Making of the Zionist Woman

East European Politics and Societies and Cultures Volume XX Number X Month XXXX xx-xx © 2013 SAGE Publications Making of the Zionist Woman: 10.1177/0888325413493113 http://eeps.sagepub.com hosted at Zionist Discourse on the Jewish Woman’s http://online.sagepub.com Body and Selfhood in Interwar Poland Jolanta Mickutė Imre Kertész Institute, Friedrich Schiller University, Germany The majority of scholarly debates on varieties of Jewish nationalism focus on the Jewish man’s role in the rebuilding of the Jewish homeland and his body in the regen- eration of the Jewish nation. This article discusses Zionism’s gender politics surround- ing the Jewish woman’s body and selfhood in this rebirth process and the formation of a modern Jewish identity in interwar Poland. It explores Jewish patriarchal structures and the discursive power and reach of Zionist ideology. Jewish women engaged not only in the ideological rebirth of the Jewish nation, they also initiated the physical rebirth of the Jewish Woman who was deemed too urban and thus degenerate (the modern Jewish woman was viewed as possessing next to no ideological consciousness and physical strength). Therefore, Zionist female ideologues argued that the bodily rebirth of Jewish women would lead to the strengthening of their Jewish identities and inevitably the Jewish stock. While still in the Diaspora, women had to work on devel- oping strong healthy bodies, inasmuch as Zionist men were expected to make themselves into strong muscular Jews to be able to immigrate to Palestine and work there productively. Besides being able to work in Palestine alongside Jewish men, nationalist Jewish women had to be strong and healthy for one more reason: they had to be able to give birth to healthy children, which in the Zionist context meant giving birth to a healthy Jewish nation. Keywords: Zionism; gender and Jewish women; Poland; interwar politics Women’s Emancipation and the Jewish Question The woman’s body and selfhood were political topics in the newly minted Second Republic of Poland (1918-1939). In an immediate postwar cultural environment seething with liberal, positivist, socialist, nationalist, and many other ideas, the women’s emancipation movement carried a strong taint of moral degeneration. Polish-Jewish society, too, viewed the movement’s ideology as a source of lax and promiscuous social mores. Many elements of this discourse about modern decadence Author’s Note: I am grateful to Jeffrey Veidlinger, Marci Shore, Rivka Schiller, Kate Fisher, and Lidia Jurek for their comments on the earlier version of this essay, and to the Imre Kertész Kolleg for its hospitality and generosity. 1 Downloaded from eep.sagepub.com at Vytautas Magnus University on June 9, 2015 2 East European Politics and Societies and Cultures were inherited from the criticism leveled against West European fin-de-siècle moral- ity and elaborated, among many other vocal European critics, by a leader of general Zionism and Western liberalism, Max Nordau.1 In the 1930s, the Polish state’s move towards right-wing nationalism added its own shade of grey to this ongoing discourse about “degeneration.”2 Nordau’s medical-cum-cultural study, Entartung (Degeneration, 1892), first pub- lished in German and available in translation in both Western and Eastern Europe, explored the psycho-physiological origins of social degeneracy. While doing so, it resorted to the cultural assumptions and language of the fin-de-siècle era. In Nordau’s backlash against modern phenomena, the “degenerates” filled a very wide social category: they were criminals, prostitutes, anarchists, and lunatics. Included were also authors and artists who manifested the same mental and somatic features yet “satisfied their unhealthy impulses . with pen and pencil.”3 It was these “self- liberating moderns”—modern writers and artists—whose degeneration worried liberal Nordau most. They did not believe much in human progress as achieved via rationality and order; they cared not about useful knowledge; they had no self- restraint or discipline.4 The Zionist Nordau, on the contrary, nourished a universal vision of an ideal society, however uniform in its ethical, psychological, and physical profile. In the Polish state in the making, many nationally minded Jewish women were no less concerned with the pernicious influence of the literary word and its actual impact on the mental and emotional health of its society’s members. Many leading Zionist women knew German well, especially those who had grown up in Habsburg Poland or had received higher education at German and Austrian universities, thus facilitating the transmission of Zionist ideas to their Yiddish-speaking audience in Poland. In Warsaw’s Zionist monthly Froyen-Shtim (Women’s Voice, 1925), edited by an all-women editorial board, Nordau’s conviction was seconded by a woman educator. Like Nordau, she expressed a firm belief that literature could influence Jewish children’s conduct