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“A Jewish Girl of Mexico:” Anita Brenner and the Article That Won First Prize in The Forward (1925) Marcela López Arellano, Universidad Autónoma de Aguascalientes, México

Abstract This article focuses on an autobiographical narrative of Anita Brenner written in 1925 for The Forward, a notable Jewish newspaper in New York City. With this text, she won the “Our Big Prize Contest” in June of that year. It is through an emphasis on the period’s culture and gender perspective that the social and cultural context of the newspaper and Jewish immigrants in the United States of America in the 1920s are investigated. This paper explores the way Brenner asserted herself both as a Jew and as a writer, and reviews the factors, which helped her win the contest, introducing her as a “modern girl,” who utilized her writing flair in the story she had to tell.

Introduction1 This essay discusses an autobiographical article by Anita Brenner (August 13, 1905 – December 1, 1974), discovered at the Center for Jewish History in New York City. Brenner’s article was the first place winner of a personal story competition that was published in a Jewish newspaper in New York in 1925. The call for submissions appeared in the English section of the Sunday edition of The Jewish Daily Forward, one of the most significant and popular newspapers among the Jewish immigrant population in the United States at the time. The piece depicts Brenner’s first years in Mexico and the United States. The following essay examines the historical, cultural, and social conditions surrounding Brenner’s narrative when she was nineteen, and the context within which it was written.2 In this case, the personal story is analyzed sociologically and historically. As an autobiographical piece, the characteristics of the text are also explored, as each component of the narrative implies a different approach from the historical perspective of the author, to the targeted reader, the writer’s intentions, the editorial revisions, and finally, the social, cultural, and historical context in which it was created. In autobiographical texts, the writer takes the distinctive role as the central subject.3 In order to situate Anita Brenner’s writing within its historical context, gender is used as a category for historical analysis— a lens illuminating the power dynamics of the social relationships, which constituted Brenner’s wider milieu.4 Gender

Women in Judaism: A Multidisciplinary Journal Volume 15 Number 1 (2018) ISSN 1209-9392 © 2018 Women in Judaism, Inc. All material in the journal is subject to copyright; copyright is held by the journal except where otherwise indicated. There is to be no reproduction or distribution of contents by any means without prior permission. Contents do not necessarily reflect the views of the editors.

1 identities are constructed in relation to social organizations, specific historical and cultural representations, and factors such as social class, ethnicity, and labour.5 The article is divided into two parts; the first situates Anita Brenner’s story up to 1925. It provides an overview of The Jewish Daily Forward and its relevance to the Jewish immigrant community in New York. This part also introduces the open call for essays through the “Our Big Prize Contest,” which was published in this newspaper in January 1925. The section likewise includes a brief review of Anita Brenner’s submission to the contest and an explanation of the reasons why the newspaper awarded the prize to Brenner. The second part of this essay demonstrates how The Jewish Daily Forward contributed to Anita Brenner’s understanding of her role as a Jewish writer from a very young age. In this section, the article focuses on some of the factors, which contributed to Brenner’s article winning the competition and concludes with a discussion about the significance of historical context to the creation of any type of written tradition. These analytical perspectives add to an understanding of how Anita Brenner’s participation in the autobiographical competition of The Jewish Daily Forward molded her ideas about her own Jewish identity. 1. Anita Brenner and The Jewish Daily Forward Anita Brenner (1905-1974) was born in the city of Aguascalientes, Mexico in August 1905. Her parents, Isidoro and Paula Brenner, were Jews who had emigrated from their native Latvia to the United States at the end of the nineteenth century and later in 1900 arrived in Aguascalientes in search of a better livelihood. The Brenners lived in Aguascalientes until 1916. When faced with the growing instability and violence of the Mexican Revolution, Isidoro Brenner decided to move his family to San Antonio, Texas. Anita Brenner continued her studies in San Antonio, where she spent a semester at a Catholic university. She enrolled at the University of Texas at Austin in 1922, where she only stayed for a year. In 1923, she decided to return to Mexico City to work and study. She registered at the Universidad Nacional de México for extracurricular courses centered on Mexican indigenous culture, ethnography, archaeology, and Latin American literature. In 1924, Brenner started working for the B’nai B’rith, a support agency for Jewish immigrants. This

