Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry XVIII: Jewish Women in Eastern Europe (review)

2008 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 190-192
Author(s):  
Shaul Stampfer
Keyword(s):  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Jewish Women

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 95-97
Author(s):  
Adam Teller
Keyword(s):  
International Economic ◽  
International Trade ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Economic System ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Economic Systems ◽  
Jewish Women ◽  
Market Conditions ◽  
The Mediterranean

This chapter provides an overview of the Polish–Lithuanian Jews who were taken captive to be ransomed or sold into slavery. Once captured, these Jewish women and men found themselves trapped in two major international economic systems of the period. The first was the international trade in Ukrainian, Polish, Russian, and Circassian captives carried out by the Crimean Tatars with the support of the Ottoman Empire. The second economic system was piracy in the Mediterranean. Two major issues are at the heart of the discussion on the fates of these Jewish captives. The first concerns the slave trade itself and how its market conditions shaped the fate of the captured Jews. The second deals with the effort to ransom the Jewish captives from eastern Europe and is focused on the transregional Jewish philanthropic networks that raised huge sums and transported them the long distances to the slave market, examining them in terms of both their form and their function.

Iris Parush. Reading Jewish Women: Marginality and Modernization in Nineteenth-Century Eastern European Jewish Society. Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press; Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2004. xix, 340 pp.

AJS Review ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 402-404
Author(s):  
Eliyana R. Adler
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Eastern European ◽  
Hebrew Literature ◽  
Women Readers ◽  
Important Research ◽  
Canon Formation ◽  
Jewish Women ◽  
Jewish Society ◽  
European Jewish

Several years ago I had the good fortune to meet Iris Parush, and I asked how she, a scholar of Hebrew literature known best for her interest in canon formation, turned to the topic of women readers in Eastern Europe. She explained that it was her work on the writer and critic David Frischmann that piqued her interest in the topic. The emotional and contradictory rhetoric of this refined thinker led Parush to embark on an enormous and important research project.

Molodowsky, Kadya (1894–1975)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Agnieszka Legutko
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Jewish Identity ◽  
Female Subjectivity ◽  
Jewish Women ◽  
Literary Magazines ◽  
Yiddish Literature ◽  
First Lady ◽  
The Holocaust

Known as ‘the first lady of Yiddish literature,’ Kadya Molodowsky published continuously between 1927 and 1974. Molodowsky earned renown as a prolific poet, prose writer, playwright, essayist, and as the co-founder and editor of such Yiddish literary magazines as Svive [Milieu] (one of the first apolitical Yiddish periodicals), and Heym [Home]. Born in Bereza Kartuska, Belarus, Molodowsky made her literary debut after surviving the Kiev Pogrom in 1920. Her first book of poetry, Kheshvendikenekht, featured ‘Froyen-lider’ (‘Women-Poems’), her most famous sequence of poems addressing the modernist struggle between the newly acquired sense of female subjectivity, and the religious and societal constraints imposed on Jewish women. Kheshvendikenekht, along with her other early volumes of poetry, Mayselekh, Dzhike Gas, and Freydke, despairingly evoked the poverty and desperate situation of the Jews in Eastern Europe. Before she emigrated to New York in 1935, she developed poetry for and about children. In 1946 she published a volume of poetry, Der melekhDovidaleynizgeblibn (widely considered her finest work), dealing indirectly yet profoundly with the loss of European Jewry in the Holocaust. Throughout her oeuvre, Molodowsky explored the issues surrounding the reconciliation of the Jewish identity with modernity.

Sexual Barter and Jewish Women’s Efforts to Save their Lives: Accounts from the Righteous Among the Nations Archives*

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katya Gusarov
Keyword(s):  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Jewish Women ◽  
The Status ◽  
Nations Department ◽  
Yad Vashem

Abstract Using the files from the Righteous Among the Nations Department at Yad Vashem, this article explores how Jewish women in German-occupied Eastern Europe used sexual barter with Gentile men, both non-Germans and Germans, to try to survive. It proposes that sexual barter be recognized as an expression of agency. Yet sexual barter has been stigmatized and corresponding testimonies largely excluded from the archives. Indications that sexual barter had been a motivation for saving Jews were not included in submissions for the award of the status of Righteous because the criteria for that honour require that nothing can have been received in return for saving a Jew. This essay seeks to problematize this rule, which misunderstands what it was like to live in hiding for both the rescued and the rescuers.

Gender Differentiation and the Education of Jewish Women

2010 ◽  
pp. 167-189
Author(s):  
Shaul Stampfer
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Elementary Education ◽  
General Education ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Women's Education ◽  
Jewish Education ◽  
Jewish Women ◽  
East European ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Amount Of Knowledge

This chapter addresses the role, function, and extent of women's education in nineteenth-century east European Jewry, the way this education was integrated into broader gender classifications, and the implications and consequences of women's education. There is a widely held misconception that, in nineteenth-century eastern Europe, almost all Jewish women had a poor Jewish education whereas many received a good general education. Although males and females were provided with very different frameworks for acquiring literacy education, women were not necessarily inferior to men in Jewish knowledge. Women not only knew how to read but read often. It is quite possible that of all the books sold in eastern Europe, the two bestsellers were books specifically intended for a female audience and read only by women: Tsenah urenah and tekhines. The Tsenah urenah is a Yiddish text consisting of a free retelling of aggadic material on the Bible. It is clear, therefore, that in traditional Jewish society, the differences between the educational achievements of boys and girls on the level of elementary education were more perceived than real. The amount of knowledge a boy acquired in a full day of non-intensive study in a ḥeder was not necessarily much more than those of tutored girls who may have studied for an hour or two a day.

scholarly journals Sex Trafficking in Argentina Now and Then

2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (27) ◽  
pp. 33-50
Author(s):  
Daniela Goldfine
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
South America ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Sex Trafficking ◽  
Buenos Aires ◽  
Jewish Women ◽  
Sex Trade ◽  
The U.S ◽  
The Way

In his 2017 documentary The Impure Daniel Najenson straddles the notions of past and present to denounce the horrors and the injustice of sex trafficking in Argentina. Following a family tale of a great-aunt who migrated from Eastern Europe to South America at the beginning of the twentieth century, he digs deep into Israeli and Argentine archives to tell the story of the Zwi Migdal and the way Jewish women were forced into prostitution. To give voice to these women, he brings in Sonia Sánchez, originally from northern Argentina, and forced into prostitution in Buenos Aires when she was seventeen years old. Sánchez tells her own story, but also reads letters from the now deceased victims of sex trade a century ago. This self-professed feminist and activist is also shown in demonstrations and interviews fueling the NiUnaMenos movement in Argentina, while the #MeToo and TimesUp movements explode in the U.S.

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