Jewish Women in Modern Eastern and East Central Europe

by Elissa Bemporad (Editor), Glenn Dynner (Editor)

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.

249 pages, Hardcover

Published November 22, 2022

About the author

Elissa Bemporad holds the Ungar Chair in East European Jewish History and the Holocaust and is Professor of History at Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center. She is a two-time winner of the National Jewish Book Award.