This book provides a rigorous social historical study of Eastern and East Central European Jewry with a specific focus on women. It demonstrates that only through the experiences of women can one fully understand key phenomena such as the momentous changes occurring in Jewish education, conversion waves, postwar relief efforts, anti-Jewish violence, Soviet productivization projects, and, more broadly, the acculturation that animated Jewish modernization. Rather than present a scenario in which secularism simply displaces traditionalism, the chapters in this book suggest a mutually transformative secularist-traditionalist encounter within which Jewish women were both prominent and instrumental.
Chapter “'To Write? What's This Torture For?' Bronia Baum's Manuscripts as Testimony to the Formation of a Write, Activist, and Journalist" is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license via link.springer.com.
Author(s): Elissa Bemporad, Glenn Dynner
Publisher: Springer
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 245
City: Cham
Contents
Introduction: Jewish Women in Modern Eastern and East Central Europe
Marginality without Benefits: Converting Jewish Women in Lithuanian Guberniyas
Abstract
Tentative Evaluations: Female Conversions in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century
Part of Modernity: Conversions in the Late Imperial Period
Conversion as `Emigration'
From Anna Kluger to Sarah Schenirer: Women's Education in Kraków and Its Discontents
Abstract
The Galician Jewish Press and `The Question of Our Daughters'
Anna Kluger and Her Struggle for Higher Education
The Kluger Case in the Local Court in Kraków
The Kluger Case in the Supreme Court in Vienna
The Repercussions of the Kluger Case
Postscript: The Bais Yaakov Kraków Model
`To Write? What's This Torture For?' Bronia Baum's Manuscripts as Testimony to the Formation of a Writer, Activist, and Journalist
Abstract
Breyndl (Bronia) Baum-A Life
Bronia Baum's Literary Works
Priority: Education
The Role of World War I and Its Consequences in the Formation of Bronia Baum's Worldview and Attitudes
Religion and Tradition
Feminist Tropes, Attitude toward Men, Relations with Women
New Rachels-Neo-Orthodox Women Poets
The Compulsion to Write and Its Origin
Summary
Translated from Polish by Barbara Krawcowicz
Humanitarian Encounters: Charity and Gender in Post-World War I Jewish Budapest
Abstract
Crossing the Line: Violence against Jewish Women and the New Model of Antisemitism in Poland in the 1930s
Abstract
Invisible Female Victims
Women Blocked and Removed from Lecture Halls
Ghetto Benches
Responses to Violence against Female Jewish Students
Conclusions
Gender Violence: The 1917-1922 Ukrainian Pogroms and the Challenges of Modernity
Abstract
Predators and Prey: Secular Education and Interpretations of Gender Violence
The Toiling Froy and the Speculating Yidene: Discourses of Female Productivization in the Soviet Shtetl
Abstract
The `Shtetl Problem' and the Female Question
Documenting the `Female Economy' of the Soviet Shtetl
The Toiling froy and the Speculating yidene during the First Five-Year Plan
Women's Labor, Jewish Demography: Production and Reproduction in the Shtetl
`To Speak for Those Who Cannot': Masha Rol'nikaite on the Holocaust and Sexual Violence in German-Occupied Soviet Territories
Abstract
Masha Rol'nikaite, Who Had to Tell
Three Encounters: Sexual Violence in Occupied Lithuania
Get Used to the Light: Shattered Families and the Aftermath of the Holocaust
Long Silence: Survival in Concentration Camps, Remembered
Conclusion
