Sources and Methods

Feminist scholarship teaches us that the personal is political; for Antin and Sampter, their intellectual and personal lives were intertwined. Analyzing letters between women suffrage leaders, Mineke Bosch and Annemarie Kloosterman find that “no clear distinction can be made between personal letters and business letters, and consequently between the personal lives of these women and their lives in the movement.”Footnote ⁹ For Antin and Sampter, too, reflections on intellectual and spiritual pursuits are intertwined with expressions of care for one another. Even more so, in building and furthering their relationship with each letter, they enacted their beliefs that spirituality was best pursued in relationship and in community.

This article draws primarily on letters by Antin, Sampter, and other members of their social and intellectual circles. Letters are hardly new to historians of American religion, but scholars usually approach them by analyzing their content. This is only one of the ways we might study them. Letters are not just containers for ideas; they can be the building blocks of relationships. They are not just text, but also physical objects that may evoke longing, delight, provocation, feelings of closeness, anxiety, or love. Caroll Smith-Rosenberg’s classic study of nineteenth-century women’s epistolary friendships emphasizes young women’s shared intimacy and passion, which took the form of letters as well as cherished objects such as photos or flowers.Footnote ¹⁰ Some of the shared sensuality that Smith-Rosenberg describes would have exceeded twentieth-century U.S. ideas of propriety, but the physicality of long-distance friendship had not changed.

In particular, we see Sampter’s and Antin’s letters as significant sources for studying American religious thought. Analyzing letters demonstrates the importance of the process of religious thought, prioritizing how ideas are considered and developed, rather than the arrival at definitive answers. Both Sampter and Antin were authors of acclaimed published works on their own, but, in this article, we want to attend to the ways in which they developed their intellectual and spiritual ideas in relationship. As the religious studies scholar Cara Rock-Singer writes, while we normally look to published volumes for statements of religious thought, Jewish women “produced thought in poems, plays, travel diaries and letters, curricula, popular journals, and newsletters,” in order to build communities in which their ideas could circulate.Footnote ¹¹ And, although we normally think of letters as a connection between two people, Antin and Sampter also saw their letters as conduits between families and communities; like others of their day, both women often expected that their letters would be passed around and read by multiple people. Shortly after Sampter’s death, Mary Antin wrote to the Zionist Margaret Doniger: “I think we have never met, but you have forwarded to me many of those wonderful serial letters of Jessie’s.”Footnote ¹² Sharing letters led their readers to recognize affinities, consider new ideas, and build religious worlds and networks. The writing and sharing of letters help us see how religious thought happens within relationships, rather than being solely created by an autonomous, isolated subject.

We will never know everything about Sampter and Antin’s friendship, and we will certainly never have a complete understanding of their physical experience. We have records of their friendship safeguarded in formal and informal archives because, even in their lifetime, each woman achieved enough fame to have others believe that their words were worth preserving. Both left an extensive correspondence, with each other and with others, which includes records of the development of their own ideas, discussions of books and others’ ideas, and their care for one another.

But there are gaps we can only guess at. “Letters, it seems, get lost, and that is unfortunate,” Sampter wrote.Footnote ¹³ We know that the women exchanged letters—long letters—that seem not to have survived. In a letter that supplemented her will, Sampter specifically suggested that letters she exchanged with Antin “may be worth preserving,” but then directed her sister, “but do not keep anything merely out of deference to my feelings.”Footnote ¹⁴ Sampter and Antin were also the kind of friends who did not always feel the need to write things down to be in sympathy with one another. “Let there be less correspondence rather than more, and there will be the more understanding!” Antin once told a friend.Footnote ¹⁵ Still, we do have significant written evidence to work with. To complement this textual evidence, we also studied the communities and physical environments where Antin and Sampter lived and wrote. The buildings, the furniture, the weather, and the people around them: these things affected the way the women lived, how they related to one another, and how they thought about the world.

Thinking about Sampter and Antin’s friendship also brings into focus the role of the body in emotional and intellectual intimacy. We often think of the body as central to romantic or sexual intimacy, but it plays a role in friendship, too. Writing about the intellectual friendships of four female British analytic philosophers, Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman suggest that “the solipsism, scepticism and individualism that is characteristic of the Western philosophical tradition would not feature in a philosophy written by people who had shared intimate friendships with spouses and lovers, been pregnant, raised children, and enjoyed rich and full and varied human lives.”Footnote ¹⁶ To share an intimate friendship, to share space and thought with another, is to have an embodied experience, too. “Rest, rest, and be with us in your quietness! . . . We all have our times and seasons to observe, and all can afford to wait for one another in faith,” Antin wrote to a friend, thinking of her friend’s physical needs even when they were apart, and even when it would encourage silences.Footnote ¹⁷

Antin’s and Sampter’s letters tell us that attention to the embodied nature of relationships with friends is not limited to those we see in person all the time. Writing to her friend Caroline Goodyear, Antin joyously reflected on how glad she was to have received Goodyear’s letter:

The physical experience of reading a letter shaped Antin’s thoughts and feelings: she held onto it in her hands, touching the paper, smelling it, and remembering her friend, while also experiencing the contrast with her current environment.

