Crossing the Line: Violence against Jewish Women and the New Model of Antisemitism in Poland in the 1930s

Abstract

This article examines anti-Jewish violence in the Second Polish Republic through the lens of gender. By focusing on verbal and physical attacks against female Jewish students at Polish universities in the 1930s, it highlights the radicalization of the antisemitic movement among Poland’s future elite. Jewish women experienced discrimination and increasingly also violence at Polish universities as Jews and as women. The assaults suggest the need to examine both gender and Jewish differences. Although all Jewish students were targets of violent antisemitic attacks, women were especially vulnerable when they dared transgress gender boundaries by acting in “unfeminine ways” and signifying their intellectual empowerment—talking back, resisting, or defending Jewish men under attack. Indeed, Jewish women who stood up to their attackers transgressed the norms of both gender and Jewishness, and were thus doubly exposed to aggression and violence. Using the contemporary Jewish press, university archives, memoirs and testimonies, the female Jewish experience and the response of male Jewish students and community activists are reconstructed. Understanding these assaults as a window into gender politics in Jewish student associations, the Jewish press and Jewish communal institutions, the author examines their place in the public discourse of the Second Polish Republic.