New College Foundation’s New Topics Lecture Series continues with "A Queer Zionism: Jessie Sampter and the Paradoxes of Jewish Nationalism" with Sarah Imhoff on Tuesday, January 18, at Mildred Sainer Pavilion on the New College campus. The young, unmarried Jessie Sampter embraced a Judaism her parents had rejected, bought a trousseau, drolly declared herself “married to Palestine,” and moved there in 1918. Jessie Sampter’s own life and body hardly matched typical Zionist ideals: while Zionism celebrated the strong and healthy body, Sampter spoke of herself as “crippled” from polio and plagued by sickness her whole life; while Zionism applauded reproductive (women’s) bodies, Sampter never married or bore children—in fact, she wrote of homoerotic longings and had same-sex relationships we would consider queer. How did a queer, “crippled” woman become a leading voice of American Zionism, and why has history largely overlooked her? Sarah Imhoff, author of “Masculinity and the Making of American Judaism,” is an associate professor in the Borns Jewish Studies Program and Religious Studies Department at Indiana University Bloomington.