Kyra Gerber MA

PhD Candidate

Cohort/Start PhD: 2025-2026

Duitsland Instituut Amsterdam (DIA, German Institute Amsterdam), University of Amsterdam – hosted by ASH, Amsterdam School of Humanities, Faculty of Humanities
Contract period: September 2025 – August 2029

Supervisors: Prof. Irene Zwiep, Prof. Bart Wallet, Dr. Krijn Thijs

Wie er eigentlich gewesen ist – Jewish Masculinities in the 19th Century in Germany and the Netherlands

This project examines how German and Dutch male Jews were confronted with social male expectations and how they were, in the terms of Foucault, ‘disciplined’ by school and society to fulfil and perform their role ‘as men’. I will focus on male Jews, because no systematic study has been published on European Jewish masculinities. German-Jewish bourgeois femininity has been covered by Paula Hyman and Marion Kaplan’s monograph.

But why Jews? I believe that to understand European history, one cannot neglect the dialogue between the Jews and their gentile surroundings. The proposed project asks not what ‘Jewish masculinity’ was but how it was shaped in dialogue with contemporary gentile male iconographies, often both embracing and rejecting them.

By combining gender studies with age studies and privacy studies, my research will follow an interdisciplinary approach. Age differentiation, implying different norms and social expectations, will serve as the connecting thread. Privacy studies are used to analyse the tensions between private and public displays of Judaism and Jewishness, and to test the enlightened adage of ‘a secular man in public, a Jewish man in private’, an assumption often carried forward in academic literature. It also researches how contemporary gentile gender roles came into play as (positive or negative) points of reference. By combining these parameters, the project strives to problematize stereotypes that are carried forward in both academic literature and general discourse (e.g. ‘the feminized Jew’, ‘the hypersexual Jew’, ‘Muskeljuden’, ‘the disembodied Jew’, the ‘peddler’, ‘the parasite’) and offer a layered emic perspective on Jewish masculinities in the age of emancipation.