Physical letters simultaneously invoke intimacy and distance. Sitting in a meadow and recalling an earlier visit to the site with Randolph Bourne, Antin wrote to her friend, “Where are you now, dear Mr. Bourne? If you are happy somewhere in Europe, it is good for you, but not for me. I would like to know you are nearer, near enough to go for a walk with me.”Footnote ¹⁹ Bourne himself found letters to be a poor substitute for a friend’s physical presence. To him, “The letter is so miserable a travesty on the personal presence, a thin ghost of the thought of the once-present friend. It is as satisfactory as a whiff of stale tobacco smoke to the lover of smoking.”Footnote ²⁰ But Antin found that her memory invoked Bourne’s physical presence. Finding herself writing a letter to Bourne instead of working, she asked “Shall I be able to forgive you for projecting yourself into the landscape, when I meant to feed my muse on solitude?”Footnote ²¹ Letters were physical manifestations of a friend’s spirit, at once relational and experienced by the body. As Rock-Singer argues, religious ideas are often expressed in ways that challenge “the recalcitrant divisions between body and text.”Footnote ²² Antin’s attention to the physicality of letters—which materially bridge the gaps of time and space between writers’ and recipients’ bodies—highlights the entanglement of body and text.

Our own collaboration as co-authors also needed to bridge gaps of time and space. Our scholarly relationship has many similarities to the friendship of Sampter and Antin, but it also differs in important ways. From the start, like our historical subjects, our relationship has been a shared intellectual venture. Each of us approached this as a biographer of one of these women; together, we have gained a deeper and more robust understanding of their relationship. We found ourselves willing to try out new ideas with one another and to develop lines of inquiry that neither one of us would have had in isolation. We see these processes as representative of the best of scholarship. Even when fields in the humanities generally pretend to individual ownership of ideas, conversation and collaboration are critical to all new works of scholarship. Scholars depend on one another.

Structurally, however, our relationship has been quite different from that of Sampter and Antin. Antin and Sampter spent most of their adult lives living more than a steamship’s journey apart, and much of their friendship was therefore sustained and nurtured through letters. They held those letters dear—holding them, rereading them, showing them to other friends and family members. Although we also live in different cities, our collaboration has taken place through different technologies: email, Google Docs, and Zoom. These may offer more temporal immediacy—we can simultaneously work in a Google Doc, or we can ensure the co-author sees a thought or a source the next time they check their email. But they offer less of the lasting material groundedness of letters, a physical reality that we know mattered to Sampter and Antin.

In short, it matters that we co-wrote this article. Mac Cumhaill and Wiseman write of their own collaboration that they wanted to pursue scholarship “in a more engaged, creative and open way…. And we wanted to philosophize together, as friends.”Footnote ²³ Like them, we have been inspired by our subjects’ intellectual friendship. By thinking about Antin and Sampter’s relationship together, we have learned more about our individual subjects, who were themselves collaborative thinkers. Both Antin’s and Sampter’s religious and intellectual work and our own scholarship highlight the value of interdependence.

Theorizing Friendship

Antin and Sampter had remarkably few models for Jewish women’s intellectual friendships, and we have few models for studying them. We suggest that this gave them more room to create their own path for intellectual friendship, and it gives us greater freedom in interpreting it. While scholars of American religion have carefully attended to the role of formal and informal communities in religious creativity and development, they have been less attentive to intellectual friendships. Robert Orsi formulates the study of religion as studies of “network[s] of relationships involving humans of all ages and many different sacred figures together.”Footnote ²⁴ But American religion scholars have rarely analyzed the role of non-romantic and non-familial friendships in these sacred networks. In general, as Brenna Moore identifies, religious studies scholars have found friendship “remarkably easy to miss,” focusing instead on cultural and social influences on religious identity that seem “more serious, more political.”Footnote ²⁵ But, “if we take friendship seriously as a category of analysis,” argues Moore, “it must be understood as expansively and capaciously as possible,” integral to and formative of subjects’ religious worlds and their own subjectivity.Footnote ²⁶

We observe similar trends in Jewish studies scholarship. When historians have considered Jewish friendships—especially between men—they have often framed these friendships in relation to the political, or in terms of political theology.Footnote ²⁷ Antin and Sampter’s friendship was deeply rooted in their political convictions and their ideas of Jewishness in relation to the nation-state. Sampter favored a binational state for both Jews and non-Jewish Arabs in Palestine, and eventually gave up her U.S. citizenship, yet she still saw U.S. Zionists as one of her communities. As an immigrant, Antin became famous for advocating that eastern European Jewish immigrants could become loyal American citizens, and she was briefly involved in Progressive and Republican party politics. Like Sampter, Antin embraced Zionism and perhaps even considered moving to Palestine with her friend, though that did not come to pass. However, looking at their relationship primarily through the lens of politics or figural Jewishness would make us miss so much else.Footnote ²⁸ We see their religious development as inextricable from their political thought—which they developed together in conversation.

