Mariusz Kalczewiak
historian
Eastern Europe | Latin America
Jewish Studies | Migration Studies | Gender Studies | Animal Studies
About
Mariusz Kalczewiak is a social and cultural historian of modern Latin America and Eastern Europe at the University of Potsdam, Germany.
Mariusz's award-winning book Polacos in Argentina. Polish Jews, Interwar Migration, and the Emergence of Transatlantic Jewish Culture appeared in 2020 with the Alabama University Press. His second book Men of Valor and Anxiety. Polish-Jewish Masculinities and the Challenge of Modernity appears in 2025 with the Indiana University Press.
Mariusz researched and taught in history and Jewish Studies programs in Los Angeles, Potsdam, and Warsaw. He is a team member in the research project "Jewish Discourse on Body" at the University of Wrocław, Poland. He holds a PhD degree from Tel Aviv University (2017).
Research
Mariusz Kałczewiak's research interests center around social and cultural history in Eastern Europe and Latin America, Jewish Migration Studies, Jewish Gender Studies, transnational and global history, and Yiddish Studies.
Mariusz's first monograph Polacos in Argentina analyzes Polish-Jewish immigration to Argentina in the first half of the 20th century and recreates a mosaic of cultural and social entanglements that Jewish migration wove between Eastern Europe and Latin America.
Mariusz's second book project Men of Valor and Anxiety. Polish-Jewish Masculinities and the Challenge of Modernity explores Jewish masculinities in Poland in the 1920s and 1930s. The book rethinks earlier assumptions about Jewish male gender identities and is under contract with Indiana University Press.
Mariusz's scholarship has appeared in American Jewish History, East European Jewish Affairs, In Geveb. A Journal of Yiddish Studies, or in Jewish Culture and History, and has been supported by Brandenburg's Ministry of Science, Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, University of Florida, Brandeis University, German Historical Institutes in Washington and Warsaw and POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews.
Men of Valor and AnxietyPolish-Jewish Masculinities and the Challenge of Modernity
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.
Polacos in ArgentinaPolish Jews, Interwar Migration, and the Emergence of Transatlantic Jewish Culture
Kalczewiak has gone far beyond writing an excellent study of transatlantic migrant cultures. Through pathbreaking, multi-archive, multilingual research Polacos in Argentina transforms our understanding of transnational Jewish and Yiddish cultures. As the best studies always do, this book transcends its specific topics to offer new insights into how scholars might understand the movement of peoples across multiple borders, and how long-term migrations come to transform both destination societies and the places from which the migrants originally came.
Latin American Jewish Studies Association Book Award Committee
- Reviewed by Martín Kleiman in Latin American Jewish Studies (2022): 81-83
- Reviewed by Pierre Anctil in Canadian Jewish Studies 34 (2022): 230-232
- Reviewed by Amy Kerner in American Jewish History 105 1-2 (2021): 299-300
- Reviewed by Maria Antosik-Piela in Kwartalnik Historii Żydów 279 3 (2021): 178-180
- Reviewed by Valeria Navarro Rosenblatt in Cuadernos Judaicos 38 (2021): 341-343
- Reviewed by Joanna Spyra in In Geveb. A Journal of Yiddish Studies (January 31, 2021)
- Reviewed by Hallie Cantor in Association of Jewish Libraries News and Reviews vol. II no. 3 (2021): 37-38
- Interviewed by Max Kaiser for the New Books Network (June 25, 2021)
The World beyond the West: Perspectives from Eastern Europe
No matter how one defines its extent and borders, Eastern Europe has long been understood as a liminal space. Its undeniable cultural and historical continuities with Western Europe have been belied by its status as an “Other” in the Western imagination. Across illuminating and provocative case studies, The World Beyond the West focuses on the region’s ambiguous relationship to historical processes of colonialism and Orientalism. Exploring encounters with distant lands through politics, travel, migration, and exchange, places Eastern Europe at the heart of its analysis while decentering the most familiar narratives and recasting the region's history.
- Reviewed by Balint Varga in Connections. A Journal for Historians and Area Specialists, 05.05.2023
- Reviewed by Klaus Dittrich inSehepunkte 24 (2024), No. 9 (15.09.2024)
- Reviewed by Paulina D. Domnik in The Polish Review (2024) 69 (4): 89–91