Interventions to improve cancer screening adherence in migrants and ethnic minorities in the European Region: A systematic review.

ABSTRACT Proposing the concept of “interstitial stigma” - a devalued status rooted in simultaneous rejection from the two societies to which persons with mixed affiliation or identity may belong – this article examines the narratives of Israeli Jewish women who migrated to their Arab/Palestinian intimate male partner’s home and community, in Israel or the Palestinian territories – two conflict zones. Reflecting on the stigmatization faced by women in mixed relationships who reside in conflict zones, the study delves into the impact of prolonged violent political conflict on women’s sense of belonging, precarity, and entrapment when intimate partners’ social identities are tied to opposing sides of the conflict. . The database consists of 43 narratives describing the hardships, challenges, and dilemmas the women encountered in both their natal and adopted communities; the patriarchal – and social identity-related marginalization and insecurity they experienced in Jewish and Arab communities; and the impact of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on the women’s familial and community relations. The article concludes with consideration of the broader applicability of the concept of interstitial stigma beyond the marriage migration and Israeli-Palestinian contexts addressed in this article.

Abstract This article explores the admission of Jewish women diagnosed with mental disorders related to pregnancy and childbearing into Colney Hatch Asylum around 1900. Admissions with puerperal insanity were prevalent amongst ‘Hebrew’ women, and in published work, including that of the institution’s medical officers, this was related to assumptions about marital and sexual practices, heredity and the ‘neurotic’ tendencies of Jewish people. However, analysis of the asylum’s casebooks reveals discrepancies between these explanations and those drawn on in practice. Similarly to other women admitted with disorders associated with childbearing, the mental breakdown of Jewish women was largely attributed to domestic stress and the strains of childbirth. The article also explores the testimonies of family members whose comments were incorporated into the asylum records, suggesting that these provide valuable insights into families’ understanding of the role of childbirth in prompting mental breakdown, reinforcing institutional diagnoses or at times diverging from them.

ABSTRACT In the forced labor camp of Sömmerda, a group of Hungarian Jewish women formed a diary-writing community whose writing offers a unique perspective on the Holocaust. Escaping the monotony of their day-to-day existence, the women constructed a world of fantasy centered on their lost loved ones. In the Sömmerda diaries, pre-camp life appears as a world without Nazis, where the families that had been separated by the time of writing were still together. However, in the diaries’ post-war narratives, the women positioned their persecution as Auschwitz survivors rather than forced laborers or diarists.

ABSTRACT Block 10 of Auschwitz, home to the experimental sterilization of over 400 Jewish women, witnessed years of intimacy between the women inside. Looking at the testimonies, memoirs, and correspondence from three women of Block 10, Margit Neumann, Ima Schalom Spanjaard van Esso, and Theresia Soetendorp, this article chronicles memories of same-sex intimacy. Rather than confirming homosexual identities, this article complicates sexual categories and offers queer readings of women's experiences drawn from the methodologies of Anna Hájková, Claudia Schoppmann, and Roseanna Ramsden. The findings echo extant scholarship while concomitantly proposing subversive methods to understand testimonies provided by same-sex partnered survivors.

ABSTRACT Focusing on Grant’s 2023 novel The Story of the Forest, this article explores how British-Jewish writer Linda Grant revitalizes the Jewish-British family saga by following four generations of Jewish women from a 1913 encounter in a Baltic forest to their eventual settlement in Liverpool. Drawing on theories of transgenerational and relational memory, Jewish feminist criticism, and contemporary feminist conceptions of generational and relational time, the analysis reveals how the novel constructs Jewish memory as transmitted through women’s stories. Grant transforms the traditional male-centered hero’s journey into a feminist, female-driven quest, positioning women as key agents in preserving memory and reshaping historical narratives. The article argues that this relational and feminist approach addresses the absence of female role models in Jewish historiography, reimagining fragmented Jewish female identity as interconnected across generations. Moreover, it offers a lens to understand the experiences of other women whose histories reveal the transformative power of female relationality in times of crisis.

