As a woman and a Jew, in a profession where visibility brings such important responsibility (I am a university professor), I am thrilled to find a kindred spirit in Edna Ferber. I particularly like the way this account makes Ferber's experience as a woman and a Jew central to her writing, especially since the popular conception of SHOWBOAT elides this fact, absorbing Ferber's feminist and Jewish identity into a muddle of invisibility in a mechanism that we are all too familiar with.
As a woman and a Jew, in a profession where visibility brings such important responsibility (I am a university professor), I am thrilled to find a kindred spirit in Edna Ferber. I particularly like the way this account makes Ferber's experience as a woman and a Jew central to her writing, especially since the popular conception of SHOWBOAT elides this fact, absorbing Ferber's feminist and Jewish identity into a muddle of invisibility in a mechanism that we are all too familiar with.