Making of the Zionist Woman

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 were inherited from the criticism leveled against West European fin-de-siècle morality 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 published 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 stepmothers 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 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 established 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.

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. The Polish press lauded the play for its originality, yet condemned the ending, which was “as nearly impossible and immoral.” ¹³ In this respect, Polish, German, English, and other theatergoers and literary critics across Europe were on the same page: they all saw Ibsen’s play as “ibscene”—that is, obscene (the first production of A Doll House in Denmark elicited such a vehemently negative reaction from its audience that, in the subsequent productions for the German stage, Ibsen altered the final scene by making Nora stay with her family). ¹⁴ In the eyes of East and West European critics, women like Nora were as unwomanly as immoral.

In Nordau’s study, too, Ibsen found himself among the leading “degenerates” because “Ibsenism” propagated selfishness, uncontrolled passion, and untraditional sexual morality that brought no use to society. In his critique of A Doll House, Nordau stated that the female was by her very nature suited solely for the family, as she could not survive “without the protection of a man.” As such, she had to continue playing a “civilizing role,” “tempering the harshness of life by fulfilling her task as mother and home maker.” ¹⁵ If she, like Nora in A Doll House, wanted the freedom of the individual to live in accordance with her principles, she suffered from the symptoms of intense egomania that would sooner or later take the form of anarchism, Nordau noted. ¹⁶ From his patriarchal viewpoint, alongside that of male editors at Cracow’s Yudishe froyenvelt (The Jewish Women’s World) and other pro-Zionist journals, she had to be a living embodiment of “the eternal Woman,” defined by certain never-changing and natural “innate, biological characteristics.” ¹⁷ Only in the eyes of a few Polish-Jewish progressive thinkers, like the Zionist publicist Jakób Appenszlak, was Nora nothing less than “the mother of the women’s revolution,” even though as such she was undoubtedly in the minority in modernizing Polish society. ¹⁸

The idea of a woman’s realizing her potential beyond the institution of marriage flew in the face of the established ideal of womanhood as constructed and performed in the domestic realm. As in the late nineteenth century, so in the early twentieth century, cultural historian Marilyn Yalom writes, it was inconceivable for a woman to lead an “autonomous existence” as a human being; she was defined exclusively through her relationship to a man and her childbearing ability. ¹⁹ The Jewish, as well as the Polish, national ethos was infused with such patriarchal normativity and religious creed. Within this conceptual framework, womanhood rested on two major pillars: wifehood and motherhood (with wifehood always temporally prior). ²⁰ The modern woman trespassing on these limits was deemed degenerate. In the Zionist setting, she was deemed degenerate for one more reason: she was seen as abandoning Jewish tradition and history—the core of her Jewishness—that she had the obligation to pass onto her children. From this ideological perspective, her assimilationist and feminist proclivities threatened the very existence of the Jewish nation.

Providing a case in point in the pro-Zionist monthly Di yudishe familye (The Jewish Family, 1902), M. Berkovitch, a male proponent of women’s emancipation from Cracow, engaged the Woman Question through religious points of reference: “And as the Jewish national life reflects itself most vividly in family life, and as the family is the strongest pillar of morality and mores which has supported our nation for eternity, it is obvious that most of the talk about the woman and her character in the Talmud has to do with family life and her relation to the man.” ²¹ The talk about the standing of woman in Jewish society, not just in Jewish religious texts, had to do with the family as well. As pro-feminist as he professed to be, Berkovitsh did not see women’s emancipation as originating from structural changes to the Jewish family. Nor could he see the woman occupy public space as he kept tying emancipated women’s selfhood back to private life in his patriarchal construction of femininity. The Midrashic literature, Berkovitsh argued, provided enough proof that educated and respectable women could contribute positively to Jewish family life. And, given the chance, so would the emancipated women of the early twentieth century, he implied.

Against the backdrop of cultural discourses inherited from the Habsburg and the Romanov empires and reinterpreted by the Polish nation-state (de facto a nation of many ethnicities), Zionist women began constructing a women’s type of Zionism. They put a thick maternalist gloss over Zionist ideology, making it less feminist, more nationalist, and hence more cohesive. On the ideological plane, their goals were similar to those of Zionist men. Obviously, they were women-oriented but with a powerful nationalist message nonetheless. Many of these women were moderate in their social views and religious practices, which was in line with the secular nature of General and Labor Zionism many of them ascribed to. Across European Jewish communities, their maternal feminism did not conflict with the Zionist discourse about Jewish women’s role and status in society. Nor did it grate against the ethos of the sanacja regime of the Second Polish Republic. ²² The sanacja regime, ushered in with the Piłsudskian coup in 1926, stood for a more inclusive and civic Polish nationalism preoccupied with rebirth, health, and purification of the Polish nation. Into this blend of national and supranational ideals, the Polish authoritarian government introduced an ideology of a moral nation and gave new life to the Polish Question, awakening the fin-de-siècle fears of Polish national degeneration. Poland’s women, who were deemed morally superior because of their feminine nature and nurture, were to act as the “moral sex” in this grand scheme of social engineering.