2 agency began operating in Mexico because the United States government had, in that same year, restricted the entry of Jewish immigrants to the United States. The immigration restrictions forced many European immigrants to first arrive in Mexico with the hope of later crossing the northern border to the United States. It was also in this year that Brenner wrote her first articles about the Jewish population in Mexico, like “The Jew in Mexico,” written for the New York- based magazine The Nation.6 In September 1924, she began to report about what was happening to the Jewish immigrants who were arriving in Veracruz, Mexico. Brenner sent these reports to Jewish newspapers and news agencies in New York, such as The Jewish Morning Journal, The Jewish Bulletin, and The Jewish Telegraphic Agency. In January 1925, Anita Brenner arrived in New York City, possibly as the result of recommendations made by the anthropologists Manuel Gamio7 and Frances Toor,8 to take classes at Columbia University with the Jewish-German anthropologist, Franz Boas.9 Brenner was a young woman of nineteen when she arrived alone in the city. She found a place to live on Greenwich Avenue near the Lower East Side of Manhattan, a Jewish neighborhood, and home to the offices of many Yiddish and English newspapers. In the United States, newspapers in foreign languages began to appear at the end of the nineteenth century as informative bulletins about maritime transportation, banking, political parties, fraternities, and nationalist movements. There were bulletins in French, German, Yiddish, and Italian. Yiddish newspapers first appeared in New York City in 1885. The Jewish- German language, Yiddish, had emerged in Germany during the sixteenth century when Jewish populations established themselves in Slavic countries. The language was formed with traces of German, Hebrew, and expressions from Slavic languages.10 The arrival of thousands of Jewish immigrants fleeing persecution in late nineteenth-century Europe boosted the growth of Yiddish culture in the United States.11 Intellectuals who arrived in the United States communicated with other immigrants through various Yiddish publications. The New York Forward, or simply The Forward,12 began as a publication of the Socialist Party and was established by the Jewish Socialist Press in 1897. According to historians Ronald Sanders and Edmond V. Gillon Jr., The Forward became the major Jewish publication in New

York City.13 In 1903, Lithuanian immigrant, Abraham Cahan (1860-1951), a socialist, teacher, and writer, took charge of the paper as editor.14 Trent Peterfield describes him as a talented and versatile editor who became a central figure in some of the major Jewish intellectual enterprises in the United States.15 Cahan established himself in American journalism during the era of media tycoons, Willliam Randolph Hearst16 and Joseph Pulitzer,17 and popularized The Forward despite the criticism of older socialists, who believed that the publication’s reputation deteriorated. However, in the 1920s, “The Forward’s circulation of more than 200,000 was among the largest in the United States, for newspapers in any language.”18 Cahan introduced an English language section in the Sunday paper19 to remain competitive with other Jewish newspapers that published in both Yiddish and English. Under Cahan’s leadership, The Forward abandoned its rigid ideology. The newspaper began publishing letters in which immigrants exchanged complaints, requests, and advice. This was evident in sections like “The Gallery of Missing Men,”20 with notes provided by wives or family members, and the most popular, “Bintel Brief,” Yiddish for “a bundle of letters,” which featured requests for advice from the editor about problems adapting to the country, relationship conflicts, or family problems. Many of the letters came from young women who wanted to start an education, but were faced with opposition from parents and spouses. Historian Paula Hyman notes that, “By studying they signify their repudiation of the cultural backwardness and female subordination they associate with the traditional Judaism.”21 Hyman maintains that the Jewish press of the first decades of the twentieth century played an important role in the assimilation of Jewish women, especially during the women’s suffrage movement. She observes that the “Woman’s Page” in The Jewish Daily Forward reinforced the acceptance of women’s participation in the workplace and in politics. She asserts that The Forward did not assume that women’s only interests were fashion and the home, and that it created a moderate socialist vision of “Jewish femininity” by writing about politics, work trends, and the feminist movements. For Hyman, this acceptance of women as “active subjects” instead of passive objects in history “recognized, and promoted, the status of women as partners in negotiating the public role of Jews in American society.”22

