Book Talk – Able to Be American

Author Hannah E. Zaves-Greene joins us to discuss her new book, Able to Be American: Disability in US Immigration Policy and the American Jewish Response with Sarah Imhoff

Epilepsy. Heart disease. Varicose veins. “Feeble-mindedness.” In 1891, Congress unambiguously codified the popular sentiment that “defects” like these should preclude admission to the United States. Expanding the eugenics-rooted restrictions of the 1882 Immigration Act, the new law conflated illness, poverty, and disability with criminality and “moral turpitude,” starkly revealing Congress’s vision of the “ideal” American. Simultaneously, American Jews sought security and acceptance in the United States. In confronting these fraught issues, they boldly asserted that they too had the right, knowledge, and ability to shape the meaning of American national belonging and, indeed, the fabric of the country itself.

Able to be American explores this tension, revealing how eugenic theories about illness and disability fundamentally shaped American society, government, and everyday life. As Jewish communal leaders contested the thorny relationship between perceived able-bodiedness and the “ability” to become American, they strove to reform federal immigration law and its implementation according to their own visions for what the United States could become. Hannah Zaves-Greene’s groundbreaking and richly sourced analysis weaves together archival documents, government records, and captivating case studies, exposing enduring truths about exclusion, belonging, democracy, and citizenship at this watershed moment in US history.

Hannah E. Zaves-Greene is a scholar-in-residence at Brandeis University’s Hadassah-Brandeis Institute and expert in American Jewish history and disability studies.

Sarah Imhoff is Professor and Chair of the Department of Religious Studies and Jay and Jeanie Schottenstein Chair in the Borns Jewish Studies Program at Indiana University. She writes about religion and the body with a particular interest in gender, sexuality, race, and disability. She is author of Masculinity and the Making of American Judaism (Indiana University Press, 2017) and The Lives of Jessie Sampter: Queer, Disabled, Zionist (Duke University Press, 2022) and, with Susannah Heschel, The Woman Question in Jewish Studies  (Princeton University Press, 2025). She is also the editor of Judaism in 5 Minutes (Equinox, 2025) and, with Andrea Dara Cooper, co-editor of Jewish Women Thinkers (Wayne State University Press, forthcoming). She is the founding co-editor of the journal American Religion.