Against this political landscape, Zionist men in Poland viewed Jewish women’s communal and political activism as nothing but a legitimate extension of women’s primary duties as mothers and caregivers. Because it was further fuelled by Zionist collectivist ideas and maternal feminism, Zionist women’s activism was well in accordance with the alleged biological and spiritual female proclivity for nurturing. Along this Zionist line of reasoning, women became mothers of the Jewish nation and its children not just physically, through their reproductive function, but morally, too, through patriotic upbringing. The solution to the “Upbringing Question,” so framed by the all-men Zionist editorial board of the women’s weekly, Yudishe froyenvelt, rested on the Jewish woman’s shoulders. ²³

However, some of the more radical Zionist women, including the younger generation of Jewish women, tried to utilize Zionism as a means of achieving civic, political, and (implicit in both) gender equality. Not all of Zionist women did belong to “maternal feminists” that the historian Karen Offen also calls “relational feminists,” that is, women who fought for women’s rights as women “defined by their childbearing and nurturing capacities.” ²⁴ In fact, many women held mixed views with elements borrowed from both feminist strains. More radical feminists saw women first and foremost as individuals rather than wives or mothers and thus represented the second, “individualist” tradition of feminist argumentation. Yet, both schools of thought found themselves in a fight for Zionist ideals where so much of the debate focused on national rebirth and social progress, two notions, one romantic, the other liberal, which parted ways after World War I. Against the backdrop of modern, or political, nationalisms that “began to hate,” their reunion was highly unlikely. ²⁵

As highlighted by many East European Jewish historians, a civil society that the Polish government, led by the Chief of the Polish State, Józef Piłsudski, set out to create, gradually gave way to a different vision in the 1930s. ²⁶ In 1918, Piłsudski envisioned Poland as it had been some two hundred years earlier: a supranational multiethnic state united by civic patriotism. As the right-wing National Democrats came to dominate the political scene, a vision of a centralized nation-state came to the fore. The resulting tensions reflected Piłsudski’s desire to couple regained freedoms with a strong centralized government and a unifying, integrative nationalism. As a result, liberal ideas about social progress came to signify decadence in a state that increasingly promoted a mono-cultural vision of the future of Polish society. Inevitably, the major institutional bonds of such civil society—citizenship, marriage, and employment—came to reflect a shift towards no less patriarchal yet increasingly antiliberal nationalism. Among these competing visions, Polish-Jewish women found themselves in the eye of the storm. Their Zionism pulled them towards nationalism (with the imposition of the sexual discipline that this implied), whereas their modern, revolutionary worldview pushed them towards personal and sexual emancipation.

Public Opinion of the Modern Jewish Woman

The subject of the immoral demeanor of the Jewish “doll,” or lalka in Polish, or the “Modern Woman” in the international vocabulary, experienced a burst of attention from Polish and Yiddish-language Jewish news media shortly after the establishment of the Polish state. In the 1920s, moral panic enveloped a good number of respectable middle-class Zionists, as well as some working-class Jewish and Polish socialists who all sought to cure the social ills of their respective societies. In these debates, the Jewish woman began to act as a moral meter for determining the social condition of Jewish society. Nationwide, they became a template against which Polish-Jewish society formulated its hopes and concerns about cultural transformation, political mobilization, and economic modernization (and accompanying pauperization). Jewish historian Paula Hyman noted that Jewish men modeled their modern identity in contrast to that of Jewish women. But women acted not only as their foil; Jewish men also projected their concerns about modernity on Jewish women. ²⁷

A February 1925 article written by Nasz Przegląd’s (Our Review’s) correspondent Samuel Hirszhorn, one of the founding fathers of this Zionist daily, unleashed a wave of controversial critiques on the Jewish Woman Question. In his piece “To Jewish Women,” this former Folkist member of the Polish Constituent Parliament, in tandem with the Zionist Members of Parliament Grynbaum and Frostig accused Jewish women of riding the wave of “voluntary assimilation.” To employ Hirszhorn’s words, “in the first place we owe this assimilation to our women.” ²⁸ It was Jewish women who forsook their obligations to the Jewish national cause and to its society. It was they who dressed in vintage clothing and sent their children to non-Jewish schools without caring to teach them Hebrew or Yiddish. These women did not care about the rebuilding of the Jewish homeland. They did not care at all or did not care enough. “We would not like to generalize,” Hirszhorn continued, excluding the working Jewish woman that formed a category beyond reproach. What he saw as a festering wound on the body of Polish-Jewish society was the Jewish woman that he dubbed lalka, a phenomenon he first read about in the Viennese Morgenzeitung paper and found thriving in the Polish Republic:

A woman who has no understanding about anything is a disease that eats at our organism from the top to the bottom of the Jewish middle class. The husband has become a salary-earning machine that has to produce and provide money for a wife that has no understanding about anything and for children that do not want to know about anything but want to live like others. Such a state of affairs has become normal in our country. A once caring Jewish father, a family man, became a pitiable and hunted caricature, an animal without dignity, who chases after profit, throws his honesty and future to the quarry of income, while terrible ignorance prevails at home, [in addition to] scowling, murmuring, thundering, and pointing of her [his wife’s] shapely fingers at the others. The family’s ignorance and ruthlessness oppress that pity-evoking “head of the house” and throw him off the saddle in the end. ²⁹

The middle-class femmes fatales who, as Hirszhorn saw it, fussed about dress and dancing only, bore the brunt of his criticism. ³⁰ Yet, along the lines of the forgiving spirit of the New Testament, he allowed for a justification: of those mindless decked-out “dolls,” not all did know what they were doing. With these words, Hirszhorn invited the Nasz Przegląd readership to a public discussion of the Jewish Woman Question.

And this large Warsaw daily did become a public forum. Preserving his anonymity, like many other participants, respondent J.H. agreed with Hirszhorn: Jewish women were unprepared for modern realities. All they still wanted after secondary school was a rich husband. They exhibited a lackadaisical attitude toward societal problems and cared largely about leisure, love affairs, and shopping. On one count, however, J.H. disagreed and put in a word of defense: “Do all Jewish women in Poland have to sympathize with the idea of Zionism and bring up their children above all as Jews, not Europeans?” ³¹ Without revealing her ideological bent, the respondent argued for a diversity of opinions on Jewish women’s national and feminist ethics.

