In 1929, the Polish-Jewish newspaper “Nasz Przegląd” announced “Miss Judaea Contest” – Beauty Pageant exclusively for Jewish ladies. In the following year, the Yiddish newspaper "Unzer Express" launched an additional similar contest. This talk aims to focus on two elements related to the Jewish Beauty Pageants in Interwar Poland: First, by using quantitative research methods, I aim to reveal the aesthetics and fashionable elements of the typical Jewish young women. The second part of the paper is devoted to the vivid discussions that the contest aroused both in the Jewish community in Poland and in other Jewish communities abroad.
The lecture will take place on December 13th at 5 pm, in the room C.0.39, Collegium Humanisticum UMK. The speech will be given in English and streamed online.
About lecturer
Emma Zohar is a NAWA visiting scholar at the Copernicus University, Torun, Poland. She served as a post-doctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, the Center for History of Emotions, Berlin (2019-2021). Zohar completed her PhD (2019) in the department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University. In her PhD dissertation, Zohar focused on the Jewish non-Zionists educational institutions in interwar Poland. Zohar’s current project “Within the Pale of Pleasure: Polish Jews and the Pursuit of Happiness (1918-1939)” deals with the everyday life practices of Polish Jewry in independent Poland. The research analyzes the consumer and leisure habits of the Polish-Jewish community in contrast to the image as the epitome of Jewish suffering. Her research interests focus on Eastern European Studies, Jewish History, History of Emotions, Gender, and Cultural History.