Position of the Jewish Community in Post-Communist Countries of Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe

Syllabus

1) Monday 3rd December, 15:50-17:20, room 313: De-Fiddler-on-the-Roof-ization: Rejoining the living narrative

2) Wednesday, 5th December, 9:10-10:40, room 313: Return to Europe? Jewish community revival, Klezmer, and tourism

3) Wednesday, 5th December, 17:30-19:00, room 313: The Jewish 1990s v. Resurgent antisemitism

4) Thursday, 6th December, 17:30-19:00, room 313: Emigration: Who goes where?

5) Monday 10th December, 15:50-17:20, room 313: When did you first learn that you are Jewish?

6) Wednesday, 12th December, 9:10-10:40, room 313: Opening Pandora’s Box: Institutional and Individual Jewish identities

7) Wednesday, 12th December, 17:30-19:00, room 313: Living in the house of the dead

8) Thursday, 13th December, 17:30-19:00, room 313: Sites of Memory, Sites of Preservation

9) Monday 17th December, 15:50-17:20, room 313: Fragmented memory

10) Wednesday, 19th December, 9:10-10:40, room 313: Documentation work and the digital diaspora

11) Wednesday, 19th December, 17:30-19:00, room 313: Neighbors

12) Thursday, 20th December, 17:30-19:00, room 313: Assault on Holocaust History

Annotation

This year marks the 30th anniversary of the Communist regimes in Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe. How have the changes affected Jews and Jewish communities in the region? How has the experience of the Holocaust, Communism, and Post-Communism shaped Jewish relations with the Jewish world, between Jews and non-Jews, and with the state? What has the re-emergence of European Jewry meant for the development of Jewish identities globally? This course explores these questions through three dominant frames: 1) the return to Europe and the “Jewish 1990s” (Zpět do Evropy!), Post-Communist Jewish identities, or when did you first learn that you are Jewish? and 3) Memory work. Students will come away with a deepened understanding of the ruptures and continuities that have shaped contemporary Jewish individual and collective identities, of memory processes, heritage, commemoration, and preservation, and the far-reaching implications of the political changes of 1989 in Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe. We will use primary and secondary literature, fiction, memoirs, film, and other media, and local sites in our exploration. Each course session will contain two parts: a 45 minute lecture and a 45 minute seminar. *Bonus: taught by a relic of the Jewish 1990s.

The course will be led by prof. Rebekah Klein-Pejšová who received her Ph.D. in History from Columbia University in 2007, and her M.A. from the Central European University in 1996. Her research focuses on transnational approaches to Modern Jewish and east central European History. Her first book, Mapping Jewish Loyalties in Interwar Slovakia (Indiana University Press, 2015), investigates Jewish political reorientation within the borders of a radically remapped post-World War One East Central Europe. Focusing on the contested territory of Slovakia, formerly the northern counties of prewar Hungary, she shows how Jews faced the challenge of recasting themselves as loyal citizens of Czechoslovakia and proving they had done so. The book traces how the interwar state saw and understood minority loyalty and underscores how loyalty preceded identity in the redrawn map of east central Europe.

Her current book project, with the working title Across the Iron Curtain, examines the efforts of Jews remaining inside Cold War era Hungary and Czechoslovakia to maintain contact with Jews outside of it and their implications for postwar Jewish/state relations. Professor Klein-Pejšová is also a contributing author to Europe on the Move: the Great War and the Refugees, 1914-1918 (under contract) with her chapter, “Between Refugees and the State: Hungarian Jews and Wartime Jewish Refugee Crisis in Austria-Hungary.”

Her work has been published in a number of leading journals, including the Association of Jewish Studies Review, Shofar, and Austrian History Yearbook. Her scholarship has been supported by the ACLS, FLAS, the Slovak Academy of Sciences, Columbia University's East Central Europe Center and Harriman Institute, Center for Historical Social Sciences, Center for Israel and Jewish Studies, and Purdue’s Library Scholars Grant. Professor Klein-Pejšová course rotation includes the Global History Survey, Jews in the Modern World, Nationalism and Socialism in East Central Europe, History of Human Rights, Holocaust and Genocide, and Beyond Borders.