs in Palestine.” Her work recovers the political context for and the gaps between what Zionists argued and hoped for, a central goal of Imhoff’s “life-writing” about Sampter. “There are valuable aspects of her Zionism that are worth considering, even though—or especially because—they are roads not taken” (192), Imhoff argues. She delves into the stereotypes and frustrating flaws of Sampter’s political vision too. Imhoff does not hold Sampter as an icon with simplistic solutions to complicated politics. Each chapter of the book dissects Sampter’s life, writing, and context via a distinct theoretical lens: religion, disability, queer, theological-political. The book progresses more or less chronologically even as Imhoff retraces certain major events, travels and places, figures and friends, and experiences of Sampter through distinct theoretical approaches, to bring new perspectives to the same events. By rethinking some events and experiences, Imhoff puts intersectional deconstruction of religion into practice. Imhoff shows how each lens highlights something essential about the commitments and burdens of Sampter’s life at the same time that Imhoff convincingly argues for the importance of Sampter’s experiences to reframing each field of study. Theorizing temporality is important especially as related to the body and embodiment, particularly in her second chapter on disability (“crip time”) and her third chapter on queer kinship and relationship (“queer time”). Imhoff shows that Jewishness should not appear easily bounded or be presumed to be so in the past or present. Imhoff theorizes practices of religious “promiscuity” as “religious recombination,” channeling Catherine Albanese. The influence of Emerson or the use of a Ouija board is not evidence of uncomplicated Christianization but of philosophical reflection in Imhoff’s theory. Of “the religion of Josephine and Emma Lazarus, Mary Antin, Israel Zangwill, and Jessie Sampter,” to name a few, Imhoff notes that to assert that Judaism was their “religion” might seem “obvious,” but this would leave out a lot of influences, “from Christianity and Hinduism to Spiritualism and transcendentalism.” Our theory of practice should reflect that fullness, especially since “they rarely saw it as apostasy or even religious border crossing.” If only “pure” examples of Jewishness—whatever we purport that to mean—count in our evaluation of the “paragon of American Jewishness,” then we would misrepresent American Judaism (44–45). By beginning with contradictions and presuming them a shared aspect of the human condition, we can better understand all areas of religious thought and practice. This is not a lesson limited to Sampter, Zionism, or Jews, but rather an argument for the importance of analyzing individuals and the significance of the genre of biographies such as that which Imhoff offers here to scholarship. Because of the emphasis on physical masculine strength in hegemonic Zionism, Imhoff poses Sampter’s biography as an opportunity to examine how we can “make sense of a person whose embodied experiences did not conform to her religious and political ideals” (69). Chapters 2 and 3...