Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry Volume 38: Gender and the Body in Eastern European Jewish History

Jewish attitudes to the body, gender, and sexuality are traditionally influenced by religious considerations. Explorations in this volume extend to how communal and state-related concerns have intersected with the personal—in care for the elderly, birth control, white slavery, and burial, as well as in the recent entanglement of antisemitism and misogyny. Holocaust-related topics include gender-dependent perceptions of warfare; gender and pogrom violence; how impersonating diverse identities became a matter of survival; how the plunder of Jewish clothes engaged the bodies of both victims and bystanders; and how mass graves perpetuated a Jewish presence after the genocide. Other studies include how the Jewish body has been construed in fiction, ego-documents, and (queer) poetry, and how Jewish youth thought about sport. The volume concludes with four reflections on the embodied self.