Meanwhile, the idea of friendship has been widely explored in the Western philosophical tradition, but primarily in terms of male-male relationships. In spite of their differences on the subject, for Aristotle, Cicero, Plato, Michel de Montaigne, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, and Søren Kierkegaard, the idea of friendship is a male, even brotherly, love. The philosopher Jacques Derrida remarks on “the hegemony of the philosophical canon in this domain”: philosophers have gendered friendship as male. Fraternity dominates. Derrida proposes to rethink friendship by first interrogating these canonical sources that “exclude the feminine or heterosexuality, friendship between women or friendship between men and women.”Footnote ²⁹ Hava Tirosh-Samuelson has argued that, at least before the modern period, the philosophical tradition reserved both friendship and happiness “for men only.” Andrea Dara Cooper has explained how canonical Jewish thought has also embraced models of fraternity that are exclusively male.Footnote ³⁰ Female friendship, especially Jewish female friendship, lacks philosophical archetypes. As Barbara Hahn asks, “How does one write of the ‘significance’ of a female friend, of an intellectual friendship, when in the established system of significance there is no space for such a relationship” because we see only in terms of male intellectual friendship?Footnote ³¹

Classical Jewish sources also praise male-male friendships while ignoring or even denigrating male-female or female-female relationships.Footnote ³² Pirkei Avot, an ethical tractate in the Mishnah, offers an oft-quoted male-male model of friendship. “Get yourself a teacher and acquire yourself a friend,” it says (1:6). In the Hebrew, “yourself,” “teacher,” and “friend” are all grammatically male.Footnote ³³ More importantly, the bond between two people is cultivated by studying religious texts together, an activity historically reserved for men. “Haver,” the word used for friend, in fact also means “study buddy.” Male-male friendship is not only a topic within Jewish texts but also the primary way that Jews learned those texts and traditions: pairs of men reading and interpreting together became the pattern for Jewish religious study in eastern Europe, for example, and this practice was familiar to many of the Jewish men around Sampter and Antin.

Neither these classic Jewish texts nor the philosophical traditions that Sampter and Antin could have encountered prescribed models for an intellectual friendship between women.Footnote ³⁴ Nor were these texts touchpoints for Sampter and Antin’s conversations. Although the women did not study these rabbinic texts, the texts influenced Jewish intellectual worlds and remained normative within the Judaism around them. Yet there was a positive side to this exclusion: Sampter and Antin were not constrained by Jewish or philosophical traditions, and they had the freedom to make many of their own touchpoints. In the Polotsk of Antin’s youth, advanced Jewish learning was reserved for boys, while Sampter grew up in an Ethical Culture household. As American teenagers and as adults, they were drawn to new kinds of religious communities, and relationships with a wide range of people made up their religious worlds. Both had some university education, but, unlike some of their male friends and peers, such as the philosopher Horace Kallen, they did not have the opportunity to pursue academic careers, which might have made their friendship more professional and utilitarian, in service to professional advancement.Footnote ³⁵ Nor, unlike some of their female friends, did they become social workers or organizers, for whom friendship could become political capital used to create social change.Footnote ³⁶ As writers and as religious practitioners, Antin and Sampter chose lives in which they had the freedom and opportunities to shape their intellectual friendship in ways that suited both their needs and their aspirations.

We do not conclude that there is a single model for women’s friendship—or even Jewish women’s friendship—that Sampter and Antin somehow exemplify. Intellectual women also experienced friction and, at times, refused interdependence. For example, in her analysis of the relationship between Margarete Susman and Gertrude Kantorowicz, Barbara Hahn reflects on how the two German Jewish women related to one another in ways that were unlike the interactions of their male colleagues. “Intellectual friendship between women is visible only as a version of relationships with which we are already familiar, as something that resembles what binds men together, even when it is simultaneously marked as something entirely different.” Susman and Kantorowicz had a contentious relationship, and their letters include little about the women’s lives.Footnote ³⁷ Sampter and Antin do not follow this model; if anything, their letters refused distinctions between life and thought.

Friendship at First Sight

In The Speaking Heart, Sampter’s unpublished autobiography, she describes meeting Antin as a “great event.” Her language of “friendship at first sight” deliberately evokes the importance we normally accord to romantic intimacy. In those first years of friendship, Sampter recalls them as budding philosophers. “I am studying at the [Latin] High School,” she remembers Antin writing, “But life teaches quite different things.” Sampter replied that she was reading William James, Charles Darwin, and a history of Germany. She was preoccupied with finding “the solution to the riddle of life . . . the ultimate truth.”Footnote ³⁸

Sampter’s recollections of their visits intertwine the metaphysical and the physical. In their late teens, should they pin their hair up like adult women or leave it down like young girls? Do people who have blue eyes see the world the same way as people with brown eyes? Recalling Antin’s visit in March 1901, Sampter writes, “[Mary] and I sat talking long that evening,” she writes, “on the rug in my room. What place is so good to sit on as the floor? A chair is in a certain spot, fixed and conventional, but the floor is everywhere.” Sitting on the floor symbolized breadth of possibility and of change, so neither their bodies nor their minds were “fixed and conventional.” In Sampter’s memory, Antin sat on the floor of her friend’s bedroom in a three-bedroom house on Fifth Avenue and rhapsodized about poor Russian Jewish immigrants, the “real Jews.” “Don’t you know I live in the slums?” Antin exclaimed. “Oh, let me tell you! It is a wonderful place to live. If you have never been poor, you don’t know what life is worth.” “I sat at [Mary’s] feet and learned,” Sampter remembers.Footnote ³⁹ The physical location and relationship of their bodies shaped how Sampter understood the world: from Mary’s feet, she could learn about the physical and social environment of the “slums,” which in turn helped her understand the philosophical question of what life is worth. Bodies and physicality mattered to how they could learn about the world and develop ideas together.

