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Friends Are the Cream of Life: Mary Antin and Jessie Sampter’s Religious Creativity
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 February 2025
Abstract
American Jewish writers Mary Antin and Jessie Sampter met as teenagers in 1899. Throughout the next four decades, they wrote letters and visited each other, discussing literature, politics, and life. Independently, both women achieved some professional success. Antin’s autobiography, The Promised Land, launched her to national fame, before she withdrew from public life to focus on religious pursuits. Sampter supported Zionist efforts from the United States, then moved to Palestine. Both women experimented with religious thought and intentional communities. Both women were disabled: Antin struggled with her mental and physical health; Sampter also struggled with mental health and had post-polio syndrome.
Drawing on Antin and Sampter’s correspondence with each other and with others, this article argues that their friendship was a crucial part of their subjectivity, their intellectual development, and their religious creativity. Intimacy and relationality were not merely supplementary to the real work of solitary thinkers but key for these women’s intellectual and spiritual development. In studying Antin and Sampter’s friendship, we suggest that studying disabled thinkers provides a lens for all significant friendships, in which each partner admits and permits vulnerability and each brings what they can. Their relationship points us to the importance of analyzing how bodies and vulnerability work in all friendships, and how the interdependence of non-romantic friendships can be essential to women’s creative work as religious thinkers and practitioners. Antin and Sampter’s friendship also demonstrates how religious thought happens within relationships, rather than being solely created by an autonomous, isolated subject.
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- © The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture
References
Notes
1 Jessie Sampter, Speaking Heart, unpublished manuscript, Jessie Sampter Papers, Central Zionist Archives (henceforth CZA), A219\11–12, 66–67.
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21 Antin to Bourne, August 11, 1913.
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32 The Babylonian Talmud Taanit 23a tells a story of Honi the circle-drawer, who awakens after a seventy-year sleep to find that none of the sages believe he is who he says he is. In his despair, he prays to die. The text then cites a saying, “friendship or death.” But the longed-for friendship is a homosocial one, the fraternity of sages.
33 The immediately preceding section of Pirkei Avot, though cited far less frequently, makes plain the exclusion of women from this model, not only by accident of who can study text, but also by intention: “Yose ben Yochanan of Jerusalem used to say: Let thy house be wide open, and let the poor be members of thy household. Engage not in too much conversation with women. They said this with regard to one’s own wife, how much more [does the rule apply] with regard to another man’s wife. From here the Sages said: as long as a man engages in too much conversation with women, he causes evil to himself, he neglects the study of the Torah, and in the end he will inherit gehinnom [hell]” (Pirkei Avot 1:5). In the rabbinic mindset, male–female interactions cannot develop into friendship; instead, they descend into perdition. This classical model of Jewish friendship, then, is definitively gendered male.
34 Feminist thinkers, including many Jewish women, would later articulate models of female friendship, but these would arrive decades after Sampter and Antin’s day. See, for example, Hava Tirosh-Samuelson, “Friendship, Jewish Female Philosophers, and Feminism,” in Fine, Friendship in Jewish History, 212–31.
35 Horace Kallen is best known for having coined the term “cultural pluralism,” an affirmation of the inclusion of immigrant ethnicities as distinct but equal parts of the American nation. David Weinfeld analyzes how Kallen’s friendship with the Black philosopher Alain Locke provided the basis for each man’s understanding of cultural pluralism. Weinfeld, David, An American Friendship: Horace Kallen, Alain Locke, and the Development of Cultural Pluralism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2022), 9Google Scholar. Kaufman, Matthew J., Horace Kallen Confronts America: Judaism, Science, and Secularism (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2019)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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37 Sussman described Kantorowicz as an “odd being” with an “elemental demonic nature.” Hahn, The Jewess Pallas Athena, 87.
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51 Antin’s friend Randolph Bourne mentions her by name as a “patriot” who was “jeered” for her embrace of Americanness. He also notes the deficiencies of a “melting pot” ideology that insists that Americanness should wipe out all previous history and culture. Bourne, Randolph, “Trans-National America,” Atlantic Monthly 118, no. 1 (1916): 86–97 Google Scholar.
52 For an overview of the debate about the compatibility of Americanism and Zionism, see Urofsky, Melvin I., American Zionism from Herzl to the Holocaust (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995)Google Scholar; Segev, Zohar, Immigration, Ideology, and Public Activity from an American Jewish Perspective (New York: Brill, 2021)Google Scholar. Zionism in the U.S. did not focus solely on Jewish sovereignty in Palestine as the goal. For example, most Zionists in the United States had no intention of moving to Palestine. Instead, they saw Jewish nationalism as a movement promoting the culture, history, and language of Jews, and Palestine could be a concentrated location for the movement, as well as a safe haven for Jews experiencing persecution, such as those from eastern Europe. Some Zionists, such as Louis Brandeis, even saw Zionism as a brand of Americanism.
53 Sampter, Speaking Heart, 233–35.
54 Sampter, Speaking Heart, 235–35a.
55 Marian Spitzer, “The Erstwhile Crowning Glory,” Saturday Evening Post, June 27, 1925.
56 The writer and organizer Henrietta Szold is remembered as the founder of the women’s Zionist organization Hadassah, which raised funds for Zionist activities and established medical, educational, and social services in Mandate Palestine and, later, the State of Israel. Hacohen, Dvora, To Repair a Broken World: The Life of Henrietta Szold, Founder of Hadassah (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021)Google Scholar; Dash, Joan, Summoned to Jerusalem: The Life of Henrietta Szold (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2003)Google Scholar.
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62 Szold to Kallen, May 17, 1917.
63 Schumm, “Reimaging Disability.”
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77 Jessie Sampter to Elvie Wachenheim, June 23, 1932, Jessie Sampter Papers, CZA, A219\30.
78 Badt-Strauss, White Fire, 18.
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85 Sampter, Speaking Heart, 55.
86 Sampter, Speaking Heart, 154.
87 Moore sees a similar pattern of friendships that extend beyond death in her study of twentieth-century French Catholic thinkers. Moore, “Friendship and the Cultivation of Religious Sensibilities.”
88 Mary Antin to “R.A.,” January 31, 1946, Mary Antin Collection, American Jewish Historical Society, correspondence 1946.
89 Jessie Sampter to Elvie Wachenheim, December 26, 1933, Jessie Sampter Papers, CZA, A219\31.
90 Furey, “Body, Subjectivity, and Society in Religious Studies.”
91 Mary Antin, undated and unaddressed letter, Mary Antin Papers, Gould Farm archive, 2008-1030, Mary Antin – letters and replies – 1930.
92 Badt-Strauss, White Fire, 18.