This study examines the prevalence of probable postpartum depression (PPD) and associated factors among Israeli Jewish women who gave birth during acute and prolonged phases of an ongoing war, addressing the gap in understanding the progression of depressive symptoms across conflict stages. A cross-sectional study included 279 women who delivered after October 7, 2023. Data were collected in the acute phase (February-April 2024) and prolonged phase (March 2025). Demographic, obstetric, and war-related variables were collected. Depressive symptoms were assessed using the Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9). Multivariable logistic regression analysis assessed the odds of probable PPD (score ≥ 10). The prevalence of probable PPD was 25.7% in the initial phase and 26.0% in the prolonged phase. Women with prior depression history (OR = 2.7, 95% CI: 1.3-5.7), pregnancy complications (OR = 1.9, 95% CI: 1.02-3.7), or infants older than 4 months (OR = 2.0, 95% CI: 1.1-3.8) had significantly higher odds of scoring above the cutoff. Secular women were nearly twice as likely to experience elevated symptoms as religious women (OR = 2.0, 95% CI: 1.1-3.8). Maternal age, obstetric characteristics, and war-related exposures were not significantly associated with depression scores. Rates of probable PPD during the war were more than triple pre-war Israeli estimates and remained elevated across conflict phases. These findings underscore the need to extend postpartum screening beyond the early postpartum period (at 4-6 months postpartum), consistent with international recommendations for repeated or ongoing assessment. Higher rates among secular women may reflect differences in community support and warrant further investigation.

ABSTRACT This article examines the role of five Jewish Egyptian women who helped perpetuate the culture of Egyptian Jews outside Egypt after their exile in the 1950s. All five spoke fluent Arabic and French, and three of them were also fluent in English. Their fields of endeavor were in turn fashion, Gaby Aghion of the “The House of Chloé”; literature and thought, Joyce Mansour and Jacqueline Kahanoff; culinary culture, Claudia Roden; and social activism, Levana Zamir.

For some early twentieth-century Jewish observers, marriage and prostitution were paradoxically linked, as they were both economic transactions that commodified women. This chapter explores this link and situates it in its broader social, economic, and legal contexts. The growing impoverishment of east European Jews led men and women to treat marriage as an economic arrangement. Although most commentators presented women as passive victims of these transactions, this chapter demonstrates how young Jewish women consciously navigated their uneasy economic and legal situation. By discussing various cases of alleged trafficking of Jewish women from interwar Poland, this chapter reveals how they treated both prostitution and marriage as tools to evade restrictions on migration imposed in the 1920s in places such as Argentina and the United States.

This chapter examines corporeality in the diary of Sarah Schenirer, the leader of the Beit Ya‘akov movement, which she kept from 1908 to 1913 when she was an unknown seamstress in Kraków struggling with the problems of an unhappy arranged marriage and thinking about ways to increase the involvement of Jewish women in society. Among the topics analysed are Schenirer’s relationship with her mother; her feelings about her physical appearance; how, for Jewish women, corporeality was tamed by ritual, religion, and medicine; and Schenirer’s participation in spa culture. Analysing Schenirer’s allusions to the body in her diary reveals the tensions and contradictions that were an important part of her identity and influenced her later activities, providing new insight into her complex life and leadership.

This chapter outlines the early career of Sara Ala Gołębianka, who became the principal nurse in the Warsaw ghetto and saved hundreds of lives. She started her career publishing articles in the Polish Jewish press on the role of female students in academic life and the need to educate Jewish social workers. She graduated from the Jewish hospital in Czyste and the Free Polish University. Working as a social nurse in the Warsaw magistrate’s office, she was also active in the Jewish Women’s Union. Gołębianka strove to create a national consciousness among Jewish women, fought for their rights, and defended their national, economic, and professional interests. She ran a newborn baby care course for the Jewish Women’s Union before the war and supported the training of professional Jewish maidservants.

This chapter contrasts the images of the female body in Polish Jewish literature and in the ego-documents of Polish Jewish women written between 1880 and 1918. Throughout Europe, an important shift in social perception occurred in this period, characterized by a highly sexualized representation of the female body which was also constantly watched, criticized, and perceived as mirroring the personality of the person to whom it belonged. The shift is clearly visible in the literature but not in the ego-documents; however, its impact can be traced, not least because of the authors’ immersion in a particular Polish Jewish culture. This chapter explores the commonalities of literary and non-literary texts regarding the representation of the female body and whether it matters that the authors were Jewish women.

Memory Spaces: Visualizing Identity in Jewish Women’s Graphic Narratives by Victoria Aarons (review)

How did Jewish men and women in early modern east-central Europe respond to their dreams? Some answers to this question emerge from a manuscript written by Yehuda Katz, a Jewish man from seventeenth-century Żółkiew. Writing after the Khmelnytsky uprisings of 1648, Yehuda presented his own attitudes to dreams and memorialized the dream-related practices of his mother Frieda and sister Henna. Whereas Yehuda was inspired by popular kabbalistic literature to record his dreams, Frieda and Henna observed the ‘dream-fast’, a halakhic ritual meant to neutralize bad dreams through fasting. Drawing on several sources, I argue that early modern Jews also associated the ‘dream-fast’ with penitence, relief, and even divination. Through Yehuda’s manuscript, I explore writing and fasting as two pious Jewish responses to dreams with distinctly gendered overtones.