In October of that year, Antin astonished her family and friends with what seemed to be her hasty marriage to her natural science instructor, the geologist and paleontologist Amadeus William Grabau, a non-Jewish man eleven years her senior. Many of her friends and benefactors dropped her, but not Sampter, who defended Antin to their mutual friends. This was partly because intermarriage did not phase Sampter, but it certainly did not hurt that Grabau had taken a new position at Columbia University, and Antin became Sampter’s neighbor in Harlem for a few years. “Her hair was up, otherwise no change,” Sampter recalls, reassuring herself that their ties of friendship remained, despite Antin’s marriage.Footnote ⁴⁰

Especially during these years, others saw the women as part of the same intellectual universe. In 1914, the Zionist monthly The Maccabaean printed a summary of Antin’s work just above a poem by Sampter.Footnote ⁴¹ The author Elma Erlich Levinger, too, wrote of both Sampter’s and Antin’s work in her “Jewish Woman as Author” article in 1922.Footnote ⁴² It was not just on the page that the two interacted: in his memoir, the Jewish newspaper publisher Philip Cowen remembered the two at an intellectual gathering at his home.Footnote ⁴³

In their twenties, Antin and Sampter did their best to move between Jewish and non-Jewish social and intellectual worlds. Together and separately, their careers and their thinking matured, and they developed as writers and political activists. In 1907, Antin gave birth to her only child, Josephine, surely named after Antin and Sampter’s shared mentor Josephine Lazarus.Footnote ⁴⁴ Though Antin might have imagined she would spend her days as a faculty wife, she had remained focused on her own work. Lazarus encouraged her to revise her earlier account of her immigration journey for more widespread publication. Sampter was also intellectually inspired by Lazarus and dedicated her first book to their mentor in 1909. Lazarus died in early 1910, but Sampter and Antin continued their intellectual friendship.

A year after her first book, Sampter published The Seekers, which related the guided exploration of religion she had undertaken with six teenagers. Its epigraph read, “A successful experiment in non-sectarian religion, in moral and aesthetic enquiry, with young people in new ways, in search of the Meaning of Things.” Although she had not yet come to Zionism or Judaism, the book exemplified Sampter’s intellectual curiosity about the varieties of religion, as well as her inclination to develop religious thought in community. In it, she asked questions of the teens: Is “material truth [the same as] divine truth?” Is there “such a thing as absolute religious knowledge?” “What is God, the something we know and cannot speak?” She offered her own insights, explaining, for example, how the Vedas might help everyone to articulate God as the understanding within each person and within the universe as a whole. Sampter saw The Seekers as a fundamentally communal enterprise, and it, too, was an exercise in physical togetherness as a route to philosophical learning. She called it “a philosophic adventure, an experiment, written down by one, but lived by seven.”Footnote ⁴⁵

At the same time, Antin was busy revising the story of her immigration journey, first as a series of articles in The Atlantic in 1911 and 1912 and then as a book, The Promised Land, distributed by Houghton Mifflin in 1912. The Promised Land launched Antin to celebrity status. “I acknowledged its greatness before the publishers discovered it,” Sampter later wrote. “There was a vision in it, around it.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Antin dedicated the book “to the memory of Josephine Lazarus, who lives in the fulfillment of her prophecies.” In Lazarus’s absence, Antin brought Sampter the manuscript to review, and the two discussed the book’s dramatic chapter titles, which leaned heavily on religious metaphors—“The Tree of Life,” “The Exodus,” and “A Kingdom in the Slums.”Footnote ⁴⁷

In the following years, Antin became a household name among both Jews and non-Jews. She was in demand as a speaker to humanize national debates on immigration policies, crisscrossing the country on speaking tours. She was friendly with Theodore Roosevelt, then out of the presidency, and she championed his unsuccessful Progressive Party and stumped for Charles Evans Hughes’s unsuccessful bid for the presidency in 1916.Footnote ⁴⁸ Meanwhile, Sampter was “busy, busy. I opened my arms to life, and it ran into them like a child.”Footnote ⁴⁹ She embraced Zionism and then Judaism; she became involved with Hadassah and created a “Course in Zionism” for a U.S. audience; she wrote pamphlets and articles promoting Zionism; and she served on Hadassah’s Central Committee. All the while, she struggled with her physical health and strength, which limited her travel and public roles.

