La Belle Juive (The Beautiful Jewess) – Four Women Who Challenged Norms and Shaped Modernity

The concept of La Belle Juive, the beautiful Jewess, originated in medieval literature and visual art, evolving into a complex archetype that, by the late 19th and early 20th centuries, became entangled with modern antisemitic tropes in European culture. These portrayals often depicted Jewish women as exotic, noble, and intelligent, yet simultaneously seductive, subversive, and threatening to Western norms. In this series, we will explore the lives of four extraordinary and creative women from this period, each with European connections, who challenged societal expectations and helped shape the modern era, whether Jewish, Jew-ish, or deeply intertwined with Jewish identity. Through their artistic output and personal experiences, we will examine how their lives serve as a lens to explore urgent political and cultural questions
Session 1 – Emma Lazarus, “The Jewess Who Ruined the US” – ‘Give me your tired, your poor… Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…’ These words emblazoned on the Statue of Liberty and quoted constantly when discussing America’s policies on immigration, are from a poem by Jewish writer Emma Lazarus: “The New Colossus”. Together, we’ll trace the poem’s journey from being considered subversive to acclaimed by the mainstream and attacked by the alt-right, exploring how Jewish culture can contribute to political commentary. To help us, we’ll look at the history of The Statue of Liberty and how Lazarus’s words came to be put on its pedestal. We’ll think about her life and her other writing in order to unpeel the layers of the poem’s meaning and Lazarus’ intentions.
Session 2 – The ‘Divine’ – and Divinely Jewish – Sarah Bernhardt – At the same time Jew-hatred was at its height in France as a result of the Dreyfus affair, the most popular French celebrity was a Jewish woman. Dubbed ‘The Divine Sarah’ by her fans, French actress Sarah Bernhardt became an international star of stage and screen, as famous for her excess and eccentricities as for her acting. In this talk we will explore her early life and the development of her career, consider the ways she was viewed by her contemporaries and think about the meaning behind her public declaration,  in the face of intense antisemitism, that “I am a daughter of the great Jewish race.”
Session 3 – Claude Cahun – Surrealist Artist and Resistance Heroine – Did you know that David Bowie’s favourite artist was the Jewish Claude Cahun, a surrealist who experimented with the meaning of gender through androgynous self-portraiture, becoming a darling of the modernist movement in 1920s and 1930s Paris?  We’ll trace the remarkable life story of this performance artist, who was born into an intellectual Jewish family in Nantes in 1894 and escaped to the Channel Islands, a British crown dependency occupied by the Germans in World War II.  There she became an active anti-Nazi resistance worker during the 1940s alongside her partner, Marcel Moore, surviving despite being sentenced to death.
Session 4 – Who’s afraid of Virginia (and Leonard) Woolf? – Author of groundbreaking novels such as Mrs Dalloway, Orlando and To the Lighthouse, member of the Bloomsbury Group, feminist heroine, writer of hauntingly beautiful letters, there are many reasons Virginia Woolf is one of the most lauded literary figures of the 20th century. But how do we think about her from a Jewish perspective? “I do not like the Jewish voice,” Virginia Stephens wrote in her diary, yet she loved Leonard Woolf, ‘my Jew’, enough to marry him despite the prejudice of her contemporaries. Known for her casual antisemitism, she had close Jewish friends and, after visiting Nazi Germany, published an indictment of 1930s fascism. So should we fear, or admire, Virginia Woolf?
Dr. Aviva Dautch is the Executive Director of Jewish Renaissance, the United Kingdom’s quarterly Jewish arts magazine and the leading English-language Jewish cultural publication in Europe. She is an academic in the field of Jewish literature.  Her PhD received the Royal Holloway’s Reid Scholarship and a research award from Brandeis University.  She is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. During the academic year 2025-2026, Aviva will be the first ever Scholar-in-Residence for the University of Oxford’s Vera Fine Grodzinski Jewish Women’s Voices program at the Oxford Centre for Life Writing. Aviva frequently lectures on modern Jewish culture at the London School of Jewish Studies, JW3 Community Centre and Limmud. She has worked as a curator, producer and educator for many of the major London arts institutions, including the British Library, the British Museum, Bethlem Museum of the Mind, The Royal Academy and Tate Modern. Aviva is also an award-winning poet and a regular arts broadcaster for BBC Radio 4.
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