Abstract This article explores American Jewish women's paid work abroad after World War I, focusing on representative women's employment with organizations like the Jewish Welfare Board, the National Council of Jewish Women, and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. American Jewish women, especially middle-class women, benefited from the turn-of-the-century expansion of educational opportunities, and the war also opened doors to new kinds of work in new places. Their work for Jewish organizations brought them fulfilling professional opportunities in administration, nursing, social service, and public health, work that many remained devoted to long after the war. But their feelings of connection to diasporic Jewish communities in other parts of the world added another element to their postwar work overseas and made them unique. They chose to work for Jewish organizations on behalf of Jewish people as an expression of their commitment to that solidarity. Jewishness, whether defined in religious, ethnic, cultural, or national terms, thus suffused their experiences and differentiated them from those of other Americans involved in postwar humanitarian work abroad. In working abroad for Jewish organizations, American Jewish women contributed materially to the welfare of Jews in need, transformed their own lives, and played a role in drawing the diasporic Jewish communities of the world closer together.

This study examines depression and intimate partner violence (IPV) among Israeli women during the COVID‐19 pandemic’s second wave (which took place between June and October 2020). The participants were 240 pregnant and 310 nonpregnant women of childbearing age. No statistically significant differences were found between these groups with respect to the levels of stress, depression, and IPV. Forty percent (n = 220) of participants were classified within the clinical range of depression, and two‐thirds (n = 376) reported experiencing IPV. Muslim women reported IPV at higher rates compared to Jewish women. Factors related to an elevated risk of depression included being Muslim, having lower income, being unemployed, having higher stress, and IPV. IPV mediated the stress–depression relationship. The findings emphasize the need for accessible screening tools and targeted intervention programs, particularly for minority populations.

Herminie and Fanny Pereire: Elite Jewish women in nineteenth-century France by Helen M. Davies (review)

Based on an analysis of the pogrom in Horodziej between 9 and 15 July 1920, this chapter explores how the head of the local fire brigade, Samuel Lederman, came to assume the role of unofficial leader of the community and attempted to limit anti-Jewish violence generally and the mass rape of Jewish women specifically. Initially there was a reluctance on the part of Jews to document mass rape because it was held to be shameful for the victims. However, this changed with its widespread occurrence and with the growing understanding that it had become a weapon of war. The chapter uses Bakhtin’s category of the ‘carnivalesque’, expanding it to encompass the usurped or perverted carnival of inter-ethnic violence, in order to understand Lederman’s rationale in deceiving the perpetrators of the pogrom.

Abstract Background Revenge cognitions and behaviors are common responses following intimate partner violence (IPV) victimization, yet little is known about how survivors, particularly from religious minority communities, process these responses during recovery. Objective This study investigated how Jewish women IPV survivors conceptualize and navigate revenge‐related responses in the aftermath of IPV. Method Using a descriptive phenomenological‐psychological approach, data were collected through in‐depth interviews and focus groups with 79 Jewish Canadian women (aged 24–64) who had experienced IPV. Results Thematic analysis revealed three patterns: (a) First, “revenge—between thinking, planning, and acting,” capturing retaliatory cognitions; (b) second, “silence—the ultimate revenge,” demonstrating nonengagement as empowerment as a psychological coping strategy; and (c) third, “true winning has nothing to do with revenge,” highlighting transformation toward self‐focused recovery. Although revenge thoughts were acknowledged as inherent to early healing stages, findings showed these typically evolved toward constructive healing paths when supported by culturally informed approaches. Conclusion Findings demonstrate that although revenge cognitions are common in early recovery from IPV, Jewish women survivors typically progress toward nonretaliatory coping strategies. Implications Results emphasize the importance of culturally informed therapeutic approaches that acknowledge and support this transformation process.

ABSTRACT Prior to 1948, Arab Jews were an integral part of the Arab world and its traditional and cultural fabric and played a critical role in economic and political life. Though their presence in Arabic literature was remarkably limited, their image was relatively positive. However, this changed following the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. There emerged a large corpus of literary works that deal with Jews, but this time the image was mostly negative. The main objective of this article is to explore Mahfouz's portrayal of Jewish women in three of his novels: Khan al‐Khalili, Mirrors, and Midaq Alley. The article focuses on the portrayal of Jewish women in a predominantly Muslim society and the social and Islamic bonds imposed on them. It explores how these Jewish characters function in the three texts to disturb, disrupt, or offset the then‐prevailing discourses. Though Mahfouz's Jewish female characters can be viewed as stereotypes, the present study will illustrate how Jewish women in these novels act differently, resist classism, and subvert the traditional gender roles. This is significant because it is the first time that Jewish female characters in Mahfouz's work are explored.