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. "Previously published in Jewish History "Special issue: Jewish Women in Modern Eastern and East Central Europe" Volume 33, issue 1-2, March 2020"

Autorentext

Elissa Bemporad, is Professor of History and Ungar Chair in East European Jewish History and the Holocaust at Queens College and CUNY Graduate Center. She is a two-time winner of the National Jewish Book Award. She is the author of Becoming Soviet Jews: The Bolshevik Experiment in Minsk (2013 IUP), and Legacy of Blood: Jews, Pogroms, and Ritual Murder in the Lands of the Soviets (2019 OxfordUP). Elissa is the co-editor of two volumes: Women and Genocide: Survivors, Victims, Perpetrators (2018 IUP); and Pogroms: A Documentary History (Oxford University Press, 2021). She is completing the first volume of the Comprehensive History of Soviet Jews (forthcoming with New York University Press and entitled Revolution, War, and a New Way of Life). Elissa is currently at work on two projects: a biography of Ester Frumkin, and the first comprehensive study of the DP Camps in Italy. Her work has appeared in different languages, including French, Hebrew, Yiddish, Italian, and Russian. She is editor of Jewish Social Studies, and Series Editor of Yiddish Voices for Bloomsbury Press. Glenn Dynner BA, Brandeis University. MA, McGill University. PhD, Brandeis University. Scholar of East European Jewry, with a focus on the social history of Hasidism and the Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment). Author of Men of Silk: The Hasidic Conquest of Polish Jewish Society, which received a Koret Publication Award and was a National Jewish Book Awards finalist. Received textual training in several Israeli yeshivas and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Additional interests include Polish-Jewish relations, Jewish economic history, and popular religion. Recipient of the Fulbright Award. Member (2010-11), Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton University. SLC, 2004-