In January 1925, The Forward published a call for a writing contest entitled “Our Big Prize Contest” in its Sunday English language section. The paper invited readers to contribute “their personal experiences and thus place themselves in line for the prizes offered for the best three submitted manuscripts.”23 These would be published and paid for at the regular price, the first place winner would receive $60 and an honors distinction, the second place winner would receive $30, and the third place recipient would win $20. The Forward recommended that “Stories should be of genuine experiences in the lives of the writers, but before undertaking to write down your story, ask yourself if you think it will interest others in addition to yourself.”24 The final deadline for the publication was April 11, 1925, and contributors were advised that articles could be modified for publication. The announcement also indicated a number of guidelines for authors, such as “manuscripts should not exceed 1,500 words, less if possible […], typed, and double spaced.”25 The best submissions were published every Sunday. On January 25, the paper ran a story about Jewish people in Argentina, which seemed to offer “a genuine experience of the Jewish youth under circumstances that are unfamiliar to most of us.”26 On Sunday, June 7, 1925, the newspaper published Brenner’s submission. Susannah Glusker, Brenner’s daughter, mentions in her biography on Brenner that her mother received an award for an article entitled “Race of Princes,”27 but the article that appeared in The Forward was published as “A Jewish Girl of Mexico.”28 It is feasible that the editor changed the title of the article. The editor also added the following subtitle, “She Didn’t Know What a Jew Was Until She Grew Up. A Prize Contest Story.”29 The story appeared in the lower right quarter of the English language section and the final segment appeared on the “Woman’s Page” with the incorrect title, “A Girl from Mexico.” The article was accepted despite the fact that it had more than 1,900 words. In her article, Brenner covered several subjects. She specified that she had been born in Mexico and mentioned the first time she had ever heard about a Jew in Mexico. She described the social peculiarity of the Jews she met in Aguascalientes when she was a little girl, explaining, for example, the Judases that were burnt every Easter Saturday. She wrote about the Inquisition in Mexico, as well as the image of Jews as evil spirits, which was common among Mexicans. As

Brenner explained, “it would have been both dangerous and ridiculous for my father to make himself known as such.” Brenner recalled many stories from her natal Aguascalientes that had been told to her by Anacleto, a driver who frequently passed by her childhood home: The only person I really respected was Anacleto, a broken-nose driver of the mule car which jangled past the parlor window when I practiced the piano and who occasionally stopped his team and listened…it was he who told me that an Israelite was a Jew…and the one who transformed the devils into princes for me.30

Brenner also remembered a rich plantation owner who had made fun of the revolutionary Francisco I. Madero31 by labeling him a Jew: One day, don Alfonso, a rich hacendado (rancher) neighbor, came to dinner. He talked about that crazy Madero, making fun about uplifting the peons…He said Madero was a deluded, idealistic, fanatical, shameless Jew.32

Madero’s role in the Mexican Revolution, she explained, caused her family to flee first from her town to Mexico City, and then later from the country to the United States. She recalled her memories of their experience running away from Aguascalientes where, by 1916, her father had owned a ranch and was the manager of a hotel. One night they had to catch a train to El Paso, Texas: We left Mexico almost at the end of the struggle. Our cows and horses were gone, the ranch was a mess of trenches, and the crops were mud made of black earth and the blood of veal and men. My older brother remained in school in the capital city. We traveled for two days in a sweat of soldiers, women, four whimpering children and Othello, a lumbering Newfoundland dog.33