The newly created rubric invited responses from distinguished Jewish public figures as well. The Zionist Warsaw city counselor Rajzla Szteinowa saw the Woman Question as arising from the “legal and social discrimination of women.” ³² To successfully fight assimilation, she maintained, Jewish society needed to include its other half, its women. To equip its women with skills for such a fight, it had to devote more attention and money to the proper education and upbringing of Jewish girls. Education would oust a generation of soulless marionettes who “wear only a thin coat of the so-called culture,” and would reenergize a weak sense of familial, societal, and national responsibilities amongst the broad masses of Jewish women. ³³ And, yes, they had to receive a political education to be able to make informed decisions about political parties and to resist the pernicious influence of religious orthodoxy and reactionaries. They had to be exposed to democratic and progressive ideas, Szteinowa argued. Moreover, all Jewish women needed the protection of the law, whether they were married, single, pregnant, or women with children born out of wedlock. ³⁴ In a word, women had to have equal rights with men. All roads to the solution of the Woman Question led to a strong emancipationist movement of Jewish women, already thriving in Poland. Only under proper legal and sociopolitical conditions did the Jewish nation have a chance of survival in Poland, she concluded.

Yet other Jewish women respondents, like Julja G., lashed out against the new sexual norms because she saw the Jewish woman as having always, irrespective of time period and geography, embodied the venerable Jewish tradition. ³⁵ As long as the Jewish woman was a wife and mother and therefore a woman, she was a noble, virtuous daughter of Israel. Yet now the Jewish woman succumbed to the fake civilization that allowed for much unbridled promiscuity. Julja noted that modern “dolls” had developed loose morals in the wake of the Great War. For her, World War I had a negative transformative character: it displaced tradition from its honorary seat in Jewish society where the woman’s world revolved around her man. Beyond her man and her obligations to him, what was there for a woman to do? Not much, Julja rejoined, lest the woman wanted to become promiscuous.

Along the lines of the sensational if misogynist Otto Weininger’s study Geschlecht und Charakter (Sex and Character, 1903), Julja saw a woman’s sexuality as experienced through either motherhood or promiscuity. Translated into both Polish and Yiddish and popular among Jewish youth in the early 1900s (according to the Zionist papers Haynt and Der moment of the late 1920s), Weininger’s best-seller established the biological nature of femininity and the crisis of masculinity. The decay of modern civilization (its “modern coitus-culture,” to quote the author himself) and the moral inferiority of the New Woman were among a few of Weininger’s sweeping subjects. In his opinion, a woman always had to choose between two fundamental poles of her sexual identity, motherhood and prostitution. ³⁶ As he saw it, she could either have legitimate sex with her husband (to be a mother) or illegitimate sex with strangers (to be a prostitute). For the Austrian-Jewish Weininger, the New Woman represented the flesh, instinct, the call of nature, feeling, the sleep of the spirit (i.e., passivity), and the drive to procreation. As such, the woman could throw the man into “the dark precipices of sexual desire,” a Haynt publicist wrote in his interpretation of Weininger’s philosophy. ³⁷ In short, she was sexual through and through. Therefore, “the feminine element had neither the need for this inner spiritual freedom [i.e., emancipation] nor the ability to use it.” ³⁸ For centuries, she had been treated as inferior because she exhibited “servile dispositions.” The few women who took advantage of emancipation possessed a masculine element, or a homosexual orientation, Weininger maintained. His antifeminist message was this: feminists were virilized females, and true femininity ran counter to the idea of emancipation (meaning that true, womanly women did not need to be emancipated).

A couple of days later, Nasz Przegląd published a response that added one more item to the list of things a respectable Jewish woman had to tend to, her “national dignity.” ³⁹ This kind of dignity was linked to the preservation of customs, history, language, and country, which was Palestine for Jews, the respondent implied. Only one respondent, a woman with the initials of R.L., called for a “new family model” whereby spouses began with self-improvement and, no less importantly, cooperated. ⁴⁰ More an individualist feminist, she suggested that Jewish women and men start sharing domestic chores and familial responsibilities, that men introduce women to the matters of the world, and that both care for their children’s education and nourishment.

Similarly, the original article on the Jewish Woman Question elicited a variety of conflicting reactions from a contingent of Jewish men. Some respondents, like Dawid Rawdin, felt the need to assume responsibility for what he saw as a sad state of Jewish women. He rejected the accusations against the allegedly vain women as unfair “because men do pay attention to women’s clothing.” ⁴¹ According to him, men were actually responsible for intensifying women’s coquetry and excessive attention to dressing. Men were the “stronger sex,” Rawdin stressed, who therefore should show the way to the fair sex. Moreover, there were women that were “regenerating” and needed support. Like many other readers with Zionist inclinations, he urged men to engage in ideological work among women.

Instead of discussing the disturbed dynamics of marital and social relations, another Jewish man, Dawid Gelblum, focused on two major sociopolitical events that upset the old social order of Jewish life: the Great War and the sanacja regime. In his view, the Great War left people hungry for material possessions, devaluing the spiritual currency of their lives. The ideologically driven sanacja, on the other hand, accelerated assimilation. Looming large, mandatory, and ever more oppressive (as it moved to the right in the early 1930s), the sanacja, historian Eva Plach argues, stood for the rebirth and purification of the Polish nation and was so flexible a concept as to expand in directions the Polish government saw fit. ⁴² It could thus paradoxically allude to calls for both liberal reform and conservatism. Because of the war and the sanacja, Jewish society, as noted by an overwhelming majority of respondents in Nasz Przegląd, was in a wretched state. It was handicapped spiritually (read: assimilating), endangered politically, and encumbered economically (read: facing political anti-Semitism and anti-Jewish economic restrictions). To make matters worse, Jewish “dolls” harbored little love for their impoverished husbands, Gelblum wrote. ⁴³ Thus, the sanacja of the country’s economy resembled the sanacja of marital relations. Both gave preference to Polish nationality and were not functioning well. Jewish women were turning too Polish, many respondents implied.

