Men of Valor and Anxiety. Polish-Jewish Masculinities and the Challenge of…
Between the 1890s and 1930s, religion, class divisions, antisemitism, secularization, and changing notions of love and friendship transformed ideas around men and masculinity in Eastern Europe. Focusing on the Polish context, where before the Holocaust functioned one of the biggest Jewish communities in the world, I will demonstrate how Polish-Jewish men evaluated and sometimes reshaped themselves as men and as Jews and how masculinity emerged as a central category that regulated their opportunities within the local gender and social regimes. The talk will explore Polish-Jewish men in a wide range of cultural spaces including yeshivot, the military, university fraternities, and even circus arenas. Underscoring the self-perceived normativity of Jewish men and their embeddedness in wider masculine dynamics, this lecture offers a gloss on historiography centered around Jewish particularism and antisemitism’s influence on male gender identities. This talk will conclude with drawing lines of comparison between Jewish masculinities in Poland and the United States in the 1920s and 1930s.
Mariusz Kałczewiak, Ph.D. is a historian of Modern Jewish History and Alexander vonHumboldt Fellow at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Before coming to USC, he worked at the University of Potsdam and at the Faculty ofHistory at the University of Warsaw. He holds PhD from Tel Aviv University(2017) and MA from University of Warsaw (2011). His research focuses on modernJewish history in Eastern Europe and the Americas, historical Migration Studies and historical Gender Studies. Mariusz’s first book “Polacos in Argentina.Polish Jews, Interwar Migration, and the Emergence of Transatlantic Jewish Culture” appeared in 2020 with Alabama University Press and won the 2020 BestBook Award of Latin American Jewish Studies Association. His second book“Man of Valor and Anxiety. Polish-Jewish Masculinities and the Challenge of Modernity” is now under review at Indiana University Press. Mariusz held diverse fellowships at Brandeis University, University of Florida and POLINMuseum of the History of Polish Jews.