Anita did not specify that they had settled in San Antonio, Texas, after leaving Mexico, but she pointed out that in this city she had discovered unfamiliar Jewish traditions, and highlighted her encounter with anti-Semitism: “Suddenly one day my friend said she could not go with me anymore. I was a Jewish girl.”34 In high school, Brenner wrote, she had discovered not only that there were certain places that Jewish individuals could not enter but that there was also discrimination among Jewish people. She spoke of her experience in the Catholic university with a compassionate nun: I was reverently devoted to writing I grew religious and mystical. I read the Scriptures and speculated about the powers of the Magen David. I reveled in the divine land of Israel and in the symbolism of Israel’s faith. I regained the thundering prophets, yet was full of pain.35

In this passage, she referred to her own struggle in recognizing herself as part of the Jewish community. In the story, she revealed that her experience at the university in Austin had taken away her religion, that she felt tortured, that her prominent nose embarrassed her terribly, and that she had no friends. It was at this point that she decided to return to Mexico, even though many warned her against it: I fled to Mexico, foregoing a B.A. at an early age and the subsequent three paragraphs in the local papers. Everybody said I was crazy. A young girl in what they called ‘a savage, unstable, uncivilized country.’36

She described that her new friends in Mexico City liked the fact that she was Jewish: The idea of a Jewish girl was such a romantic one to the poets and writers and artists with whom I associated, that I grew ashamed when I was forced to confess that I did not know Hebrew and knew very little about Jewish traditions. They knew more than I did.37

They told her that many Mexicans were of Jewish origin and she remembered what her neighbor in Aguascalientes had told her father about Madero, wondering if it were true. Anita wrote that in the two years that she lived in Mexico,38 she had researched the Jewish people, the Inquisition, and Judaism in general, and had traveled to the indigenous villages of the country. I began investigating the Jewish religion seriously for what it could mean to me. I had been wistful about vanquishing it in the first place. This time I held up my head feeling proud of my hooked nose again. 39

This is when she began to feel victorious, and it was then that “I advised myself to pack up my things and try civilization for a while.”40 Brenner concluded her story by saying that she was pleased to be able to write about her experience and that she was “proud of [her identity], because whether devils, rebels or angels, peddlers, princes or prophets, they really are not that bad, that after all everyone needs information.”41 On June 21, 1925, The Forward announced in the upper central part of the English language section that “Anita Brenner wins first prize in contest,” with the following statement: “Mary Linda Helfant wins second prize and Dr. M. Steinman wins third. A Successful Contest Closed.” Alongside the announcement, they included a photograph of Anita Brenner with the title, “Wins First Prize.”42 The picture must have been taken in the newspaper office. The paper notified its readers that Anita Brenner, a young Mexican-born Jewish woman who had been educated in a Catholic university in Texas, had won the contest with her story, “A Jewish Girl in Women in Judaism: A Multidisciplinary Journal Volume 15 Number 1 (2018) ISSN 1209-9392 © 2018 Women in Judaism, Inc. All material in the journal is subject to copyright; copyright is held by the journal except where otherwise indicated. There is to be no reproduction or distribution of contents by any means without prior permission. Contents do not necessarily reflect the views of the editors.

Mexico.” Her article was the last story that was published in the contest series but the judges considered it to be the best of all the entries. The Forward informed readers that Brenner had received fifty dollars43 and had been congratulated for her excellent work. Mary Linda Helfant, who penned, “A prodigy at 12- Disappointed at 22,” had received thirty dollars, and Dr. Steinman’s “The Revolutionary Boy” won twenty dollars. The publication explicitly stated the specific reasons for Anita’s placement: Miss Brenner’s story won the first prize because of its intensely interesting subject matter and its excellent style. She had a story to tell about her Jewish life and experiences in a world utterly unknown to most of us. She narrated it straightforwardly, plainly and emotionally.44

Regarding the second place prize, The Forward pointed out that the author had written without self-sympathy about the disillusionment of youth, and that the third place prize was about the revolution against the Russian Czar. The editor pointed out that in most submissions about Jewish life in Russia, authors normally wrote with self-pity and that Steinman had been placed highly because his story reflected a spirit of happiness and enjoyment. In this particular case, The Forward went on to offer a constructive review: Too many of our young Jewish men and women are morbid, too many of them pity themselves, too many dwell constantly upon their troubles, real or fancied […] We should look forward, not inwards. We should be concerned about our troubles, our sorrows, our persecutions, but we shouldn’t let them swamp us up. We should leave the whining out of our character and out of our literature.45

