The Making of the Modern Jewish Family in Eastern Europe

Tuition: $480 | YIVO members: $375**
Students: $240 (Must register with valid university email address)

This is a live, online seminar held weekly on Zoom. Enrollment will be capped at about 20 students. All course details (Zoom link, syllabus, handouts, etc.) will be posted to Canvas. Students will be granted access to the class on Canvas after registering for the class here on the YIVO website. This class will be conducted in English.

Instructor: Aleksandra Jakubczak

Course Description:
Across nearly all communities, the family unit reflects society and its transformations. This class will examine the Jewish family in Eastern Europe from the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries. The family will serve as our lens for understanding Jewish society in this period of upheaval and change. How did the industrialization of the Eastern European economy impact the Jewish family? How was the Jewish family affected by the spread of Hasidism and the emergence of Zionism and socialism?

We will look at the functioning of Jewish families in modern Eastern Europe, from their construction to dissolution – from courtship and marriage through childbearing and running the household to death, abandonment, or divorce. Using a broad range of primary sources (statistics, pamphlets, newspapers, memoirs, and reports from welfare organizations), we will examine the forces that shaped the modern Jewish family, such as economy, law, and military conflict.

The course is suitable both for academics and non-specialists, as no prior knowledge of Eastern European or Jewish history is required. The instructor will provide all the readings in English or English translation.

Course Materials:
The instructor will provide all course materials digitally throughout the class on Canvas.

Aleksandra Jakubczak is a historian specializing in the social and economic history of Eastern European Jewry in the modern period. Since 2022, she has been a chief historian at the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews. She received her Ph.D. in Jewish History at Columbia University in New York in 2023 for her doctoral dissertation, entitled (Sex)Worker, Migrant, Daughter: The Jewish Economics of Sex Work and Mobility, between 1870 and 1939, which looked at Jewish women selling and organizing sex to examine how Eastern European Jewish women experienced urbanization, industrialization, and mass migration. Her Polish-language monograph, entitled Poles, Jews and the Myth of Trafficking (2020) was shortlisted for the Schmeruk and Gierowski’s Prize for the best book in Polish Jewish Studies. In AY 2023-2024, she will be Stroock Fellow at the Center for Jewish Studies at Harvard University.

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