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Sharon Ann Musher is a Professor of History at Stockton University. She writes and teaches about social and cultural history, with an emphasis on Jewish women, motherhood, the New Deal, and slave narratives. Her most recent book, Promised Lands: Hadassah Kaplan and the Legacy of American Jewish Women in Early Twentieth Century Palestine (New York University Press, 2025), draws on the records of her grandmother, the second daughter of Mordecai Kaplan — founder of Reconstructionism — to show how travel to Palestine in the interwar period shaped a cohort of American Jewish women who went on to center Zionism in American Jewish institutions and communities. Sharon’s first book Democratic Art: The New Deal’s Influence on American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2015) traces a range of aesthetic visions that flourished during the 1930s to outline the successes, shortcomings, and lessons of the golden age of government funding for the arts.
Sharon writes both for academics and the general public. She has published articles and reviews in the Journal of American History, American Quarterly, Jewish Quarterly Review, and Jewish Journal of Sociology. She has written for the AAUP’s Academe blog, and Times (Union), and has a Times of Israel blog. She also has commented on, advised, and built New Deal related exhibits.
Sharon has spoken about her work at professional conferences (American Historical Association, Association of Jewish Studies, and American Jewish Historical Society), a number of universities, and also to public audiences at the NY Public Library, the Weizman National Museum of American Jewish History, bookstores, social clubs, high schools, and synagogues.
Her research has received support from the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Association of University Women, and the New Jersey Council for the Humanities. Sharon earned an M.Phil. in Economic and Social History from Oxford University and a Ph.D. in History from Columbia University.
Beyond academia, Sharon is on the boards of two not-for-profits: the Jewish Publication Society, which publishes books that promote Jewish literacy and self-awareness, and the Living New Deal, which documents, preserves, and maps the New Deal’s physical remnants.
She lives in Philadelphia with her husband, Daniel Eisenstadt, two out of their three daughters — Elena, Ariella, and Rachel — and their dog, Meyer.
Image Credit: Bernard DeLury