The editors of the publication stated that these stories had won because the writers did not ignore the problems of the Jewish people but, more importantly, they did not let these problems hold them back. This, in the end, was what made the stories so attractive to the judges. 2. Aspects of Culture and Gender Anita Brenner arrived in New York in 1925, began her anthropology classes at Columbia University, looked for Jewish publications, and made the decision to share her experiences with other Jewish people. As a resident of New York City, she must have known of the enormous popularity of The Forward. Due to her work with the support agency for immigrant Jews in Mexico, Brenner was aware of the immigrant community’s desire to know about their brethren living in other parts of the world. In reading The Forward, she understood that the newspaper addressed both men and women, dealing with daily life. Women in Judaism: A Multidisciplinary Journal Volume 15 Number 1 (2018) ISSN 1209-9392 © 2018 Women in Judaism, Inc. All material in the journal is subject to copyright; copyright is held by the journal except where otherwise indicated. There is to be no reproduction or distribution of contents by any means without prior permission. Contents do not necessarily reflect the views of the editors.

Anita Brenner chose to tell her story to Jewish immigrants in the United States, who had themselves experienced, or whose parents had experienced, the process of integrating and assimilating into a new culture. Brenner focused her narrative on the difficulties and suffering that she had overcome in order to include herself as part of the Jewish community. She knew that the readers would not judge her ambivalence between wanting integration and maintaining a separate identity. It is interesting to note that Brenner wrote her story because she believed that it would be of interest to other people. The opportunity given by the paper aided Brenner in uniting two essential parts of her being that had begun to emerge: the writer and her process of assimilation to Judaism. She took advantage of the opportunity to share a story that would not be understood elsewhere. Other examples of Brenner’s autobiographical narratives attest to the fact that she decided either to expose or to silence her Jewish identity depending on when and to whom it was written. In 1923, Brenner wrote an autobiographical novel (which was left unfinished and never published) about her disagreeable experiences with Jewish people in Texas.46 With The Forward, however, it was precisely this part of her identity that she wished to share with other Jews. Brenner’s position as a young woman perhaps made her submission particularly favorable to the editors of The Forward. Modern women in the first decades of the twentieth century made strides in spaces that had been won by earlier generations, specifically regarding women’s emancipation. These years produced tangible gains for feminists, union leaders, and other progressive social movements in the United States. As Nancy F. Cott has explained, in the 1920s the term “liberated woman” became popular. During that period, various agents of modernity were forced to take into account the desires and symbols, which linked individuality to women’s identities.47 Therefore, the press and film industries no longer presented women solely as timid and submissive. Instead, women were depicted as sociable and fun loving, and well in control of their lives. Brenner had the chance to live in the United States and Mexico during this birth of the so-called “modern girl,” when young women were wearing new fashion, looking for romantic love, and rejecting the traditional roles of daughter, mother, and wife. These

“modern girls” came from the middle and upper classes but not all were college educated; some were from a more modest upbringing and were described as “rebellious and independent.”48 According to Paula Hyman, The Forward was an agent of change in the formation of this new model of femininity offered to young Jewish women, as it allowed women to write stories, relate their experiences, and included them in the construction of Jewish identity in the United States. Even though she liked fashion, Brenner was more interested in her studies, politics, and reading. She was a young, middle-class, university educated Jewish woman who wanted to be a writer, and in this article, she put her writing skills into practice. Another factor in favor of Brenner’s submission was her youth. In June 1925, when she was just nineteen years old, she wrote: In High School, I was a martyr and I was bitter because my pretty creatures were gone. I had no more thundering prophets and gentle blue mantled Davids. I did not like Jews.49

She also recounted stories about her personal growth and self-awareness, as she attended the University of Texas: I substituted mysticism with Emersonianism, then went through various stages of pessimism, cynicism, fatalism, agnosticism, atheism. I suffered.50

