Yiddish Discourses of Body, Gender, and Sexuality (1880–1939)

Session Submission Type: Panel Session

Abstract

This panel examines visual and textual discourses of body, gender, and sexuality in East European Jewry and its diaspora communities. Body, gender, and sexuality attracted much attention around the turn of the century. Political, social, and cultural changes between 1880 and 1939 brought renewed scrutiny to these entangled subjects of discourse, leading to the reconsideration and, at times, subversion of longstanding conventions. The three papers, drawing on Jewish press advertisements, Yiddish illustrated magazines, and works of Yiddish sexology, present the body, gender, and sexuality as animating subjects of Jewish popular discourse in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.

Zuzanna Kołodziejska-Smagała’s paper examines discourses of the body through the lens of press advertisements published in the Jewish press in the Polish lands between 1880 and 1918. By analyzing press advertisements found in Polish, Yiddish, Hebrew, and German-language Jewish periodicals, Kołodziejska-Smagała offers a complex picture of the Polish Jewish body at the fin-de-siècle.

Samuel Glauber’s paper looks to Yiddish illustrated magazines as a source for the history of Jewish women in interwar Poland. The illustrated articles found in these magazines present a distinctly modern type of Jewish woman, one visually consistent with the image of the Modern Girl that emerged as a global phenomenon in the interwar period yet nevertheless rooted in Polish-Jewish culture.

Zohar Weiman-Kelman’s paper turns to masturbation as a site for identifying the ideologies animating Yiddish sexology and exposing its intertextual and cross-cultural dialogues. Yiddish masturbation, Weiman-Kelman argues, linked the religious and the secular, playing a role in shaping scientific discourse, and with it modern Jewish corporeality and subjectivity.

Sub Unit

• Yiddish Studies

Chair

• Rachel Kranson, University of Pittsburgh

Individual Presentations

• Discourses of the Body in Advertisements Printed in the Jewish Press in the Polish Lands between 1880 and 1918 - Zuzanna Kołodziejska-Smagała, Taube Department of Jewish Studies, University of Wroclaw

• Representations of Women and Womanhood in Yiddish Illustrated Magazines - Samuel Glauber, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

• Yiddish ONANIZM: How Jews Took Sexuality into Their own Hands - Zohar Weiman-Kelman, Ben Gurion University of the Negev

Respondent

• Naomi Seidman, University of Toronto

Zoom Host

• Zoom Host 14