In her forthcoming book, Able to Be American: Disability in U.S. Immigration Law and the American Jewish Response (University of North Carolina Press, November 17, 2026), Hannah Zaves-Greene explores the complex, even fraught, gender dynamics between American Jewish women and men as they collaborated to aid immigrants and contest discriminatory immigration policies at the turn of the 19th century. Women immigration advocates like Sadie American and Cecilia Razovsky of the National Council of Jewish Women underscored gender’s profound significance in determining immigrants’ admissibility, recognizing rules and regulations that left men relatively untouched, but threatened and endangered women and girls. Their contributions illuminate how leading American Jewish women conceived of the meaning and implications of socioeconomic and legal belonging in the United States during its greatest wave of immigration.
HBI is delighted to have provided Dr. Zaves-Greene with a Research Award in 2021 in support of this work.
Hannah Zaves-Greene received her Ph.D. in American Jewish history from NYU, with a focus on gender and disability studies. Zaves-Greene is the founding president of the Society for Jewish & Disability Studies. She consulted for the National Museum of Immigration on Ellis Island, and her research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the New York Public Library, and the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Zaves-Greene is currently a Scholar in Residence at HBI investigating how American Jews responded politically, legally, and socially to the AIDS epidemic in the U.S., and how these responses influenced legislation like the Americans with Disabilities Act (1990) and HIPAA (1996).
Able to Be American is available for pre-order now at the University of North Carolina Press, Amazon, Bookshop, and other booksellers.
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