Gendered Violence: Jewish Women in the Pogroms of 1917 to 1921

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.