Many other Jewish men sounded the alarm about the Jewish women’s emptiness and decadence. From the shtetl of Dereczyn in eastern Poland, I. Melman agreed with Gelblum: Jewish women did not anymore feel or think “po żydowsku,” that is, in “a Jewish way.” ⁴⁴ Melman did not refer to either linguistic or religious but to cultural assimilation. Indeed, many women did not “feel in a Jewish way,” echoed with the same emotive phrasing the avant-garde Yiddish poet, Moyshe Broderzon, after a discussion of the Jewish Woman held in Vilna by Jewish women in March 1925. The modern Jewish woman was all but a virtuous woman, a consoling mother, and a “spiritual hearth of the family.” ⁴⁵ At home in cafes and theatres she had nothing distinctively Jewish, Broderzon opined.

To be saved from themselves, Jewish women had to reform. Only reformed, could they prevent the downfall of the Jewish nation, nationalist ideologues suggested. Like Polish women nationalists, Zionist women had to represent “the moral sex” because of their morally superior nature and nurture, as believed by many patriotic late nineteenth-century writers and thinkers in the Polish lands under the Habsburgs and tsarist Russia. The main character in Bolesław Prus’s novel Lalka (The Doll, 1887–1889), Mr. Wokulski, summed up the fin-de-siècle men’s belief in women’s moral and emotional superiority: “We admit this in a thousand ways, and we declare that although man creates civilization, woman ennobles it and gives it ideals.” And he continued, “In intellect and capacity for work, an average woman is lower than a man, but in manners and feelings she should be as much above him as will compensate for these inequalities.” ⁴⁶ “Women’s influence adds wings [to humankind],” General Zionist Róża Melcerowa agreed with this famous Polish positivist writer in July 1932, “whereas male dominance inhibits the progress of true culture.” ⁴⁷ Such attitudes, of both Prus and Melcerowa born in the nineteenth century, sprung from Polish notions of romanticism and sacrifice surrounding the role of women and their immediate and larger family—that is, their home and nation.

Throughout Yiddish and Polish-language Jewish public media, the emergent (and mostly negative) type of the Modern Jewish Woman evoked humorous ridicule from Jewish cartoonists, not just social commentary from Polish-Jewish readers of both sexes. The one-time satirical journal, Der griner (The Inexperienced Newcomer, 1927), lampooned the modern Jewish woman through a parody of Shavuot when traditional Jews celebrate the giving of the Torah. ⁴⁸ In a caricature, a modern Jewish woman (hayntike vaybele)—sporting a short-haircut, high heels, and a tight-fit dress with a very deep back décolleté—is shown as laboring over her own tablet of the Ten Commandments that she will follow when she goes on a vacation:

A reflection of the caricaturist’s sensibilities about the moral downfall of the modern Jewish woman, the caricatured woman is writing down the rules of conduct about how to cheat on her spouse. In the satirical drawing, she is wearing a dress showing her legs and arms because she is modern, or, in the words of her critics, promiscuous: her sexuality forgoes her marital obligations as well as traditional varieties of sexuality, as expressed in wifehood and motherhood. That is the reason why her dacha should be far away from the city: in an ironic twist, the cartoonist says that distance would in fact make her husband’s visits difficult. Such a woman cuts her hair short in the vain hope of cutting many of her years off as well. In the twentieth century that she sees as having ceased to worship old years and the experience and wisdom of the elderly, she wants to stay young, too. ⁵⁰ She has emancipated herself from the delusion of sex as a procreative means, so she talks, in no immodest terms, about her strong sex drive (in the text, the word bederfenishen, i.e. needs, seems to imply “sexual needs”). As she atones for her sins by confessing them in minute detail—and the Yiddish satirist inserts a Hebrew line from the Passover Haggadah (or Maimonides’s halakhic work, depending on the cartoonist’s level of religious education)—she perceives herself as standing on moral high ground. And why not? Reinterpreted in a modern vein, her behavior could find support in a large body of religious texts on Jewish law and tradition. “All who are frequent in confessing and take great value in this matter are indeed praiseworthy,” writes the rabbi Maimonides himself in his interpretation of the unabridged line. Similarly, another humorous publication from Warsaw, Grins (Vegetable, 1914), featured the modern woman, standing on the top of a mountain and, like Moses, holding a tablet with her “Ten Demands” for a Jewish man: emancipation, tango, a dacha, trips abroad, jewelry, hats, fur coats, theatre, flirtation, and money. ⁵¹

The caustic parody of this type of the Jewish woman found a receptive audience in many larger Yiddish periodicals as well. Among many others, the left-wing Zionist Haynt published a drawing of a young woman with close-cropped hair, a man’s jacket with a bow tie, a smoking cigarette in one hand and a prayer book in the other. ⁵² One of the largest Yiddish dailies in Poland laughed at the modern woman’s poor understanding of Judaism with a satirical caption, “She is making a blessing: Blessed [are You, Hashem,] for not making me a woman.” In the traditional context, such a blessing said by a Jewish man, would have meant that, if he were a woman, he would be exempt from performing all the precepts of the Torah because a woman must also perform her duties as a mother, which consequently allows for certain exemptions. In its original form, the blessing meant that a man would rather stay a man because he could perform all of the precepts without obstruction. In the caricature, however, the smoking woman is shown as taking the blessing literally by interpreting it in a new, feminist way. As such, she stood for a travesty of traditional Judaism and womanhood in the critic’s eyes.