The two friends no longer lived in the same neighborhood and rarely got to see each other, “so that our meetings were events.” Sampter recalls a treasured visit to Antin, perhaps in 1916. Antin, Grabau, and Josephine had moved out of the city to “a lovely country house among woods and fern” in Westchester. “Our visits were so concentrated,” laments Sampter. As they sat together “on a rustic seat under the murmuring trees,” their conversation meandered, in the way of close friends. Their political ideals could not be separated from their personal relationship. Both were Zionists, and each was writing and speaking about Zionism, “brotherhood,” and peace in language that echoed the other’s, even though Antin’s The Promised Land made her the poster girl for American Jews’ acculturation.Footnote ⁵⁰ Juxtaposed, their biographies reflected ironies of nationalism: nativists used Antin’s immigrant status to question her Americanness, in spite of her public embrace of the country, while the New York-born Sampter not only moved to Palestine but gave up her U.S. citizenship.Footnote ⁵¹ Referencing contemporary debates about whether American Jews could be both loyal American citizens and Zionists, Sampter told Antin, “You are the living answer to those who claim that Zionism and Americanism are at odds!” Antin agreed that only “foolish” Jews who “failed to understand America” could not hold the two ideas in their heads at once.Footnote ⁵² Europe was at war, and the two friends felt their hearts break for both Russian Jews and those in Palestine. Antin had been back to visit Russia a few years ago. “Russia is the past but Palestine is the future,” she said.Footnote ⁵³

From global geopolitics and Jewish imaginaries, their conversation shifted naturally to the drama of Sampter’s love life. Once again, Sampter remembers their conversation as a physical experience as well as a cognitive one: “I slipped down to the grass at her feet, and stretched myself with the earth. Earth helps us to be true. I told her my problem.” The way Sampter’s body connected with the earth facilitated her insight into her own problems; physical connection with nature helped her to “be true,” in part because it provided her with physical evidence of the oneness of human life, the physical environment, and the divine that she wrote about in her books and poems. Antin comforted her friend and shared with Sampter her new interest in psychoanalysis. Sampter recalls, too, that Antin had cut her hair. “It curled like a baby’s over her head. It meant comfort, ease, grace.” Sampter longed to cut her own hair, but her sister was horrified by the idea. “I decided not to displease her in so slight and unimportant a matter,” says Sampter, but we know, despite her words, that hair matters, just as it had fifteen years earlier.Footnote ⁵⁴ In a few years, bobbed hair would become “a tangible symbol of women’s recently acquired independence,” as the writer Marian Spitzer would explain to readers of The Saturday Evening Post in 1925.Footnote ⁵⁵ Antin’s frizzy hair was far from the sleek bob of the 1920s, but it was a physical symbol of her independence of thought and her position as a professional woman. How they presented their bodies to the world and to each other mattered to their friendship, too.

Mistakes and Regrets

Like most friendships—although not always like the narratives told about them—Sampter and Antin had some bumpy roads. They ran in larger literary and intellectual circles, ones that included American Jewish luminaries such as the philosopher Horace Kallen and the Zionist leader Henrietta Szold.Footnote ⁵⁶ In the 1910s, Antin, Sampter, Kallen, and Szold corresponded with one another, often about Zionist matters, but also with personal care for their friends’ lives. In 1914, for example, Szold wrote to Kallen about Sampter. In the letters, she discusses Sampter’s physical health, intellect, and career as integrated pieces:

Szold admired Sampter’s devotion to Zionism but worried about her physical health.

In 1917, the friends exchanged a series of letters that demonstrate the centrality of friendship to ideas, as well as the inseparability of bodies and thought. Szold, Kallen, and Antin briefly schemed about borrowing some of Sampter’s writing and finding a publisher to produce a book of her poems. Kallen wrote to Szold,

Recognizing the mutual dependence of intellectual relationships, Sampter’s friends wished to promote her voice as a Zionist leader and thought it was beyond her capacity to do so herself.

Antin wrote to Kallen that she had managed to get a few poems “out of Jessie,” and she forwarded Sampter’s recent letters to her that discussed the poems. But, she wrote,

Antin wanted to share the details of Sampter’s situation with Kallen, but she hesitated because that meant sharing not only the content of the poems but also Sampter’s financial position. She continued: “If you still think the venture venturable, under present strained conditions … Shall we steal the MSS and go ahead?” Antin continued to plan the volume: “In this first collection, there ought to be included the best of her pieces already published. Most of them appeared in the Maccabaean or the Menorah.” Yet, as her letter went on, she began to worry about whether this was the right thing to do: “Jessie Sampter is one of the most delicate things I know. I’m a brute compared to her. . . . Please return the letters, and do see that no harm comes of my meddling.”Footnote ⁵⁹

Antin took two more weeks to write to Kallen again, apologizing and hoping that “my delay has not made the thing hopeless.” She had written notes about Sampter’s poems, but then became ill and unable to work. Upon returning to her notes, she could not make heads or tails of them. She offered to read proofs of the poems, which she thought would be both useful and “a salve to [her] conscience” after she had delayed the project. “I am not dependable yet—have just added a sprained ankle to my more serious disabilities—but do give me a chance to make up if there is occasion.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Szold chimed in, writing to Antin: “I have been having some correspondence with Doctor Kallen, who wrote me of your plan and his regarding Jessie Sampter’s collected poems, etc. Needless to say, the plan appeals to me very strongly.”Footnote ⁶¹

