Lori Harrison-Kahan – författare

The Case of Lizzie Borden and Other Writings is the first work to collect Garver Jordan’s fiction and journalism, much of which has been out of print for over a century.Jordan began her career as a reporter, making her name as one of few female journalists to cover the Lizzie Borden murder trial for the New York World in 1893. Jordan’s distinctive, narrative-driven coverage of the Borden and other high-profile murder cases brought her national visibility and she turned increasingly to fiction writing.Drawing on her experiences as a true-crime reporter and newspaper editor, she published detective novels and short story collections such as Tales of the City Room that explored the fine line between women’s criminality and crimes against women. Employing popular genre conventions as a means of dealing with women’s issues, Jordan exposed gendered abuse in the workplace and the prevalence of sexual violence.The Case of Lizzie Borden and Other Writings encourages readers to draw a historical trajectory from Jordan’s pioneering literary activism to the writings of contemporary journalists and novelists whose work continues to fuel discussions of gender, feminism and crime, raising questions about who gets to tell women’s stories, especially in the wake of the #MeToo movement.

During the first half of the twentieth century, American Jews demonstrated a commitment to racial justice as well as an attraction to African American culture. Until now, the debate about whether such black-Jewish encounters thwarted or enabled Jews’ claims to white privilege has focused on men and representations of masculinity while ignoring questions of women and femininity. The White Negress investigates literary and cultural texts by Jewish and African American women, opening new avenues of inquiry that yield more complex stories about Jewishness, African American identity, and the meanings of whiteness.Lori Harrison-Kahan examines writings by Edna Ferber, Fannie Hurst, and Zora Neale Hurston, as well as the blackface performances of vaudevillian Sophie Tucker and controversies over the musical and film adaptations of Show Boat and Imitation of Life. Moving between literature and popular culture, she illuminates how the dynamics of interethnic exchange have at once produced and undermined the binary of black and white.

During the first half of the twentieth century, American Jews demonstrated a commitment to racial justice as well as an attraction to African American culture. Until now, the debate about whether such black-Jewish encounters thwarted or enabled Jews’ claims to white privilege has focused on men and representations of masculinity while ignoring questions of women and femininity. The White Negress investigates literary and cultural texts by Jewish and African American women, opening new avenues of inquiry that yield more complex stories about Jewishness, African American identity, and the meanings of whiteness.Lori Harrison-Kahan examines writings by Edna Ferber, Fannie Hurst, and Zora Neale Hurston, as well as the blackface performances of vaudevillian Sophie Tucker and controversies over the musical and film adaptations of Show Boat and Imitation of Life. Moving between literature and popular culture, she illuminates how the dynamics of interethnic exchange have at once produced and undermined the binary of black and white.

The Superwoman and Other Writings by Miriam Michelson is the first collection of newspaper articles and fiction written by Miriam Michelson (1870-1942), best-selling novelist, revolutionary journalist, and early feminist activist. Editor Lori Harrison-Kahan introduces readers to a writer who broke gender barriers in journalism, covering crime and politics for San Francisco's top dailies throughout the 1890s, an era that consigned most female reporters to writing about fashion and society events. In the book's foreword, Joan Michelson-Miriam Michelson's great-great niece, herself a reporter and advocate for women's equality and advancement-explains that in these trying political times, we need the reminder of how a ""girl reporter"" leveraged her fame and notoriety to keep the suffrage movement on the front page of the news. In her introduction, Harrison-Kahan draws on a variety of archival sources to tell the remarkable story of a brazen, single woman who grew up as the daughter of Jewish immigrants in a Nevada mining town during the Gold Rush.The Superwoman and Other Writings by Miriam Michelson offers a cross-section of Michelson's eclectic career as a reporter by showcasing a variety of topics she covered, including the treatment of Native Americans, profiles of suffrage leaders such as Susan B. Anthony and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and police corruption. The book also traces Michelson's evolution from reporter to fiction writer, reprinting stories such as ""In the Bishop's Carriage"" (1904), a scandalous picaresque about a female pickpocket; excerpts from the Saturday Evening Post series, ""A Yellow Journalist"" (1905), based on Michelson's own experiences as a reporter in the era of Hearst and Pulitzer; and the title novella, The Superwoman, a trailblazing work of feminist utopian fiction that has been unavailable since its publication in The Smart Set in 1912. Readers will see how Michelson's newspaper work fueled her imagination as a fiction writer and how she adapted narrative techniques from fiction to create a body of journalism that informs, provokes, and entertains, even a century after it was written.

