Over two million Jews emigrated from Eastern Europe between the 1880s and 1930s, and many more migrated within the region. One of the characteristics of the Jewish migratory stream in this period, as compared to non-Jewish migrations, was an exceptionally high proportion of women among migrants. The greater mobility of Jews in general and Jewish women, in particular, caused Jewish women to be the most noticeable group among female migrants from Eastern Europe and turned them into emblematic female emigrants from this region.

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This lecture will explore the experiences of Jewish women who migrated within Eastern Europe and/or abroad to places like Istanbul, Buenos Aires, London, or New York. It will demonstrate that migration was a heavily gendered phenomenon. Indeed, women were subject to different emigration and immigration laws, in some cases severely limiting their options to move freely, in others creating avenues for circumventing immigration quotas East European Jews faced in the interwar period. The lecture will investigate both the structures shaping the migrations of Jewish women, such as state laws, social expectations, and stigmas, and how these women navigated them to achieve spatial and socio-economic mobility.

Aleksandra Jakubczak is a historian specializing in the social and economic history of Eastern European Jewry in the modern period. She is a historian at the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews and a research fellow at the Historical Institute of the Polish Academy of Sciences. She received her Ph.D. in Jewish History at Columbia University in New York in 2023 for her doctoral dissertation, entitled (Sex)Worker, Migrant, Daughter: The Jewish Economics of Sex Work and Mobility, between 1870 and 1939, which looked at Jewish women selling and organizing sex to examine how Eastern European Jewish women experienced urbanization, industrialization, and mass migration.

Over two million Jews emigrated from Eastern Europe between the 1880s and 1930s, and many more migrated within the region. One of the characteristics of the Jewish migratory stream in this period, as compared to non-Jewish migrations, was an exceptionally high proportion of women among migrants. The greater mobility of Jews in general and Jewish women, in particular, caused Jewish women to be the most noticeable group among female migrants from Eastern Europe and turned them into emblematic female emigrants from this region.

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This lecture will explore the experiences of Jewish women who migrated within Eastern Europe and/or abroad to places like Istanbul, Buenos Aires, London, or New York. It will demonstrate that migration was a heavily gendered phenomenon. Indeed, women were subject to different emigration and immigration laws, in some cases severely limiting their options to move freely, in others creating avenues for circumventing immigration quotas East European Jews faced in the interwar period. The lecture will investigate both the structures shaping the migrations of Jewish women, such as state laws, social expectations, and stigmas, and how these women navigated them to achieve spatial and socio-economic mobility.

Aleksandra Jakubczak is a historian specializing in the social and economic history of Eastern European Jewry in the modern period. She is a historian at the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews and a research fellow at the Historical Institute of the Polish Academy of Sciences. She received her Ph.D. in Jewish History at Columbia University in New York in 2023 for her doctoral dissertation, entitled (Sex)Worker, Migrant, Daughter: The Jewish Economics of Sex Work and Mobility, between 1870 and 1939, which looked at Jewish women selling and organizing sex to examine how Eastern European Jewish women experienced urbanization, industrialization, and mass migration.

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