This was a narrative of a young person that had recently been through a process of self- realization and was now capable of revealing this growth through her writing. An additional factor that was especially favorable in Brenner’s submission was the fact that she was from a country unfamiliar to most immigrant Jews living in New York City. Mexico, as the editor noted, “was an utterly unknown world for most of us.”51 This is possibly why the editors chose the title “A Jewish Girl of Mexico,” in order to arouse the curiosity of the readers. In her story, Anita described a new territory, an unknown aspect of Jewish culture. She wrote about a revolution of which readers had probably never heard. The Forward had previously published an article about Jewish people living in Argentina. Despite these variables of Brenner’s background, it was above all her writing style that ultimately facilitated her achievement. The announcement, which recognized her placement referred to her “intensely interesting subject matter and excellent style.”52 She had taken writing

10 courses at North American universities and literature courses in Mexico. The Nation had published one of her articles and Jewish newspapers were accepting her reports about Mexico. The Forward recognized her writing style as “straightforward, complete and emotional.”53 It is interesting to note that despite the 1,500 word-limit, Brenner’s article was awarded first place with over 1,900 words. Finally, Brenner did not fall into the usual feature of self-pity that the editors of The Forward noticed among many of the other submissions. With her positive narrative, without laments or regrets, she accepted and followed the objectives of The Forward, which had asked Jews to cast off their pessimistic attitudes and remove lamentation from their accounts. With her work, Brenner described how to integrate into a new country with joy, and not with restlessness or sadness. Brenner told her story without showing defeat or humiliation, she revealed her pain, her search, her questions, but confessed that finally she felt strong and proud of her prominent nose. It was her narrative style that won her the prize. Conclusions This essay partakes in the idea that the analysis of personal narratives introduces diverse voices, like those of women, in order to incorporate the social and cultural dynamics within which authors are writing. It reaffirms that women construct themselves as social subjects because “individual social action is best understood through historically specific social relationships and institutions.”54 The valuable part of analyzing a document is the possibility of considering the context in which it was produced and the effect that this context had on the author and his or her readers. Brenner moved to New York City when Jewish immigrants had already begun integrating into the culture and society of America. According to historian Gloria Carreño, “America was a panacea, it was the solution to problems. In the synagogues, markets, and in everyone’s homes, people talked about America: the new world.”55 In Europe, stories were told about the riches of this country, its prosperity, and the freedoms enjoyed there.56 With the expansion of railroads and steam engines, three million

Jews arrived in the United States, where church and state were separated, and social life was characterized by religious, ethnic, and racial diversity.57 Many of these immigrants stayed in New York City and established themselves in the Manhattan neighborhood called the Lower East Side. They built synagogues, schools, stores, kosher restaurants, bookstores, and founded Jewish newspapers that informed the community with news about Jewish people in other countries and also offered advice pertaining to cultural integration and assimilation in the new country. This was the context in which Brenner arrived in 1925. In addition to New York’s prevalent Jewish community, she also found very progressive spaces for women. Women existed as anthropologists, writers, poets, journalists, university students, feminists, socialists, artists, and a large number of women no longer wanted to remain in the private sphere of the home and family. Instead, like Brenner, these “modern girls” were taking advantage of the new opportunities that had been opened by earlier feminist activism. In many ways, women were the focus of newspapers in the 1920s. For some publications, this focus was related to consumer and commercial impulse, but for others, like The Forward, it provided women with a public voice. This newspaper recognized Brenner’s writing and gave her a space, which allowed her to claim identity as a writer and as a Jew. The written word was an axis for Brenner’s later life but, as a young woman in New York City, The Jewish Daily Forward made it possible for her to fulfill her calling as a writer, publicly telling her story for the first time. Anita Brenner became a well-known anthropologist, who wrote extensively about the art, culture, and history of Mexico.

ARCHIVES AHEA Archivo Histórico del Estado de Aguascalientes, México. CDICA Centro de Documentación e Investigación de la Comunidad Ashkenazi de México. CJH Center for Jewish History in New York.