The Superwoman and Other Writings by Miriam Michelson is the first collection of newspaper articles and fiction written by Miriam Michelson (1870-1942), best-selling novelist, revolutionary journalist, and early feminist activist. Editor Lori Harrison-Kahan introduces readers to a writer who broke gender barriers in journalism, covering crime and politics for San Francisco's top dailies throughout the 1890s, an era that consigned most female reporters to writing about fashion and society events. In the book's foreword, Joan Michelson-Miriam Michelson's great-great niece, herself a reporter and advocate for women's equality and advancement-explains that in these trying political times, we need the reminder of how a ""girl reporter"" leveraged her fame and notoriety to keep the suffrage movement on the front page of the news. In her introduction, Harrison-Kahan draws on a variety of archival sources to tell the remarkable story of a brazen, single woman who grew up as the daughter of Jewish immigrants in a Nevada mining town during the Gold Rush.The Superwoman and Other Writings by Miriam Michelson offers a cross-section of Michelson's eclectic career as a reporter by showcasing a variety of topics she covered, including the treatment of Native Americans, profiles of suffrage leaders such as Susan B. Anthony and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and police corruption. The book also traces Michelson's evolution from reporter to fiction writer, reprinting stories such as ""In the Bishop's Carriage"" (1904), a scandalous picaresque about a female pickpocket; excerpts from the Saturday Evening Post series, ""A Yellow Journalist"" (1905), based on Michelson's own experiences as a reporter in the era of Hearst and Pulitzer; and the title novella, The Superwoman, a trailblazing work of feminist utopian fiction that has been unavailable since its publication in The Smart Set in 1912. Readers will see how Michelson's newspaper work fueled her imagination as a fiction writer and how she adapted narrative techniques from fiction to create a body of journalism that informs, provokes, and entertains, even a century after it was written.

Originally published in 1900 and set in fin-de-siècle California, Heirs of Yesterday by Emma Wolf (1865-1932) uses a love story to explore topics such as familial loyalty, the conflict between American individualism and ethno-religious heritage, and anti-Semitism in the United States.The introduction, co-authored by Barbara Cantalupo and Lori Harrison-Kahan, includes biographical background on Wolf based on new research and explores key literary, historical, and religious contexts for Heirs of Yesterday. It incorporates background on the rise of Reform Judaism and the late nineteenth-century Jewish community in San Francisco, while also considering Wolf's relationship to the broader literary movement of realism and to other writers of her time.As Cantalupo and Harrison-Kahan demonstrate, the publication history and reception of Heirs of Yesterday illuminate competing notions of Jewish American identity at the turn of the twentieth century. Compared to the familiar ghetto tales penned by Yiddish-speaking, Eastern European immigrant writers, Heirs of Yesterday offers a very different narrative about turn-of-the-twentieth-century Jewish life in the United States.The novel's central characters, physician Philip May and pianist Jean Willard, are not striving immigrants in the process of learning English and becoming American. Instead, they are native-born citizens who live in the middle-class community of San Francisco's Pacific Heights, where they interact socially and professionally with their gentile peers.Tailored for students, scholars, and readers of women's studies, Jewish studies, and American literature and history, this new edition of Heirs of Yesterday highlights the art, historical value, and controversial nature of Wolf's work.

Originally published in 1900 and set in fin-de-siècle California, Heirs of Yesterday by Emma Wolf (1865-1932) uses a love story to explore topics such as familial loyalty, the conflict between American individualism and ethno-religious heritage, and anti-Semitism in the United States.The introduction, co-authored by Barbara Cantalupo and Lori Harrison-Kahan, includes biographical background on Wolf based on new research and explores key literary, historical, and religious contexts for Heirs of Yesterday. It incorporates background on the rise of Reform Judaism and the late nineteenth-century Jewish community in San Francisco, while also considering Wolf's relationship to the broader literary movement of realism and to other writers of her time.As Cantalupo and Harrison-Kahan demonstrate, the publication history and reception of Heirs of Yesterday illuminate competing notions of Jewish American identity at the turn of the twentieth century. Compared to the familiar ghetto tales penned by Yiddish-speaking, Eastern European immigrant writers, Heirs of Yesterday offers a very different narrative about turn-of-the-twentieth-century Jewish life in the United States.The novel's central characters, physician Philip May and pianist Jean Willard, are not striving immigrants in the process of learning English and becoming American. Instead, they are native-born citizens who live in the middle-class community of San Francisco's Pacific Heights, where they interact socially and professionally with their gentile peers.Tailored for students, scholars, and readers of women's studies, Jewish studies, and American literature and history, this new edition of Heirs of Yesterday highlights the art, historical value, and controversial nature of Wolf's work.

Redefining Jewish American literature through expansive feminist frameworks.Bridging literary studies and cultural history, this edited volume examines Jewish women writers' wide-ranging contributions to American literary culture from the turn of the twentieth century to the present. Matrilineal Dissent features innovative considerations of contemporary autofiction, graphic narratives, and novels by Mizrahi writers as well as middlebrow, Progressive Era, and second-wave feminist literature. Authors discussed herein--such as Roz Chast, Erica Jong, Annie Nathan Meyer, and Adrienne Rich--challenge monolithic representations of Jewishness and gender while imagining radical alternatives. By tracing a matrilineal literary history, this book dissents from readers and critics who continue to describe women's contributions as mere commentaries on and correctives to male-dominated canons. Simultaneously, this volume troubles the politics of inheritance, continuity, and lineage to underscore the ways that literary traditions--like Jewishness and gender--are mutually constitutive and continually in flux.Collectively, contributors reframe Jewish American literary history through feminist approaches that have revolutionized the field, from intersectionality and the #MeToo movement to queer theory and disability studies. Examining both canonical and lesser-known texts, this collection asks: what happens to conventional understandings of Jewish American literature when we center women's writing and acknowledge women as dominant players in Jewish cultural production?