Aleksandra Jakubczak-Gabay
She, her, hers
Columbia University
Aleksandra Jakubczak is a historian specializing in the social and economic history of Eastern European Jewry in the modern period. She is a chief historian at the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews and a research fellow at the Historical Institute of the Polish Academy of Sciences. She received her Ph.D. in Jewish History at Columbia University in New York in 2023 for her doctoral dissertation, entitled (Sex)Worker, Migrant, Daughter: The Jewish Economics of Sex Work and Mobility, between 1870 and 1939, which looked at Jewish women selling and organizing sex to examine how Eastern European Jewish women experienced urbanization, industrialization, and mass migration. Her Polish-language monograph, entitled Poles, Jews and the Myth of Trafficking (2020) was shortlisted for the Schmeruk and Gierowski’s Prize for the best book in Polish Jewish Studies. Her research has been supported by numerous institutions, among others, the Center for Jewish History, the American Academy for Jewish Research, the Polish Academy of Sciences, the Israeli Council for Higher Education, and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.