Your Promised Land, Your Life: American Jewish Women Writers Reflect upon Zion

How does Zion figure in the construction of the Jewish female authorial self or the representation of personal identity? Is there a distinct and traceable history of Jewish women's figurations of Zion? This paper aims to answer these questions through an examination of three texts: Mary Antin's The Promised Land (1912), Adrienne Rich's Your Native Land, Your Life (1986), and Anne Roiphe's Lovingkindness (1987). All three of these works contain autobiographical elements, and all three deploy images of Zion to clarify or represent personal identity. In each of them, however, Zion means something different. Read together, they trace the development of Zion as a figure from a melting pot nation to an alternative to American secularism and secular feminism. Lovingkindness, in particular, represents the beginning of a "womanist" trend in Jewish-American women's writing—the search for a meaningful Jewish identity alongside feminist self-realization.