and, if well written, would naturally induce proper moral sensibilities.5 Therefore, fairy tales for children had to be inhabited by loving step- mothers and children who loved them in return. In this way, through the cultural mediation of literature, children would learn to follow a positive behavioral model in real life. As many pedagogical as nationalist concerns ran in another Froyen-Shtim piece: a woman writer worried over the Jewish youth’s lack of “spiritual upbringing” that would turn them into proud human beings and Jews, proud of their humanity and their Jewishness in everyday life.6 Throughout the sixteen years of its publication, 1924 to 1939, the pro-Zionist pedagogical monthly, Dos kind (The Child), had a number of Zionist women, either social workers or educators in the broader sense of the term, who discussed the growing need for children’s upbringing to reflect modern pedagogical and traditional Jewish values. It was because contemporary Jewish youth, especially women youth, the “the so-called modern daughters,” engaged in Downloaded from eep.sagepub.com at Vytautas Magnus University on June 9, 2015 Mickutė / Making of the Zionist Woman 3 such superficial pursuits as “sex appeal (seksualizm), sports, and politics.”7 At stake was Jewish youth’s upbringing that should bind practical knowledge with ethical imperative, both overlaid with Jewish patriotism. Proper literature and pedagogical guidance could instill the appropriate motives in Jewish youth, male and female alike. In the very same synthetic study on degeneration, Nordau described the New, or Modern, Woman as evoking outrage. In Nordau’s appraisal of Europe’s modern ills, degenerate men dressed like women and “women who wish to please men of this kind wear men’s dress, an eyeglass, boots with spurs and a riding-whip, and only show themselves in the street with a cigar in the mouths. … Modesty and restraint are dead superstitions of the past” for such women.8 To counteract such a trend, Nordau’s “New Muscular Jew”—a par excellence specimen of the Zionist Man— was to be manly, or anything but effete, subservient, and uselessly intellectual.9 In line with Zionism’s gender politics, the New Zionist Woman had to be anything but degenerate, too. For the fairer sex, however, turning degenerate meant something else. It meant becoming emancipated, or modern, with its sundry negative connotations. When evaluating the modern Jewish character Rachel in a play review for the Polish- language Zionist-sympathizing weekly Wschód (The East, 1901), theater critic Hasofer from Habsburg Lvov decried such an emancipated Jewish woman in a Nordau-like fashion: “An emancipated Jewish woman loses all her feminine charm, lacks true intellectual and moral education and is lost for the Jewish people. The modern Jewish woman (Żydówka ‘modern’), the emancipated Jewish woman, is a phenomenon that is thoroughly unhealthy.”10 In the eyes of this Zionist intellectual, it was unhealthy because it discredited the Jewish woman both as a Jew and a woman. The modern woman, the Jewish kind in particular, was too masculine and unfettered in her behavior and appearance, too financially independent as regards her economic position, too well versed in non-Jewish cultures and literatures (often at the expense of her Jewish heritage), and too brazen in her determination to be on a par with man in general. Above all, she was well aware of the meaning of her actions and desires and pursued them regardless of public consternation. In other words, the New Woman as such exemplified political and civic emancipation, yet one that was sexually inappropriate and therefore morally objectionable. In the eyes of Zionist critics in particular, emancipation accorded Jewish women freedom that in fact was nothing but looseness in sexual practices and indifference to the estab- lished traditional forms of Jewish woman’s identity. Years later, a progressive Polish-Jewish lawyer, in his commentary on the new draft of the Polish Marriage Law of 1931, concurred on this point, remarking that no decent Jewish woman could be so free as, for instance, to look for a husband herself: such behavior “would go against the good morals and lead to wantonness.”11 Public social mores dictated that a man initiated a search for a wife, not the other way around. Downloaded from eep.sagepub.com at Vytautas Magnus University on June 9, 2015 4 East European Politics and Societies and Cultures In the newly independent Polish state, the cultural discourse about the decadence of modern women circulated around the concept of the Jewish “doll,” a term most probably borrowed from A Doll House written by the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen in 1879.12 At the end of Ibsen’s play, the main heroine Nora abandoned her “doll house,” in which she felt she was just a toy, a powerless marionette at the will and for the joy of her husband. She left her husband and family to become somebody on a journey of self-discovery.

Load more