Center for Jewish Studies, Univ. of Graz: Susanne Korbel and Aleksandra Jakubczak (POLIN Museum, Warsaw) (Web)

Time: 16.10.2023, 12:00-18.30 Uhr
Venue: University of Graz

Program

• Welcome: Aleksandra Jakubczak (Warsawa) and Susanne Korbel (Graz)
• Keynote: Aleksandra Jakubczak: The Economic Crises of the Interwar Years and Their Impact on the Intimate Lives of Polish Jewish Women
• Mariusz Kałczewiak (Los Angeles): Jewish Homosexual Men in Interwar Poland. Between Crime, Malady, and Individual Subjectivities
• Martina Niedhammer (Munich): An Uncommon Gender Gap? The Question of Central European Jewish Cookbooks and their Authors
• Susanne Korbel: Intimacies in Budapest and Vienna around 1900
• Journal Launch: Eleonore Lappin-Eppel (Vienna/Graz): Nashim special issue „Jewish Women in Post-War Central and Eastern Europe“
• Final discussion
• Workshop Dinner

For the past few decades, flourishing gender studies have provided new heuristic tools, theoretical reflections, and methodological approaches that have brought fruitful results also in historical research. Cross- and intercategorial angles based on concepts such as intersectionality expanded conventional historiographical narratives and thus, not least, contributed significantly to new findings in Jewish studies. Perspectives on Jewish history and culture drifted towards more open, mutual, and sensitive understandings of categorizing individuals and groups. The inclusion of gender helped to reflect on how encounters, exchanges, and diverse forms of togetherness unfolded in different historical pasts. This has particularly fostered microhistorical case studies that contributed to a more nuanced understanding of the everyday life of Jews in Central and Eastern Europe.With this workshop gathering scholars specializing in Jewish and non-Jewish history in Europe, we seek to stimulate the discussion on the place of Jewish studies in the gendered history of the region and situate Jewish Studies in the broader academic landscape transformed by the gendered turn.
During the workshop, we foresee discussing encounters between Jewish and non-Jewish men and women; perspectives on queerness, masculinity, or femininity; aspects of distinct gendered Jewish history. Questions to be addressed include: In which perspectives on everyday life does gender prove to be a relevant category of analysis? Which intersectional aspects are relevant in interpreting frequent encounters between Jews and non-Jews? Which theoretical frames help us to sharpen our research on agency in daily working patterns?

To attend the workshop and receive pre-circulated papers, please contact Susanne Korbel susanne.korbel at uni-graz.at

Abstracts

Aleksandra Jakubczak (POLIN Museum, Warsaw): The Economic Crises of the Interwar Years and Their Impact on the Intimate Lives of Polish Jewish Women
The various economic downturns in the interwar years had far-reaching consequences for the financial well-being of millions of Jews living in Poland. Yet, they also affected the most intimate spheres of Polish Jewish lives – the privacy of their households, sexuality, and marital practices. This talk will explore how the economic hardships experienced collectively and individually by Jewish citizens of the Polish Republic changed the most personal sphere of Jewish life as commercial sex and other forms of labor penetrated the Jewish home, and marriage became increasingly an economic strategy.

Mariusz Kałczewiak (University of Southern California, Los Angeles): Jewish Homosexual Men in Interwar Poland. Between Crime, Malady, and Individual Subjectivities
In the 1920s and 1930s, we observed the first-time appearance of Polish-Jewish homosexual subjectivities, yet this development was accompanied by oppressive social attitudes towards homosexual men. Following an overview of expert discussions on homosexuality in Poland, I explore how Polish-Jewish debates placed homosexual men within a semantic realm of deviation and crime and how the male homosexual was defined as a sexual predator threatening normative heterosexual masculinity through seduction. Using case studies of adolescent Józef Halpern from Lviv, the young painter from Warsaw Józef Rajnfeld, and the much older Łódź manager Leon Waks, I demonstrate how these Jewish men conceptualized their homosexual desire as a major aspect of their gender identities. In the final section, I show how Polish-Jewish men employed homophobic discourses about Muslims and German Nazis to stabilize their fragile heteronormative masculinities.

Martina Niedhammer (Collegium Carolinum, Munich): An Uncommon Gender Gap? The Question of Central European Jewish Cookbooks and their Authors
The history of cuisine as an important part of everyday history offers various glimpses into aspects of gender that go far beyond simple equations of female kitchen work and male expertise in the area of hygiene or gourmandism. This counts also for Jewish historiography which has paid increasing attention to questions of foodways in recent years. In my paper, I want to take a closer look at those who wrote and compilated cookbooks explicitly marked as Jewish during the 19th and early 20th century in Central Europe. Other than in the case of non-Jewish cookbooks, the authors of Jewish cooking manuals mostly were or pretended to be female. This might have been the result of a distinct understanding of Jewish women as gatekeepers of religious tradition and „soft“ mediators of modern lifestyles at once.

Susanne Korbel (University of Graz): Intimacies in Budapest and Vienna around 1900
Personal encounters between Jews and non-Jews outside public spheres in Budapest and Vienna around 1900 were frequent and diverse, despite historiography about Jews in the emergence of modernity remaining characterized by a narrative of private isolation. In this presentation, I outline different intimacies and analyze multifarious encounters between Jews and non-Jews in the „private“ spaces of everyday life. Where and how did Jews and non-Jews in Budapest and Vienna come into contact with one another in „private“ rooms around 1900? What areas of daily life can be defined as Jewish and non-Jewish spaces of interaction and interethnic exchange? What effect did such spaces of intimacy have on (negotiations of) gender?

The workshop is supported by the University of Graz, the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, and the World Union of Jewish Studies. The workshop is part of the FWF Esprit Project ESP 120. The workshop is organized within the Global Education Outreach program supported by Taube Philanthropies, the William K. Bowes, Jr. Foundation, and the Association of the Jewish Historical Institute of Poland.

Source: H-Net Notifications