In response to the liberalization of old social norms, Der moment’s supplement, Shone-toyve (Happy New Year), depicted a Jewish woman whipping her husband, who reacts to his wife’s beating with fear and a touch of irony: “In the old age I have become a ‘liberal Jew.’ The Jewish woman gives me malkes (lashes)!” ⁵³ Usually done by a hired sexton on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, this old East European Jewish custom of beating men after their visit to synagogue signified an attempt at purifying oneself of one’s sins before the Lord. ⁵⁴ In the shifting cultural landscape, however, it was the Jewish woman who expiated her husband’s wrongdoings with lashes for sins committed against her. Throughout all three years of its publication, 1929 to 1931, another nonpartisan humoristic journal, Der sheygets (The Smart Alec), incessantly parodied what it saw as the ghastly new norms of modern women’s behavior. In one of its myriad caricatures, a young woman with cropped hair and a smoking cigarette in her mouth—a persistently reoccurring image in the Polish and Yiddish-language Jewish press—is about to breast-feed a baby who cries in shock: “Daddy, go away from me—I want the Mummy!” ⁵⁵ The caption at the top of the caricature says, “The fashion has already gone so far . . . ” as to allow for a mix-up of sexual identities. The modern mother in the drawing wears trousers, smokes, has very short hair—by prewar standards, she undoubtedly looks like a man.

The Zionist Woman and Her Fight against Degeneracy

Zionist women responded to these public debates through serious ideological and practical work. For the sake of the Jewish nation, they set out to reinterpret their conventional duties as wives and mothers. Much earlier, the concept of womanhood started to change as women became more conspicuous in the political and social domains, especially because of their philanthropic activities. Their charitable work received wide social approbation as it was viewed as an extension of women’s roles as mothers and homemakers and hence guardians of Jewish tradition and history. And preservation of Jewish tradition and history was a large part of being a Zionist woman. For most Jewish women, the social sphere thus operated as a happy medium between the domestic and the political spheres as they grew increasingly involved in schooling, physical education, health, and welfare services. ⁵⁶ Tangentially or directly, they participated in Zionist politics by addressing matters related to Jewish women, children, youth, and family: birth, birth control, love, sex, sexuality, and male and female physiology. A woman commentator in the General Zionist women’s internal bulletin, Kobieta Nowa (The New Woman, 1932–1933), phrased the Zionist women’s mission thus in November 1932: “the woman has to call for the rebirth and make it a reality.” ⁵⁷

The majority of women were content to sublimate their selfhood to the ideals of the collective as such a stance gave more meaning to their personal lives as well as a higher sense of social worth. It was because most Zionists, unlike the stridently feminist Puah Rakovska, were quite conservative in their views toward womanhood. Most Zionist women redefined their selfhood against a complex matrix of expectations arising from the Zionist dream. As such, they committed themselves to the tenets of Jewish nationalism: learning of the Hebrew language, doing of hakhshara (vocational training), aliyah (emigration to Palestine), and national cultural work in the Diaspora. At the same time, Jewish nationalists, both men and women, were equally actively engaged in a struggle for Polish democracy and civic and national rights for Jewish community, a struggle riven with tension and contradiction. ⁵⁸ In 1918, Haynt reflected on this heightening sense of belonging to dual collectivity after seeing the statistics from the Ministry of Education. The Ministry’s questionnaire distributed among Jewish teachers in Polish secondary schools showed that, when asked if they were Jewish, most teachers reported as being of Judaic faith and Polish nationality. ⁵⁹ No less disconcertingly, many middle-class Jewish women increasingly read and wrote in Polish and learnt about Yiddish literature through Polish translations, the Yiddishist cultural periodical Literarishe bleter reported in 1926. ⁶⁰

Consequently, the nationalist Jewish women believed they had a distinct role to play in Zionism, through ideological as well as physical work, physical in the sense that it directly related to her body. A Zionist woman had to improve her physique via proper exercise and hygiene, or, in the national parlance, she had to strive for the physical rebirth of the Jewish woman, a lifeline of Jewish progeny and hence the Jewish nation. Her body was to serve as a tool and site for reinscribing the nationalist motives. Gradually, staunch feminist aspirations began to wilt under the scorching sun of nationalism, and maternal feminism found a strong foothold among Zionist women. Much like the Matka Polka (Polish Mother), a romanticized rendition of traditional Polish womanhood promoted by Polish nationalists, she had to be loving, spiritual, strong (physically and spiritually), and healthy. The ideal Polish Mother, Catholic and Polish-speaking, would not stray away from her true Polish identity. She would not be intimate and intermarry with non-Poles. Above all, she was a mother, caring and reproducing for the sake of the Polish nation. ⁶¹ On the Jewish playground, Jewish women were performing similar functions for the Jewish nation.

At the ideological vanguard of this maternal feminist movement, Miriam Jakubowiczowa—a General Zionist in Poland’s Wizo (Women’s International Zionist Organization)—took measures to provide the language and structure for realizing a need she perceived already in 1929. In conjunction with other like-minded activists, she set up the Association for Jewish Women’s Sports Clubs in Poland (Zrzeszenie Żydowskich Kobiecych Stowarzyszeń Sportowych w Polsce—ZŻKSSP). In 1929, one of its clubs, “Ewa,” boasted around 600 women in Warsaw and many more in local divisions, where it offered tennis, gymnastics, athletics, sports games, swimming, ping-pong, skiing, sledding, and calisthenics. ⁶² In their bulletin, they elucidated the Association’s goal in the following manner:

And instead of provincial partisanship, we, women, bring to our work the most encompassing motto of sisterhood as we strive for our highest goal of the physical rebirth of the woman and thus the Nation. Only while on this path will we manage to be fair in our relationship with the strongest groups and loyal to the less numerous minority, too. . . . The woman’s fight for rights has to be based upon her aspirations for health and practical efficiency. A healthy, strong, and composed woman builds the future; she shapes the conditions of life and work. Such a modern woman cannot be brought up and fed by theories only; she should be actively led in an appropriate direction not by moralizing; instead certain values should be inculcated in her through action. Only women and institutions created by them are called for such a fundamental transformation of their identity.

