Elissa Bemporad, Jerry and William Ungar Chair in East European Jewish History and the Holocaust Professor of History Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center Elissa Bemporad, François Guesnet, Professor of Modern Jewish History University College London François Guesnet, Joanna Degler, Professor of Literature Wroclaw University Joanna Degler, Antony Polonsky, Emeritus Professor of Holocaust Studies Brandeis University and Chief Historian of the Global Educational Outreach Project at the Museum of Polish Jews in Warsaw Antony Polonsky
Published
January 2026
Language
EN
ISBN
9781802070385
§ About the book
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.