Eastern European Jewish Women in an Age of Transition, 1870-1939 (Thursday)

This is a live, online seminar held weekly on Zoom. Enrollment will be capped at about 15 students. All course details (Zoom link, syllabus, handouts, etc.) will be posted to Canvas. Students will be granted access to the class on Canvas after registering for the class here on the YIVO website. This class will be conducted in English.

Instructor: Aleksandra Jakubczak

Course Description:
At the turn of the twentieth century, Eastern Europe was home to more than three million Jewish women. Women were represented in all classes within Jewish society, including the acculturated Jewish elites, the formally educated, revolutionaries, Zionists, Jews who were faithful to tradition, and the working class. Many of these Eastern European Jewish women did not passively watch the great revolutions taking place between the 1870s and 1939. Instead, they actively participated in the ongoing changes and shaped the discourses about them—abandoning parental homes; transgressing boundaries imposed on them as women and as Jews; and pursuing higher education, gainful employment, or political activity. In some respects, Jewish women’s lives represented the experiences of the entire Jewish society. In others, their gender informed their experiences and sometimes affected them drastically, as being Jewish and being women limited their opportunities and choices in some spheres.

This course explores the social and cultural history of Eastern European Jewry from the perspective of women and through the lens of gender, paying particular attention to sexuality, family, and daily life. Students will analyze historical materials, such as memoirs, statistics, press, and scholarly literature. All texts will be provided with English translation.

Course Materials:
The instructor will provide all course materials digitally to students throughout the class.

Aleksandra Jakubczak is a Ph.D. candidate at Columbia University, specializing in modern Eastern European Jewish history. Her scholarly interests include the social and economic history of modern Jewry; migration; transnational history; gender, sexuality and women’s history. She holds two MA degrees from Warsaw University in Hebrew Studies and History. In 2015, she was a graduate visiting student at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and, in 2016, a research fellow at the Institute for the History of Polish Jewry and Israel Poland Relations at Tel Aviv University. She is the author of Polacy, Zydzi i mit handlu kobietami [Poles, Jews and the Myth of Trafficking of Women], a scholarly monograph published by Warsaw University Academic Presses in 2020.

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