Gender and the Body in East European Jewish History

Online conference to launch Polin. Studies in Polish Jewry Volume 38: Gender and the Body in East European Jewish History

Polin. Studies in Polish Jewry Volume 38: Gender and the Body in East European Jewish History from Liverpool University Press

It first explores the lasting impact of religious and esoteric traditions on Jewish practices around the body, gender and sexuality including fasting, libido, possession and demonic interference, and burial. It asks how the Jewish body was construed in fiction, ego-documents and (queer) poetry, how Jewish youth thought about sport, and how impersonating diverse identities during the Second World War became a matter of survival. 

It engages with the intersection of communal as well as state-related concerns, such as the panic over ‘White Slavery’, gender-dependent perceptions of warfare, care for the elderly, birth control, and the recent entanglement of antisemitic and misogynistic discourses. It reflects on the successful subversion of the established roles of perpetrator and victim in the context of pogrom violence, how the plunder of Jewish clothes during the Holocaust engaged the bodies of both victims and bystanders, and how the mass graves of the murdered Jews perpetuated a Jewish presence after the genocide. 

The volume concludes with a reflection on the embodied self, through four case studies discussing Sara Schenirer, Rachel Fajgenberg, Sara Gołębianka, and Krystyna Modrzewska.