Men of Valor and Anxiety: Polish-Jewish Masculinities and the Challenge of Modernity

At the turn of the twentieth century, Jewish men in Eastern Europe lived in a social reality in which both Jewish and non-Jewish men and women tested, debated, and redesigned masculinities.

Men of Valor and Anxiety explores how religion, class divisions, antisemitism, new domesticity, and militarization changed masculine ideas and practices in Eastern Europe between the 1890s and 1930s. Author Mariusz Kalczewiak applies recent paradigms of gender theory and social history to offer a sensitive historical analysis of personal memoirs, advice books, archives of Jewish institutions, and journalistic commentaries. This study ventures into the military barracks, yeshivot study halls, fraternity parties, and Jewish homes to demonstrate how complex Jewish masculinities were between orthodoxy, acculturation, Polish and Jewish nationalisms, and changing notions of domesticity and profession.

Focusing on an ethnic minority in a country that first struggled for independence and later embarked on an accelerated modernization project, Men of Valor and Anxiety is the first book to demonstrate how the links between ethnicity and masculinity were constructed within East European Jewish social, political, and cultural contexts.