But, by the end of May 1917, Antin and Szold had made the decision that it was best to abandon the project. They seem to have recognized that publishing Sampter’s work without her consent might have infantilized her, rendering her entirely dependent on their largesse and undermining her own agency. Szold wrote to Antin: “One part of the plan I cannot endorse. I believe it would be of great discontent to Jessie if we were to publish her poems, without consulting her on the selection.” Szold went on to describe two conversations in which Sampter had brought up the possibility of publishing a book of her poems, and in both instances insisted that “a very rigid selection would have to be made by her.”Footnote ⁶² Perhaps Sampter had come to suspect something, as Antin suggested in her earlier letter. If she did suspect, she made her intentions clear to her friends: she did not want their meddling in choosing which of her poetry should be published. Whether or not Sampter made it explicit, Antin and Szold both thought they had overstepped. Feminist disability scholars would see this as Sampter’s friends working to reconcile an ethics of care with an ethics of justice, finding a balance between valuing interdependence and individual dignity.Footnote ⁶³

In the same letter in which she bowed out of the scheme to publish Sampter’s poems, Szold also asked after Antin’s health, saying she knew from Sampter that Antin had been sick, and so she did not take it for granted that Antin would want to see Sampter’s “absolutely great” new prose poem, which would be published as The Book of Nations. The next week, Antin wrote to Kallen explaining that she and Szold were “in absolute agreement about the matter of giving Jessie’s new work precedence over the collected poems, and about having Jessie’s own judgment on anything published.” She, too, praised the manuscript for The Book of Nations, calling it “surely the best thing Jessie has done.” Antin chastised herself for the “folly” of the idea of going ahead without Sampter’s inclusion, as well as her tardiness in recognizing what would be best for her friend.Footnote ⁶⁴ The scheme may have failed, but Antin and Sampter’s friendship and intellectual exchange did not.

About a year after Sampter’s book was published, Antin wrote to Kallen, upbraiding him: “Why in the world haven’t you written a review of Jessie Sampter’s Book of Nations? I happen to know that you think well of it, and I’m sure you want to see it circulate outside the borders of the Zionist community. . . . You can’t turn on me with the same challenge, because you know I don’t know how to do a review. How are you going to do it?” She also added a postscript: “Perhaps I ought to explain this sudden onslaught. The explanation is simple. I am just emerging after a long period of retirement—and blessed silence—due to illness.”Footnote ⁶⁵

Throughout these exchanges, it is clear that the friendships did not see intellectual content as separate from the physical and material world. Antin discusses her own correspondence and work in ways that acknowledge her health—a delayed letter because of ill health, “blessed silence” because of illness. Szold similarly acknowledged Antin’s health as a potential reason she might not be able to contribute to the intellectual enterprise of evaluating Sampter’s work. And Antin’s, Szold’s, and Kallen’s letters discuss Sampter in ways that integrate concerns for her finances, physical health, career, and networks of support with her intellectual production.

Plans and Dreams

Antin and Sampter’s friendship allowed for missteps, and, relatedly, it also provided a space for the women to grow and change religiously. Their shared vulnerability—in terms of both their embodiment and their willingness to experiment with intellectual and spiritual ideas—is part of what allowed them to speak frankly about their new ventures. They demonstrated a willingness to experiment with intellectual and spiritual ideas together, and this mutual openness allowed for free and deep experimentation for each. Both were drawn to experimental forms of cooperative living that prioritized interdependence as a spiritual and ideological value, and both women saw interdependence as conducive to religious and intellectual growth.

The years after World War I saw dramatic changes in the two friends’ lives, both in their personal circumstances and in their spiritual pursuits. After years of Zionist activism from the United States, Sampter moved to Palestine in September 1919. She lived in Jerusalem, most of the time with her fellow Zionist and intimate friend Leah Berlin. She later moved to Rehovot, where she had growing contact with the kibbutz movement and collective living; in particular, she cultivated friendships with Kvutzat Schiller. In 1926, she adopted a Yemenite toddler, Tamar. As the years went on, Sampter and Antin were rarely in the same place, and yet bodies remained present in their friendship.

Antin’s marriage had collapsed by the end of the war. While Antin advocated for the Allied cause, her husband, Amadeus Grabau, sided with Germany, the land of his Lutheran grandfathers. The following year, he was dismissed from Columbia University. The couple had already separated by 1919, when Grabau moved to China to research geology and paleontology there. Antin suffered a breakdown and was institutionalized for neurasthenia, the term for a since-discredited diagnosis of a nervous disorder, in western Massachusetts. As Antin later recounted, she opted out of public life, “unloading” her celebrity obligations in search of “what the psalmist calls ‘truth in the inward parts.’” She was sure that Josephine Lazarus would have understood her choices.Footnote ⁶⁶ By 1923, she and her daughter, Josephine, lived at Gould Farm, a liberal Protestant intentional community devoted to psychiatric rehabilitation, in the Berkshire Mountains in western Massachusetts. Much of Antin’s life was nomadic, but Gould Farm would be her community and her refuge throughout the rest of her life. She remained plagued by psychiatric limitations: “When all other forms of disability have vanished, the writing facility is still crippled,” she lamented. But Gould Farm taught her to seek spiritual growth, to find meaning in suffering, and to work toward recovery with “wholesome strenuousness.”Footnote ⁶⁷

Sampter’s first biographer, Bertha Badt-Strauss, recounts that Antin had considered moving to Palestine with Sampter. This did not come to pass. But Badt-Strauss argues, as we do, that we should understand Sampter’s life at Kibbutz Givat Brenner and Antin’s at Gould Farm as parallel to one another.Footnote ⁶⁸ Both communities strove to be a “wholesome community life of the future, where everybody worked and nobody had more than he earned by his work.”Footnote ⁶⁹ And, even as they made their lives on separate continents, Sampter and Antin developed their ideas about communal living and convalescence in conversation with one another.

