Examines how Jewish women have used poetry to challenge their historical limitations while rewriting their potential futures.Jewish women have had a fraught relationship with history struggling for inclusion while resisting their limited role as reproducers of the future. In Queer Expectations Zohar WeimanKelman shows how Jewish women writers turned to poetry to write new histories developing queer expectancy as a conceptual tool for understanding how literary texts can both invoke and resist what came before. Bringing together Jewish womens poetry from the late nineteenth century the interwar period and the 1970s and 1980s WeimanKelman takes readers on a boundarycrossing journey through works in English Yiddish and Hebrew setting up encounters between writers of different generations locations and languages. Queer Expectations highlights genealogical lines of continuity drawn by authors as diverse as Emma Lazarus Kadya Molodowsky Leah Goldberg Anna Margolin Irena Klepfisz and Adrienne Rich. These poets push back against heteronormative imperatives of biological reproduction and inheritance opting instead for connections that twist traditional models of gender and history. Looking backward in queer ways enables new histories to emerge intervenes in a troubled present and gives hope for unexpected futures.