In Promised Lands, Sharon Ann Musher crafts an original and intimate account of her grandmother Hadassah Kaplan’s remarkable journey from Manhattan to British Mandate Palestine.

In 1932, Kaplan, then 19, sailed to Palestine and spent a year there with friends and chaperones. Along the way, Kaplan and her fellow travelers made side trips to Egypt, Jordan, France and the United Kingdom. These young American and Canadian Jewish women, Musher writes, were pioneers in their own right—members of an adventurous generation of upper-middle-class women coming of age after women’s suffrage. They sought spiritual growth, self-determination and a connection to Zionism and Jewish tradition.

They also recorded their adventures in letters and journals. Musher, a professor of history at Stockton University in New Jersey, writes that her grandmother’s story examines “the lives and legacies of previously little-remembered women travelers.”

Musher draws on a rich family history. Her grandmother was the second of four daughters born to Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan and his wife, Lena. Kaplan founded the Reconstructionist movement, and his oldest daughter, Judith, was the first girl in the United States to be called to the Torah as a bat mitzvah.

While the book is largely a biography of Hadassah Kaplan, Musher also explores her father’s influence and ideas as well as those of colleagues, friends and Jewish educators of the day, including the poet and Zionist educator Jessie Sampter and Hadassah founder Henrietta Szold.

“In 1932, when Mordecai wrote about the need to change the traditional status of women, he identified Zionism, adult education, and the organization Hadassah as key,” Musher writes. “Zionism, he wrote, provided a vehicle for realizing that Jewish life was worthwhile and a ‘thing of beauty.’ ”

The interwar period, however, was fraught. America was mired in the Depression, and fascism was spreading across Europe. Musher’s source material includes not only her grandmother’s meticulous journals but also letters she exchanged with her mother. Lena Kaplan, a German-born Jew, worried equally about her spirited daughter becoming entangled in political upheaval, failing to manage her finances and keeping company with young men on her travels. The letters reveal a cultural rift between an immigrant mother and her first-generation daughter.

In contrast, Mordecai Kaplan’s letters focused on his daughter’s Jewish education. He urged her to learn Hebrew and insisted that she continue studying Jewish texts.

Musher’s research in Promised Lands more broadly illuminates a small but influential group of women who challenged conventional expectations of the “ideal” Jewish wife, mother and daughter.

Hadassah Kaplan and her friends went on to make contributions to philanthropy, volunteerism and communal Jewish leadership in America. Kaplan herself became head of the Women’s Division of the Society for the Advancement of Judaism, served on the boards of the Reconstructionist Foundation and later the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College and helped raise funds for a range of Israeli cultural and educational institutions, including the Batsheva Dance Company, Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Weizmann Institute of Science. Influenced by her travels, she turned to Jewish history and Zionism as guiding forces in securing the futures of both Israel and the United States.

Judy Bolton-Fasman is the author of Asylum: A Memoir of Family Secrets.