That is one of the major reasons for the independent nature of women’s sports. It is directly related to the decision-making concerning our own work methods and types of organizations brought into existence, the development of special care for adolescent youth, the importance of the working woman and the creation of the types of physical exercise that fit her profession, the development of specific courses and camps, etc. ⁶³

Zionist women had to do this for their people and, as expressed in the bulletin’s motto: “Serve the cause” (“Sprawie służ”). ⁶⁴ With these ideas, Jakubowiczowa and other Wizo women reached out to Jewish families through a regular column on women’s sports, exercise, and Jewish women’s physical education in the Zionist women’s weekly Ewa (Eve) under the rubric “Physical Education.” Jakubowiczowa also published articles on these topics in the family monthly Dos kind and “The Jewish Woman’s Voice” in Nowy Dziennik (New Daily), a Wizo mouthpiece based in Cracow. ⁶⁵ Jakubowiczowa, like other Zionist women, taught that exercise had a positive effect on all aspects of womanhood and motherhood: menstruation, pregnancy, birth, breastfeeding, and menopause. ⁶⁶ Positive psychological benefits came with exercise as well; exercise could teach women independence, responsibility, leadership, will, and resilience. ⁶⁷ Healthy physically and psychologically, Jewish women could be healthy mothers and workers, Kobieta Nowa asserted. What was more important, individual health was closely interrelated with national health. According to the Young Wizo’s member Nechamkisówna, “physical education cannot be a goal in itself, but instead a significant instrument for universal education and, more particularly, national education.” ⁶⁸

Moreover, the Jewish nationalist leadership invoked historical evidence to substantiate their specific claims to women’s bodies and selfhood to make them appear more legitimate. The Zionist leadership appealed to the putative or potential historical awareness of the female contingent. Heroic moments of resistance performed by Jewish women at various points in Jewish history were singled out to serve as a unifying rally call. The Jewish woman had to be a valiant heroine, like most of her female predecessors from ancient Jewish history and religious scriptures. Puah Rakovska pointed to Miriam, Moses’s sister, who participated in the liberation of Jews from their enslavement in Egypt; she cited Hannah, mother of Samuel the Prophet, and Rachel, who were capable of enormous self-sacrifice as mothers. ⁶⁹ Pious and selfless, such mothers stuck to Jewish tradition and religious beliefs irrespective of painful repercussions. ⁷⁰ As most Jewish nationalist women also demanded to be treated on a par with men, they used the learned Talmudic figure of Brurye as exemplifying equality between the sexes in Jewish tradition, in addition to the clever politician Queen Salome Alexandra, the financially shrewd woman Mibtakhya, the judge and prophetess Deborah, and the brave Judith and Esther, to name just a few. Zionist women drew parallels between these and other extraordinarily accomplished Jewish women from modern times. ⁷¹ Once again, they felt they had to undertake the task of regenerating and perpetuating Jewish culture and consciousness, but this time in the context of national modernity. In other words, women set out to become the spiritual healers of the Jewish nation as well as its actual builders. Their ability to sacrifice themselves for the Zionist project was necessary to complete the mission, agreed such Zionist feminists as Puah Rakovska, Hemdah Ben-Yehuda (Eliezer Ben-Yehuda’s wife), and Roza Joffe (head of the Hebrew School for Girls in Jaffa), all echoing the ideas of Menahem Ussishkin and Dr. Khayim Dovid Hurvits on the Woman Question at the Russian Zionist conference in Minsk. ⁷² Moreover, such historicization justified the elimination of other possible alternatives for Jewish women.

Paulina Appenszlakowa, editor of Ewa, years later commented on the Polish-Jewish nationalist women’s mission and their growing identification with Jewishness. In a letter from 1946 to the Polish communist-sympathizing poet Władysław Broniewski, she observed poignantly: “She [Appenszlakowa’s friend Krysia] writes she feels Jewish and only now she understands how unpleasant that is. Poor thing, she forgot that we had created the myth of chosenness to console ourselves and through it we elevated that ‘unpleasantness’ to the dignity of a mission.” ⁷³ Much more optimistic in their approach toward the Zionist mission in the pre–World War II years, Zionist women took on the national task and interpreted it as a route to equal opportunity and political expression. To invoke Foucault, they partook in the act of “collective will” that sprung from their intense social and political belief in the future of statewide self-fashioning. ⁷⁴ Or, from a sociological vantage point, they joined in the experience of “collective effervescence.” They engaged in a ritual of forming a collective conscience and consciousness, while sharing experiences ever more intensively through group action, emotions, and emblems. ⁷⁵ With bristling determination, Polish Zionist women rallied around the belief that they, like Zionist men, would re-create a Jewish nation in the Zionist fashion. And, as a collective, the women shared their enthusiasm, ideology, sentiments, and practices—their collective will or effervescence, being and becoming one within the boundaries of Zionist ideas and practices.

The Wizo women themselves admitted that their women’s movement differed from other international movements: “It was, so to say, more idealistic.” ⁷⁶ They pinned their hopes on the nationalism that would regenerate the Jewish nation via women as mothers and producers of this nation. In their eyes, that was a cogent enough reason for all women to show solidarity as women and discard ideological preferences. At a general meeting in Łomża in March 1933, the Association’s women formulated their desire to be at the vanguard of the massive women’s movement for the physical rebirth of the Jewish nation, as done by and through the Jewish woman’s body: “Both the club [“Ewa”] and the Association [ZŻKSSP] stand on the national yet nonpartisan foundation in an attempt to work together for the physical rebirth of the Jewish woman and thus the Jewish Nation, calling to all nationalist Jewish groups regardless of their ideological coloring.” ⁷⁷ In this way, they established a link between the woman’s body, sexuality, and physical work (related to agriculture), a path that led to regeneration or, if not followed, to degeneration.

