Gendered Violence

This is a groundbreaking study of an important and neglected topic. Between 1917 and 1921, rape was used as a strategic weapon in the genocidal anti-Jewish violence--the pogroms--that erupted in Ukraine. During this period, at least 100,000 Jews died and unknown numbers of Jewish women were raped. The book is based on the in-depth study of the scores of survivor narratives that have been all but forgotten for almost a century. It analyzes how the victimized Jewish communities experienced trauma, how they expressed it, the motives of the perpetrators, and the part played by rape in furthering the pogroms' objectives.

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).
Irina Astashkevich, a visiting research associate of the Tauber Institute, holds a PhD from Brandeis University. She received her MA in History, Jewish History and Archives from the Project Judaica - a joint project of the Russian State University of Humanities, Historical Archival Institute, Jewish Theological Seminary of America, and the YIVO Institute of Jewish Research in New York. She has worked in various archives in Russia, Lithuania, and the US, as well as in Jewish philanthropic organizations, such as the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee in Moscow.

"Astashkevich's study opens new and urgent lines of thinking in the historiography of interethnic violence in Eastern Europe and Ukraine. By grappling with the ways sexual violence co-constituted antisemitic violence during the Ukrainian War of Independence, Astashkevich gestures toward the ways mass rape and sexual violence have been foundational to the trauma of the region and to the generational trauma of Ukraine's far-flung Jews. Her book is one of the most theoretically inflected pieces of feminist scholarship to deal with the Ukrainian War of Independence. Because of that, Astashkevich helps us to understand the modernizing forces that worked to bring mass rape into relationship with genocidal violence. This stimulating monograph the deserves attention of anyone interested in Jewish history, antisemitism, sexual violence, Ukrainian history, gender history, and the history of atrocity." --Meghann Pytka, Northwestern University, H-Poland