HRC Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin: https://norman.hrc.utexas.edu/fasearch/findingaid.cfm?eadid=00186&kw=brenner, anita

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Hyman, Paula E. Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997. Maynes, Mary Jo, Jennifer L. Pierce, and Barbara Laslett. Telling Stories: The Use of Personal Narratives in the Social Sciences and History. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008. McClung Lee, Alfred. The Daily Newspaper in America: The Evolution of a Social Instrument. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1947. Peterfield, Trent, William, John Erskine, Stuart P. Sherman and Karl Van Doren. The Cambridge History of American Literature. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1921. Ramos Escandón, Carmen, ed. Presencia y transparencia: la mujer en la historia de México. México: El Colegio de México, 2006. Sanders, Ronald, and Edmund V. Gillon, Jr. The Lower East Side: A Guide to its Jewish Past in 99 New Photographs. New York: Dover Publications, 1994. Scott, Joan W. Género e historia. México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, UAM, 2008. [Trans. Consol Vilá I. Boada]. Sorin, Gerald. A Time for Building: The Third Migration 1880-1924. The Jewish People in America. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.

NOTES

1 This paper was translated from Spanish by Scarlett Shaffer and Laura Morales, and edited by Jaime Wadowiec. I thank Dr. Alison Rose and Dr. Susie Porter for reading it and making interesting suggestions. 2 Antonio Castillo Gómez, “Cultura escrita y sociedad,” in Cultura Escrita & Sociedad, ed. Antonio Castillo Gómez (Gijón: Ediciones Trea, 2005), 10. 3 David Carlson, “Autobiography,” in Reading Primary Sources. The Interpretation of Texts from Nineteenth-and Twentieth-Century History, ed. Miriam Dobson and Benjamin Ziemann. (New York: Routledge, 2009), 178. 4 Joan W. Scott, Género e Historia (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, UAM, 2008), 51. 5 Carmen Ramos Escandón, ed. Presencia y transparencia: la mujer en la historia de México (México: El Colegio de México, 2006), 16. 6 Anita Brenner, “The Jew in Mexico,” The Nation, August 27, 1924. 7 Manuel Gamio (1883-1960) Mexican Anthropologist, studied with Franz Boas. In 1911, he was part of the International Archaeology and Ethnology American School in Mexico. 8 Frances Toor (1890-1956) American Anthropologist and writer. She founded the magazine Mexican Folkways in Mexico, where Anita Brenner collaborated for a while.