According to their inviting Zionist ideology and the call for every Jewish woman to exercise for a greater purpose (“Every Jewish Woman Exercises,” Jakubowiczowa articulated the slogan), the Jewish woman’s body had to be strong, healthy, and clean. ⁷⁸ For that purpose, the Zionist woman had to engage in the new forms of exercise and observe the stringent rules of hygiene. She had to forestall the “physical degeneration” of the Jewish woman. If preparing for aliyah, she had to leave her urban surroundings for work and life on a collective agricultural farm. She had to be able to produce healthy offspring; she had to regenerate the stock of the Jewish nation. The future of the nation depended on her ability and keenness to regenerate. On a farm in Chlebowice near Łódź (in addition to farms in Grochów near Warsaw, Stanisławów in Eastern Galicia, and other), khalutsim—Zionist pioneers composed of both boys and girls—worked hard to temper their bodies and souls so as to produce a physically and psychologically healthy sample of Zionist youth. ⁷⁹ The erotic impulses of youth were elevated to serve the Zionist cause. Unlike the urban Jewish “new women” demanding intimacy and romance, the young people on the farm espoused communal love, whereby no individual was singled out as an object of adoration or passion. Their love expressed a holistic and sexless Zionism as a mental framework and a way of life. Love for the Jewish national idea came first and overwhelmed other aspects of a young Zionist’s life. By the same token, love for a woman or man did not come second. In fact, it was part of the love for Zion; the sexual drive and romantic attraction were sublimated into ideology and what it prescribed. The Zionist youth were living this ideology with an all-consuming zeal. Thus framed, sex was a means to procreation; attraction and love were conduits to the love for the Jewish collective and the “new family.” Farm girls had two options, to stay virtuous or become “holy mothers.” ⁸⁰ At least that was what pro-Zionist reporters and the farm leadership thought was true when they asserted that amorous feelings played no dominant role in the relations among khalutsim, whom they observed and interviewed on the Chlebowice farm in central Poland:

The management knew their people; they knew that the internal life of boys and girls was completely free of that simple, non-intellectual, and soulless eroticism of senses; in educational work it was senseless and even simply harmful to issue prohibitions or put up external hurdles; the conditions for development had to be created for a man in such a way that he could grow internally and without help walk along the most beautiful and deepest road of his life. When once somebody asked one of the Chlebowice boys about whether there are any romantic relationships on the farm, he answered surprised: “Among us? Is ordinary love possible in Chlebowice?” ⁸¹

Male Zionist ideologues and practitioners nodded in approval of such a reaction. A great many of them were pro-Zionist journalists and educators who molded the minds and bodies of young people through pen and observation, physical activity and agricultural work. On the other hand, that was exactly what the socialist Zionist Aaron David Gordon, who spearheaded the Second Aliyah from Russian Poland, lamented in 1918 when he settled on the Kinneret farm alongside young pioneers. On collective farms in Palestine, ideology-infused demands became incompatible with the demands of human nature. As a result, Gordon’s co-ideologists, young pioneers from Poland, lacked familial and sexual life. “Life” and “work” were artificially separated, Gordon decried. ⁸² Yet such experimental preparatory farms were few and far between in Poland, because of a lack of funding. Besides, women ideologues, with Wizo steering the course, remained aloof from male Zionist endeavors and engaged in their own projects. For their part, Wizo women encouraged Jewish girls to enroll in vocational schools (like Krakow’s well-known “Ognisko Pracy”) or other short-term training courses that would provide them with skills and hopefully an income after graduation, allowing for survival in Palestine, should they choose to immigrate. ⁸³ And some nationalist women went to live on experimental farms, like Hannah Meisel, who left for Palestine and founded a network of agricultural schools for young Jewish women.

In their attempt to create a strong and healthy Zionist woman, women did not engage in sports for sports’ sake, because the main idea was not the development of the body only, but a development of both body and mind. Both had to be working for the common goal of the rebirth of the Jewish woman, the ZŻKSSP women highlighted. Through the body, one could map the mind for a greater national purpose. Borrowing the poetic words of the Polish poet Kazimierz Wierzyński from the Skamander group, Zionist women encapsulated the desired oneness of muscle and mind:

From our muscles, like from a logarithm,

Will, effort, and power will come, bursting with change. ⁸⁴

If a woman cared for the health of her nation, she had to exercise on a regular basis in order to develop both internally and externally.

Debates over proper care of health were entangled in the controversy of medical opinions. Responding to modern society’s obsession with health, the Yiddish-language bi-weekly Familienbleter (The Family Newspaper), dedicated to the affairs of the Jewish family, suggested that “too much gymnastics is unhealthy.” ⁸⁵ A columnist noted that the truth about the healthy body of a worker who spends his days working outside or in the fields is largely a myth, according to medical opinion. In fact, too much exercise can be more harmful than idleness. Approaching the whole issue from a scientific rather than a nationalist viewpoint, the author marshaled evidence proving that rest was as necessary as movement; it was one of the paths to mental and physical fitness. Athletes and boxers, for instance, have a shorter life span than people of other professions, he noted. In his opinion, rest was better than excessive exercise. And big muscles do not tell much about a man’s internal health, the author concluded.

