Mariusz Kalczewiak, PhD
historian at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles
Jewish Studies | Eastern Europe | Latin America
About
Mariusz Kałczewiak is a social and cultural historian of modern Eastern Europe and Latin America. One of the leading scholars in Latin American Jewish Studies, currently Kałczewiak develops a new research focus on Jewish Gender Studies.
He holds a PhD degree from Tel Aviv University (2017) and a MA degree from the University of Warsaw (2011).
Mariusz Kałczewiak's first book Polacos in Argentina. Polish Jews, Interwar Migration, and the Emergence of Transatlantic Jewish Culture appeared in 2020 with the Alabama University Press.
Research Interests
Mariusz Kałczewiak's research interests center around social and cultural history in Eastern Europe and the Americas, Jewish Migration Studies, Jewish Gender Studies, transnational and global history, and Yiddish Studies.
Dr. Kałczewiak'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 Kałczewiak's second-book project Men of Valor and Anxiety. Polish-Jewish Masculinities and the Challenge of Modernity explores Jewish masculinities in Eastern Europe between the 1890s and 1930s. Kałczewiak works as well on an intellectual biography of the Yiddish writer and culturist Perets Hirshbeyn - The World is Huge and Full of Illusions: Perets Hirschbeyn and Global Jewish Writing .
Dr. Kałczewiak'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.
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)
- 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