Born in Europe in 1824 as Henrietta Pulfermacher, Cora Wilburn came to the U.S. in 1848 and established herself as a successful writer, although she has long since been forgotten. Without ever shedding her Jewish identity, she became involved in the Spiritualist movement, whose adherents sought to make contact with the souls of the dead. Recounting his search to find Wilburn’s writing and reconstruct her biography, Jonathan Sarna describes her sole novel, the semiautobiographical Cosella Wayne:

The novel immediately captured my attention as its central characters were Jews. It soon dawned on me that nothing resembling this novel appears in the (meager) canon of 19th-century American Jewish fiction. Indeed, Cosella Wayne anticipates central themes of American Jewish writing: intermarriage, generational tension, family dysfunction, Jewish-Christian relations, immigration, poverty, the place of women in Jewish life, the rise of romantic love, and the tension between destiny and free will. The book provides rich descriptions of Jewish rituals as well as Jewish communities around the world, and it introduces readers to Jewish texts little available at that time in English, such as the Ethics of the Fathers.

The story casts light on the early decades of Spiritualism—today appreciated for its openness toward women and advocacy of liberal political causes, such as abolitionism and women’s rights. Finally, Cosella Wayne dates back farther than any previously known Jewish novel published in the United States with American themes.

Standard accounts consider Nathan Mayer’s Civil War novel, Differences, published in 1867, to be “the first novel of literary value to treat of American Jews seriously, realistically, and at length.” Cosella Wayne, set in the 1840s and published in 1860, predates Differences by seven years. The first American Jewish novel authored by a woman, according to most accounts, is Emma Wolfe’s novel of intermarriage, Other Things Being Equal, published in 1892. Again, Cosella Wayne revises this chronology and demonstrates that the very first American Jewish novelsit of consequence was another woman, Cora Wilburn.

Robert Satloff has some harsh words for the U.S. government in this regard, words I take especially seriously because Satloff is someone inclined to political moderation. Why, he asks, have American diplomats failed to achieve anything in their endless rounds of talks in Doha and Cairo? Because

there is simply not enough pressure on Hamas to change course, accept a deal, and release the remaining October 7 hostages, stuck in nightmarish captivity. . . . In this environment, why should Hamas change course?

Publicly, the U.S. should bite the bullet and urge Israel to complete the main battle operations in Gaza—i.e., the Rafah operation—as swiftly and efficiently as possible. We should be assertively assisting with the humanitarian side of this.

Satloff had more to say about the hostages, especially the five American ones, in a speech he gave recently:

I am ashamed—ashamed of how we have allowed the story of the hostages to get lost in the noise of the war that followed their capture; ashamed of how we have permitted their release to be a bargaining chip in some larger political negotiation; ashamed of how we have failed to give them the respect and dignity and our wholehearted demand for Red Cross access and care and medicine that is our normal, usual demand for hostages.

If they were taken by Boko Haram, everyone would know their name. If they were taken by the Taliban, everyone would tie a yellow ribbon around a tree for them. If they were taken by Islamic State, kids would learn about them in school.

It is repugnant to see their freedom as just one item on the bargaining table with Hamas, as though they were chattel. These are Americans—and they deserve to be backed by the full faith and credit of the United States.