In 1930, Antin wrote to her friend Agnes Gould, a founder of Gould Farm, that she had just enjoyed a day-long visit from Sampter, who was visiting the United States. After a day with Antin in Brooklyn, Sampter “feels she must get up to the Farm.” Sampter had begun to think about what would become a Zionist rest home for workers at Kibbutz Givat Brenner, and the two friends saw Gould Farm as a model—perhaps the only real model—of what Sampter envisioned. There were, to be sure, many “splendid modern experiments for the establishing of human life on the basis of brotherhood,” but Gould Farm did not expect its residents to arrive already hale and healthy in mind and body. Antin wrote to Gould that Sampter was “proposing just such a community [like Gould Farm] for mutual service, through the sharing of love and all other goods, that those who partake of its life may heal themselves.” Antin quickly followed this with a reminder that, when Sampter visited the Farm in January, her frail friend “cannot be put into an unheated room, as I have told you.”Footnote ⁷⁰ Both Sampter and Antin wanted—and created—communities that supported convalescence of mind and body, while caring for and accepting people as they were.

Still, shared dreams are rarely completely aligned. While Sampter dreamed of a Zionist rest home, Antin saw her friend’s vision as an extension of Gould Farm. Its founder Will Gould, known to his community as “Brother Will,” had died tragically in a fire in 1925, and Antin was preoccupied with recording and sharing his legacy. To Antin, Sampter’s community in Palestine would be an extension of Gould Farm and “a fulfillment of one of Brother’s Will’s most precious dreams.” She wrote to Will’s widow, Agnes, “There is no overstating the matter,” though it is unlikely that Sampter would have articulated her own goals of communal living in those terms.Footnote ⁷¹

It is not clear from the historical record if Sampter did, in fact, manage to visit Gould Farm, but she continued to think about her plans in relation to Antin’s community, if not as an extension of the Farm. In 1932, she wrote to her sister, reminding her that she had been “very anxious to be at Gould Farm . . . to learn something there.” Now her “plans and dreams” were moving toward fruition: “I came to the conclusion that the only way I can constitute my life so as [to] give it a more cooperative form is by living with people who, like me, need good physical conditions.” Her intimate friend Leah Berlin had become interested in bodies in a different way, having been drawn to dietetics and vegetarianism. The two “want[ed] to start a sanitarium, or rather, a rest house for about 8 people at a time, chiefly young working people who have got tired or are convalescent.”Footnote ⁷² Like Gould Farm, the rest home would accommodate both bodies and minds in need of healing.

Along with another woman named Rivka, Sampter and Leah began to take in guests and feed them meals as an “experiment which will prove to us whether we can start the rest house together.”Footnote ⁷³ Their partnership with Rivka collapsed, but Sampter and Leah continued with the plan together. In the winter of 1933–34, the two moved to Kibbutz Givat Brenner, where Sampter used her inheritance to establish their dream of a vegetarian rest home for workers. At the same time, she was writing to recommend that a friend in the United States recuperate at Gould Farm.Footnote ⁷⁴

Meanwhile, while retaining her ties to Gould Farm, Antin grew intensely interested in the teachings of the Indian mystic Meher Baba, who claimed to be an avatar, the incarnation of a deity. Since 1925, Baba had maintained silence, communicating through signs and an alphabet board. For a few years in the early 1930s, Antin and Josephine lived at the community retreat of his followers in Harmon-on-Hudson, New York, and they were among the first to meet with him on his first visit to the United States in 1931. Antin was cautious about sharing her feelings about Meher Baba, but a fellow “Baba lover,” as his followers called themselves, recalled that Antin was “inexplicably happy,” tears streaming from her eyes in Baba’s presence.Footnote ⁷⁵ In a letter to another Baba lover, Antin described Baba’s silence as “more holy than ever was the silence of an empty cathedral,” revealing to her “the origin of the familiar motifs of much of Christian sacred art.” True to form, Antin sought communal fellowship: with Baba’s followers from those years she found a powerful “brotherhood of Baba’s Own,” who were “nearer, dearer than sisters and brothers of the flesh.”Footnote ⁷⁶

Once again, many of Antin’s friends looked askance at her choices. Sampter, who shared Antin’s interest in spiritual exploration and communal living and was herself translating the works of the spiritual teacher Krishnamurthi into Hebrew around this time, did her best to “have an open mind.” After all, the world needed “not merely changes of government but changes of spirit first,” she told her disapproving sister.Footnote ⁷⁷ Badt-Strauss, Sampter’s biographer, noted that Sampter defended Antin to the Jewish theologian Mordecai Kaplan, who likewise frowned on her participation in Baba’s community.Footnote ⁷⁸

