Jewish women's exclusion from the public domains of religious and civil life has been reflected in their near absence in the master narratives of the East European Jewish past. As a result, the study of Jewish women in eastern Europe is still in its infancy. The fundamental task of historians to construct women as historical subjects, 'as a focus of inquiry, a subject of the story, an agent of the narrative', has only recently begun. This volume is the first collection of essays devoted to the study of Jewish women's experiences in Eastern Europe. The volume is edited by Paula Hyman of Yale University, a leading figure in Jewish women's history in the United States, and by ChaeRan Freeze of Brandeis University, author of a prize-winning study on Jewish divorce in nineteenth-century Russia. Their Introduction provides a much-needed historiographic survey that summarizes the major work in the field and highlights the lacunae. Their contributors, following this lead, have attempted to go beyond mere description of what women experienced to explore how gender constructed distinct experiences, identities, and meanings. In seeking to recover lost achievements and voices and place them into a broader analytical framework, this volume is an important first step in the rethinking of east European Jewish history with the aid of new insights gleaned from the research on gender. As in earlier volumes of Polin, substantial space is given, in 'New Views', to recent research in other areas of Polish-Jewish studies, and there is a book review section.
ChaeRan Freeze is associate professor of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies at Brandeis University. She is the author of Jewish Marriage and Divorce in Imperial Russia (2001), which received the Koret Foundation Publication Award and the Salo Baron Award for the Best First Book in Jewish Studies. She is co-editor (with Jay Harris) of Everyday Jewish Life in Imperial Russia, 1825–1914: Select Documents (forthcoming) and is working on a book Sex and the Shtetl: Gender, Family, and Jewish Sexuality in Tsarist Russia.
Paula Hyman is Lucy Moses Professor of Modern Jewish History at Yale University. Among her books are Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History and The Jews of Modern France; she is co-editor of the prizewinning encyclopedia Jewish Women in America and of Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Encyclopedia.
Author of The Jews in Poland and Russia, 3 vols. (Littman Library, 2010–12), also published in an abridged version: The Jews in Poland and Russia: A Short History (2014). In 2012 The Jews in Poland and Russia was awarded the Pro Historia Polonorum prize of the Polish Senate for the best book on the history of Poland in a non-Polish language written in the previous five years. Holds honorary doctorates from the University of Warsaw (2010) and the Jagiellonian University (2014). In 2011 he was awarded the Officer’s Cross of the Order of Merit of Polonia Restituta and the Officer’s Cross of the Order of Merit of Independent Lithuania.
