Blending history, collective biography, and literary criticism, the new book West of the Ghetto: Jewish Women, Old San Francisco, and American Literary Culture (Wayne State University Press, 2026) re-positions the American West as a generative space for turn-of-the-20th-century Jewish women’s literature. Author Lori Harrison-Kahan, a professor of the practice in the Boston College English Department, demonstrates that California-based writers Emma Wolf, Bettie Lowenberg, Harriet Lane Levy, Miriam Michelson, and Anna Strunsky played formative roles in Jewish American literary history. Shaped by ethno-religious, gender, class, and settler-colonial dynamics of San Francisco and the frontier, their works challenge masculinist views of Jewish literature and contrast dramatically with well-known stories of the New York ghetto. Mining print and archival sources (including newspapers, magazines, novels, letters, diaries, and unpublished writings), Harrison-Kahan narrates the obscured lives of these pioneering women and considers how literary communities—from bourgeois women’s clubs to socialist bohemia—sustained them.