Still, Sampter worried about Antin’s newfound spiritual interest—which she could not stop pressing on her friends—and especially about Josephine, who seemed to be worshipping Meher Baba a little too much. In the fall of 1932, Sampter told her sister (in her own handwriting) that she wanted to write to Antin and Josephine about their new religious community, and so she had made notes. But her health did not permit it, so that correspondence would have to wait. “I don’t know when I will feel equal to using my typewriter,” she explained. In the meantime, she shared with her sister her response to a poem that Josephine had sent that seemed to worship Meher Baba: “Jo’s attitude is very painful to me.” The sentiment in it should not be “addressed to a human being!” She wondered whether it was Josephine’s own stance, or if Baba encouraged it, but she did not feel she could make that judgment quickly.Footnote ⁷⁹ Several months later, after learning that Josephine had been hospitalized, Sampter again wrote to her sister:

Here, Sampter expressed her concern for both Antin and her daughter while also offering some of her own philosophy of religion. Good religion, she thought, should not revolve around a single human personality, nor should it encourage total deference. But Sampter, Antin, and Josephine all agreed that spiritual well-being and mental and physical health were connected, and Sampter and Antin’s friendship was not threatened by divergent spiritual paths.

Like her mother, Josephine suffered from a number of mental breakdowns throughout her life and went through periods of institutionalization, and she found solace in worshipping Meher Baba as a savior. Though Antin would move on from Baba’s community within a few years, Josephine would remain a follower throughout her life. Writing to her sister in 1934, Sampter suggested that she thought Jo’s mental illness might be exacerbated by her relationship with Baba. “It is the greatest sorrow that could befall Mary and I wish I might be with her. On the other hand,” she continued, “Mary has that in her which makes her able to cope with all sorrows with understanding and wisdom.”Footnote ⁸¹ Antin had not only strength of character but also intimate friendships—even from afar—with which to alleviate mental and spiritual suffering, as well as the travails of parenthood.

Death and Friendship

In 1938, Sampter left Givat Brenner to get treatment for malaria and heart disease, and she died at Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem. Almost as soon as she learned of her sister’s death, Elvie wrote to Antin to tell her the news. Antin wrote back: “Death has visited me many times. I thought I knew how it felt to lose a friend. But this is—Jessie. Elvie dear, I have been lost in a cloud of selfish grief. I can’t spare Jessie.”Footnote ⁸² She felt the loss of her friend and colleague deeply. She reminisced about Sampter’s best qualities, like “intellectual integrity shot through with the warm light of tolerance” and “devotion for all the little people.” She recalled Sampter’s “physical handicaps to overcome,” even while saying that her accomplishments outshone them. Sampter would be missed, body and soul.

Even in her sorrow, Antin nevertheless felt inspired to grow intellectually: she wrote that maybe she would learn Hebrew, so she could experience Sampter’s expression in that language too.Footnote ⁸³ Two months later, Antin wrote to Margaret Doniger about Sampter: “For nearly forty years she was part of my life. And so she remains. But I shall miss her writings, her letters and poems.”Footnote ⁸⁴ Their friendship was nurtured by the intellectual content of their letters, of which there could be no more, and yet Sampter would remain a part of Antin. Sampter expressed something similar after the death of Josephine Lazarus: “How our souls are peopled! I discovered that nothing can be lost, nothing that has been loved. [Lazarus] remained a present friend to me. More and more she came back to me; as sorrow softened, the sense of presence deepened.”Footnote ⁸⁵ Antin and Sampter had experienced this kind of connection to Lazarus together, when they spoke of their late, beloved mentor a few years after her death. “A silence fell on us, then a Presence filled the room, the Oversoul rested upon us, vibrant, electric; Personality descended upon us.”Footnote ⁸⁶ For Sampter and Antin, death—the end of physical presence—did not end relationships.Footnote ⁸⁷

In moments when she was not overwhelmed with grief, Antin likewise spoke of her friendship with Sampter as something that was not limited by the presence of a friend. Years after Sampter’s death, Antin would reply to her sister Rosemary, who had written to Antin about a dear friend: “You say so much about [her] growth. Don’t we grow ourselves with every friend we help grow?”Footnote ⁸⁸ She wanted Rosemary to see that her friend was not the only one who had developed through the course of their relationship. True friendships change both parties.

Sampter expressed a similar philosophy of friendship. A deep friendship makes its mark on both friends, and death does not stop the relationship or its ability to shape the friend who lives on. After the death of her friend Boris Kazman, she wrote: “I do not miss him because I have not lost him. His friendship was and is one of the marvelous things in my life. It was part of me, as is every thing that we live deeply. . . . There is no death; there is only life with its continuous, eternal changes.” She explained to her sister,

The idea of being “less dependent on others” was not about physical independence or emotional distance; in fact, Sampter recognized a deep interdependence between friends. Instead, being less dependent meant being less self-centered. A deep friendship “concentrates” life in a person, which then allows that person to give love more freely without need or expectation of something in return. As Mary Antin would say, when we engage in the depths of friendship, “we grow ourselves.”