At the turn of the twentieth century, Jewish men in Eastern Europe lived in a social reality in which both Jewish and non-Jewish men and women tested, debated, and redesigned masculinities.

Men of Valor and Anxiety explores how religion, class divisions, antisemitism, new domesticity, and militarization changed masculine ideas and practices in Eastern Europe between the 1890s and 1930s. Author Mariusz Kalczewiak applies recent paradigms of gender theory and social history to offer a sensitive historical analysis of personal memoirs, advice books, archives of Jewish institutions, and journalistic commentaries. This study ventures into the military barracks, yeshivot study halls, fraternity parties, and Jewish homes to demonstrate how complex Jewish masculinities were between orthodoxy, acculturation, Polish and Jewish nationalisms, and changing notions of domesticity and profession.

Focusing on an ethnic minority in a country that first struggled for independence and later embarked on an accelerated modernization project, Men of Valor and Anxiety is the first book to demonstrate how the links between ethnicity and gender were constructed within both global and local contexts.

Mariusz Kalczewiak is Senior Research Associate and Fedor Lynen Research Fellow in Hisotry at the University of Southern California. He is author of Polacos in Argentina: Polish Jews, Interwar Migration, and the Emergence of Transatlantic Jewish Culture.

Acknowledgments
A Note on Translation, Spelling, and Transliteration
Introduction
1. Yeshiva Men: Elite Religious Knowledge and Intellectual Potency
2. A Jew and His Penis: Circumcision and the Entanglements of Jewishness and Masculinity
3. Boys Showing Off: Working Class, Strongmen, and Corporeality
4. Tender Bonds of Fraternal Affection: Student Fraternities, Homosocial Sociability, and Jewish Respectability
5. Pulling the Trigger: Military and Jewish Masculinities
6. Leisure and Toil: Masculinity in Profession, Family, and Consumer Culture
7. Homosexual Masculinities: Between Crime, Progressive Calls and Homophobic Subversion
Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
Index