Gendered Violence

Jewish Women in the Pogroms of 1917 to 1921

Irina Astashkevich author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Academic Studies Press

Published:30th Oct '18

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

Gendered Violence cover

This is the first book to recognize and address the problem of mass rape of Jewish women during the pogroms in Ukraine during the Civil War (1917-1921). The genocidal violence during the pogroms became a precursor to the Holocaust, and until recently the latter overshadowed the significance of the pogrom violence in the historiography of East European Jewish life. This book evaluates the traumatic impact of rape on both Jewish women and men through scrupulous analysis of the gendered narrative of the pogrom rape. This gendered form of violence shaped the experience of the victims and the narration of the events, which often follows normative gendered scripts and but also deviates from them. Drawing on theories of trauma and archival documents from the YIVO Institute, this volume illuminates a dark history that has never been addressed nor officially recognized, until now.

“Astashkevich’s study opens new and urgent lines of thinking in the historiography of interethnic violence in Eastern Europe and Ukraine. By grappling with the ways sexual violence co-constituted antisemitic violence during the Ukrainian War of Independence, Astashkevich gestures toward the ways mass rape and sexual violence have been foundational to the trauma of the region and to the generational trauma of Ukraine’s far-flung Jews. Her book is one of the most theoretically inflected pieces of feminist scholarship to deal with the Ukrainian War of Independence. Because of that, Astashkevich helps us to understand the modernizing forces that worked to bring mass rape into relationship with genocidal violence. This stimulating monograph the deserves attention of anyone interested in Jewish history, antisemitism, sexual violence, Ukrainian history, gender history, and the history of atrocity.” —Meghann Pytka, Northwestern University, H-Poland

ISBN: 9781618116161

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: unknown

170 pages