To some extent, Wizo women agreed on this point, although the need for exercise or movement did not disappear from their arguments. Mira Jakubowiczowa, citing medical opinion on this issue in Dos kind, noted that rest hours had to be interspersed with physical exercise, as suggested by Dr. Knoll, whose medical judgment she trusted. Exploiting the very same opinion of Dr. Knoll, a columnist in Kobieta Nowa, Milka Bogacka, added that an intensive way of life required intensive rest but that hygiene and movement did have to follow the initial cycle of passive rest. ⁸⁶ To realize these ideas, the ZŻKSSP women organized summer camps for Jewish girls, courses for female sports instructors, and local sports clubs for Jewish women across Poland. Through their bodies, they were improving the body of the Jewish nation.

Conclusion: Zionism’s Gender Politics

As an ideology, Zionism set out to create a new type of Jewish woman, on ideological, psychological, and physical planes. ⁸⁷ The Jewish woman—or, to be more specific, one that could give birth to children and bring them up in the Zionist tradition—figured prominently in the Zionist discourse. Besides these spiritual qualities, she was expected to live up to certain physical requirements regarding her health and physique. She had to be strong both in body and character. She had to offer herself in the service of the national collective because for a Zionist woman community was above the individual. ⁸⁸

From a broader perspective, modern Jewish politicians clustered women together as belonging to the marginal sex in their gendered treatment of politics. As a result, many Jewish women nationalists drifted away to engage in the domains where they encountered fewer hurdles to their activism, domains relegated to women out of tradition and social convention or viewed as a legitimate extension of women’s primary duties as mothers and caregivers: care of children, youth, and the elderly, as well as new forms of professional, social and cultural activity after the Great War. As a result, Polish Zionist women began creating their own institutional spaces and political-cultural discourses, through which they contended with their status of double marginality, as part of both a Jewish minority and a marginalized sex. In one wording or another, the concept of “double discrimination” and “double struggle”—in contemporary scholarly language, “double marginality”—appeared in the Yiddish paper Di froy (The Woman) and the articles of the pro-feminist Polish-Jewish lawyer Rafael Lemkin in Ewa (both were nationalist newspapers, published by feminist Jewish women in Vilna and Warsaw, respectively). ⁸⁹ Marginal and marginalized, Jewish women were objects of “double discrimination” as both women and Jews, Lemkin summed it up while discussing European and Jewish feminisms in interwar Poland. Even within the Jewish sphere they were thus discriminated against because the discursive meanings of gender were predicated on their national identity, a product of modern Jewish politics. Hence, to quote Lemkin, their struggle for equality had to rage on both the national and social-feminist planes. Within the purview of the state and society at large, emancipation had to come from the top down as much as from the bottom up, Lemkin suggested.

As a result, feminist Zionist women engaged not only in the ideological rebirth of the Jewish nation. They initiated the physical rebirth of the Jewish Woman who was deemed too urban, too decadent. Zionist female ideologues perceived the bodily rebirth of Jewish women as leading to the strengthening of their Jewish identities and inevitably the Jewish stock. While in the Diaspora, such women had to work on developing strong and healthy bodies, as much as Zionist men were expected to make themselves into muscular Jews so as to be able to leave for Palestine and work there productively. But 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. In this discourse, the Jewish woman’s body was also the body of the Jewish nation.

Eagerly, many Zionist women stepped up to the challenge of building the Jewish nation (or, as Zionists saw it, its “rebuilding”). But as these women operated across a set of diverse contexts, they interpreted their mission in a variety of ways. Many women took it literally, placing equal demands for both the New Zionist Man and Woman. This group of women was more radical in its views on Jewish women’s roles in interwar Polish-Jewish society. Usually, they belonged to the younger generation of women, born before or immediately after the Great War. The majority of them, like Puah Rakovska, also turned to socialist Zionism. Other Zionist women, especially those espousing more traditional, maternal feminist views, pieced together a more conservative and moderate Zionist version of the woman. Their vision matched the “womanly” Jewish woman championed by General Zionists Nordau and Melcerowa, a Wizo leader in Poland.

The older and the younger generations of Zionist women, however, did not neatly fall into the two distinct categories. Firstly, most Zionist women knew Polish, Yiddish, or Hebrew, and many of them were multilingual, easily crisscrossing the worlds of Polish, Yiddish, German, Russian, and sometimes even French literatures. Secondly, they were all engaged in the Woman Question to a greater or lesser extent, adhering to either more radical or more conservative modes of feminist ethos (even orthodox Jewish women were turning to politics in the interwar years, as exemplified by women in the Agudes Yisroel party). Finally, Polish Zionist women were fractured along generational and class lines, with regional belongings playing a no less significant role. Consequently, they exhibited a high degree of political flippancy and expediency, with many Jewish women activists often crossing the boundaries of political movements more than once. Unlike their Zionist mothers grounded in the nineteenth-century Polish cultural ethos, the majority of the younger generation was not as willing to sublimate themselves to the Zionist vision of the national collective and its demands.

In an attempt to reconcile cultural antagonisms, many modern Zionist women simultaneously clung to what they saw as old and new paradigms of self-perception. Insecure in the extremities of modernity yet repelled by Jewish traditionalism, they strove to combine both, paradoxically. That is why throughout the interwar era the Woman Question was in the swings of the shifting dialectics of the self and the collective, percolated by a high degree of reflexivity and psychological analysis, all symptoms of modernity. In agreement with the tenor of the times, modernity brought the self to the forefront of science and literature, which was facilitated by Freudian psychoanalytical theory, growing literary genres of introspection in Yiddish and Polish memoirs and diaries, and a more heated discussion of one’s body and sexuality. ⁹⁰ But in the Zionist discourse, the self was conclusively sublimated to the collective. In the patriarchal system of social controls, motherhood was a woman’s destiny. On the Zionist anvil, it turned into the discourse about the Jewish nation’s destiny while its opposite (emancipated womanhood, prostitution, unwed motherhood, and other forms of woman’s sexuality), into national degeneracy.