Bodies, Desire, and Sexuality in Eastern European Jewish History
Tuition: $240 | YIVO members: $180**
Students: $120 (Must register with valid university email address)
This is a live, online course held weekly on Zoom. Enrollment will be capped at about 20 students. All course details (Zoom link, syllabus, handouts, assignments, etc.) will be posted to Google Classroom. Students will be granted access to the class on Google Classroom after registering for the class here on the YIVO website. This class will be conducted in English.
Instructor: Aleksandra Jakubczak
Course Description:
This course explores how Jews in Eastern Europe understood and experienced the body, sexuality, and desire in the modern era. Rather than treating sexuality as confined to marriage or family life, the course examines a wide range of intimate experiences and practices, including premarital and extramarital sex, prostitution, same-sex desire, sexual violence, and other forms of non-normative sexuality. Through autobiographies, memoirs, newspapers, court cases of rape, and statistical sources on prostitution, students will investigate how different groups understood and navigated changing sexual norms. By placing bodies and sexuality at the center of historical inquiry, the course explores how Eastern European Jews responded to the pressures of modernization and social change while challenging enduring stereotypes of the "Old World" as a static, uniformly traditional, and sexually repressed society.
Course Materials:
All course materials will be provided digitally on Google Classroom.
Questions? Read our 2026 Fall Classes FAQ.
Aleksandra Jakubczak is a historian specializing in the social and economic history of Eastern European Jewry in the modern period. Since 2022, she has served as a historian at the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews. She earned her Ph.D. in Jewish History from Columbia University in New York in 2023 and has, since then, held postdoctoral fellowships at Harvard University and at the Center for Antisemitism Research at the Technical University of Berlin. She is the author of monographs as well as numerous scholarly articles.
**Become a member today, starting at $54 for one year, and pay the member price for classes! You’ll save on tuition for this course and more on future classes and public programs tickets.