9 Franz Boas (1858-1942) German Anthropologist of Jewish origin. Founded the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University in New York. Anita Brenner met him during her first stay in New York in 1925, and later he became her supervisor while writing her Ph.D in Anthropology. 10 William Peterfield Trent et al., The Cambridge History of American Literature (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1921), 599. J 11 For Jewish immigration in the United States, see: Sorin, Gerald, A Time for Building. The Third Migration 1880- 1920, The Jewish People in America. (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.) 12 The authors that mention this newspaper use indistinctly The Jewish Daily Forward or just The Forward. 13 Ronald Sanders and Edmund V. Gillon Jr., The Lower East Side: A Guide to Its Jewish Past in 99 New Photographs (New York: Dover Publications, 1994), 53. 14 He was the editor of The Forward up to 1946. 15 Peterfield, Trent, et al, The Cambridge History of American Literature, 600. 16 William Randolph Hearst (1863-1951) was a journalist, editor, publisher, and entrepreneur in the American press and media at the turn of the twentieth century. He owned about 28 national newspapers, such as the Los Angeles Examiner and The Chicago Examiner. 17 Joseph Pulitzer (1847-1911) was an American editor of Jewish origins. In the 1890s, the fierce competition between his newspaper The World and Hearst’s publications popularized the concept of “yellow journalism.” Pulitzer is best known for the Pulitzer Prizes, established in 1917 by money he bequeathed to Columbia University to recognize artistic and journalistic achievements in the United States. 18 Sanders and Gillon, The Lower East Side: A Guide to Its Jewish Past in 99 New Photographs, 53. 19 Alfren McClung Lee, The Daily Newspaper in America: The Evolution of a Social Instrument (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1947), 176. 20 Dorothy and Thomas Hobbler, The Jewish American Family Album (New York- Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 104. 21 Paula E. Hyman, Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997), 104. 22 Ibid., 114. 23 “Our Big Prize Contest,” The Jewish Daily Forward, January 25, 1925. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid. 27 Susannah Joel Glusker, Anita Brenner. Una mujer extraordinaria (Aguascalientes, México: Instituto Cultural de Aguascalientes, 2006), 198. (See: Susannah Glusker, Anita Brenner: A Mind of Her Own. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998). 28 Anita Brenner, “A Jewish Girl of Mexico,” The Jewish Daily Forward, June 7, 1925. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid. 31 Francisco I. Madero (1873-1913) Mexican landowner and politician, who in 1908 published The Presidential Succession, and called the people to arms for the uprising in November 20, 1910, against the President Porfirio Díaz, who was considered a dictator. Madero is known as the initiator or the Mexican Revolution, and was President of Mexico from November 1911 to February 1913, when the general Victoriano Huerta had him assassinated. 32 Brenner, “A Jewish Girl of Mexico.” 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid. 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid. [She went back to Mexico in 1923 when she was eighteen years old, and wrote this article in New York in 1925 before she turned twenty years old]. 39 Ibid. Women in Judaism: A Multidisciplinary Journal Volume 15 Number 1 (2018) ISSN 1209-9392 © 2018 Women in Judaism, Inc. All material in the journal is subject to copyright; copyright is held by the journal except where otherwise indicated. There is to be no reproduction or distribution of contents by any means without prior permission. Contents do not necessarily reflect the views of the editors.

40 Ibid. 41 Ibid. 42 “Anita Brenner Wins First Prize in Contest,” The Jewish Daily Forward, June 21,1925. 43 Although they offered $60.00 U.S. to the first prize, she only received $50. The outfit may have cost $10.00 when they first published her article. 44 “Anita Brenner Wins First Prize in Contest.” 45 Ibid. 46 HRC Anita Brenner, “A Race of Princes,” 1923. Anita Brenner Papers. Series I. Books. Box 5. Folder 1. “A Race of Princes, autobiographical novel, unfinished.” 47 Nancy F. Cott, “Mujer moderna, estilo norteamericano: los años veinte,” in 5. Siglo XX, ed. Francoise Thébaud (Madrid: Taurus, 2006), 107. 48 Catherine Gourley, Flappers and the New American Woman: Perceptions of Women from 1918 through the 1920s (Minneapolis: Twenty-First Century Books, 2008), 19. 49 Brenner, “A Jewish Girl of Mexico.” 50 Ibid. 51 “Anita Brenner Wins First Prize in Contest.” 52 Ibid. 53 Ibid. 54 Mary Jo Maynes, et al., Telling Stories. The Use of Personal Narratives in the Social Sciences and History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008), 2. 55 Gloria Carreño, “Tomo I. Pasaporte a la esperanza,” in Generaciones Judías en México. La Kehilá Ashkenazi (1922-1992), ed. Alicia Gojman de Backal (México: Comunidad Ashkenazi de México, 1993), 33. 56 Eric L. Goldstein, “The Great Wave: Eastern European Jewish Immigration to the United States, 1880-1924,” in The Columbia History of Jews and Judaism in America, ed. Marc Lee Raphael (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 73-74. 57 Hasia Diner, The Jews of the United States (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004), 73.

Key words: Journalism, Autobiography, Jew, Writer, Jewish History, Mexico.

Relevant Links on Anita Brenner: Another Promised Land (an exhibition): https://www.skirball.org/exhibitions/another-promised-land-anita-brenners-mexico From the Archives: Anita Brenner on the Mexican Art Scene, in 1951: http://www.artnews.com/2017/10/27/from-the-archives-anita-brenner-on-the-mexican-art-scene- in-1951/