Tel Aviv University/University of Warsaw
Between Individual and Political Emancipation: Zionism and Feminism in the Lives of Puah Rakovsky and Rahel Straus
This dissertation is a comparative biographical study that delves into the individual and political emancipation efforts of two feminist-oriented activists of the Zionist movement: Puah Rakovsky, a teacher and translator (1865 in Białystok –1955 in Haifa), and Rahel Straus, a gynecologist (1881 in Karlsruhe – 1963 in Jerusalem). The study explores the correlation between their feminist and national commitments, underscoring the crucial role of the feminist orientation in their activism in the Zionist movement. It deepens our grasp of Zionism’s importance for Jews in early twentieth-century Eastern and Central Europe while highlighting the active role of Jewish women in navigating their national identity. This study provides a new perspective on the relationship between Zionism and feminism by comparing examples from the Polish-Russian borderland and Germany. It examines the unique nature of the Zionist movement in each context and explores the feminist orientation as a dynamic factor. The study integrates macro-historical perspectives with case studies and aims to provide a detailed understanding of Jewish women’s political choices and lives, contributing to a broader recognition of diversity in modern Jewish experiences in Central Europe and its Eastern counterpart. This study also seeks to integrate Jewish women’s stories into broader research fields beyond Jewish history. It exposes the elements of their stories that surpass the Jewish experience, such as tensions between feminist and national interests and the negotiations of private and political dimensions of women’s lives.
Katarzyna Czerwonogóra is a historian of modern Jewish history whose work explores Polish-Jewish relations, gender, and national identity in Central and Eastern Europe. She holds a PhD in Jewish History from Tel Aviv University and an MA in Sociology from the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. Her MA thesis examined the Jewish revival in Poland from a feminist perspective, with a particular focus on Kraków, combining sociological analysis with questions of memory, identity, and minority presence in a predominantly Catholic society. Between 2019 and 2025, she worked at Yad Vashem – The World Holocaust Remembrance Center, where she held several research and educational positions. She has also worked as an indexer of Holocaust testimonies for the USC Shoah Foundation.
Her scholarly publications address Jewish women’s activism, Zionism and feminism, women’s experiences during the Holocaust, and Jewish cultural life in Poland and Europe. Her research is interdisciplinary and multilingual, engaging historical, sociological, and memory-studies perspectives. Fellowships from Bar-Ilan University, the Leo Baeck Fellowship Program, and the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute have supported her work.
Her current project, Modern despite or thanks to Catholic tradition? Jewish question and Polish national identity, 1980–2000, explores the post-1989 “pro-Jewish turn” in Polish identity discourse from a postsecular perspective. It examines how efforts to integrate Jewish history and memory into the Polish national imagination drew on moral and symbolic resources rooted in post–Vatican II Catholic theology and the anti-antisemitic turn associated with John Paul II.