On Radical Jewish Female Voices in Eastern Europe

Max Weinreich Fellowship Lecture in Eastern European Jewish Studies The Workers Circle/Dr. Emanuel Patt Visiting Professorship in Eastern European Jewish Studies Admission: Free

Based on our lecturers’ forthcoming book on primary sources on women and gender in modern Jewish history, Gender and Jewish Women in Central and Eastern Europe, this lecture will examine the dynamics of Jewish women’s entry into politics in modern Eastern Europe. It will look at arguments used to bring women into the political arena, the causes that appealed to Jewish female voters and the role models Jewish women drew upon. Elissa Bemporad will discuss the early work of Ester Frumkin, one of the most prominent Bundist leaders in late Imperial Russia. Drawing on Frumkin’s writings from the late 1890s and early 1900s, Bemporad will focus in particular on the activist’s position on Judaism and religious elites in the Jewish milieu. Natalia Aleksiun will focus on Puah Rakovsky and her public career as a Zionist activist, journalist and educator. 

About the Speakers

Elissa Bemporad is the Jerry and William Ungar Associate Professor of East European Jewish History at Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center. Her most recent book, entitled Legacy of Blood: Jews, Pogroms, and Ritual Murder in the Lands of the Soviet, will appear next year with Oxford University Press. Bemporad is currently working on the first volume of the six-volume Comprehensive History of Soviet Jewry, which will appear with NYU Press.

Natalia Aleksiun is Professor of Modern Jewish History at Touro College, Graduate School of Jewish Studies, New York. She is the co-editor, with Antony Polonsky and Brian Horowitz, of Writing Jewish History in Eastern Europe (2016) and has published widely on Polish Jewish issues. Her book Conscious History: Polish Jewish Historians before the Holocaust is forthcoming with Littman in 2019. She is currently completing a book about Jews in hiding in Galicia during the Holocaust and a study about the conflict surrounding medical dissections in East Central Europe before the Holocaust.