You could say that being a New Yorker influenced Jeanne Abrams to become a Westerner.
The Denver section of the National Council of Jewish Women sponsored a kosher picnic near Leadville, Co., in 1895. Photo courtesy of University of Denver Beck Archives, Special Collections, Penrose Library and Center for Judaic Studies
Abrams, a professor at Penrose Library and director of the Beck Archives and the Center for Judaic Studies’ Rocky Mountain Jewish Historical Society, moved from New York to Denver in 1973 and embarked on a career researching Jewish history in the West.
Her work was inspired, in part, by a 1976 cover of The New Yorker on which New York was pictured as the biggest part of the world. The West was “a footnote at that point,” Abrams points out — a reflection of many people’s mindsets. “It’s been my passion for 25-30 years to deconstruct that myth.”
That passion led Abrams to write Jewish Women Pioneering the Frontier Trail: A History in the American West (New York University Press, 2006) — the first academic book to trace the contributions of Jewish women in the American West.
The West, Abrams says, was historically more open for women to fully integrate than the East had been. “The West was an area where risk-taking was acceptable,” she says, noting that early pioneers were still able to maintain a Jewish identity. “The [area] was definitely more progressive in terms of education and professional development.
“Going West or growing up in the West signaled promise for many Jewish women.”
Abrams studied the lives of hundreds of women, drawing on historical records and personal memoirs dating back to the mid-1800s.
The book chronicles a history full of firsts. Francis Wisebart Jacobs, “Denver’s mother of charity,” helped establish the national Jewish Hospital in Denver, the city’s first free kindergarten and the Community Chest (which evolved into the national United Way).
In the 1920s, Californian Florence Prag Kahn became the first Jewish woman to serve in the U.S. Congress. “She won election in her own right after she filled in for her husband [following his death],” Abrams says.
Seraphine Eppstein Pisko served as head of National Jewish Hospital — likely the first Jewish woman in the U.S. to serve as chief executive of a national institution.
Jewish women were at the forefront of the women’s suffrage movement, Abrams says, but even before they were allowed to vote, many Jewish women in the West had “access to power circles” that enabled them to influence the men who could vote.
Abrams also found that women often pioneered the organization of public Jewish life. For example, in the mid-1870s the Jewish population of Cheyenne, Wyo., was about 40 when Bertha Myers established the city’s first Jewish religious school.
“As one of the smallest groups among western female immigrants, Jewish women were unusual in their disproportionate public visibility,” Abrams writes in the introduction to her book. “Although they were rarely revolutionary, they often opened new doors of opportunity for themselves and future generations in a region that allowed them ‘a place to grow.’”