Unchosen Peoplehood: Spoiled Identity, Political Extrusion, and the National Horizon of Polish Jews, 1918-1939

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 10:14:54 -0500

Start: 02/16/2012 - 4:00pm

End: 02/16/2012 - 4:00pm

The Jewish Studies Program, the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies, the Center for German Studies and the Corcoran Department of History invite you to the following event:

Unchosen Peoplehood: Spoiled Identity, Political Extrusion, and the National Horizon of Polish Jews, 1918-1939

A talk by Professor Kenneth Moss, The Johns Hopkins University

Thursday, Feb. 16, 2012

4:00 PM

Nau Hall Room 342

A reception will follow the talk.

The concept of nationhood began to undermine the terms of Jewish belonging in Eastern Europe well before 1918, but the nation as fact imposed itself in Jewish life with particular force during and after World War I, when the several million Jews of Poland, Romania, and the Baltic states found themselves redefined as a problematic and even politically and morally dangerous “national minority” in new nation-states committed first and foremost to the welfare of their titular ‘owner nation.’ Furthermore, this was the moment when Jewish nationalisms came of age as serious actors in Jewish life: Zionism above all took on far greater practical resonance and political force as a Jewish national community began to gain real institutional and social traction in British-controlled Palestine. This lecture investigates how Polish Jews of every ideological inclination, religious variety, and sociocultural hue responded (in radically different and opposing ways) to how nationalism and nationalization of life were reshaping their political horizons – the horizons of their political, material, and personal futures. It seeks to illuminate how in interwar Eastern Europe, Jewish actors of all sorts began to rethink and debate anew the terms of Jewish collective identity, the meaning of statehood and statelessness, the significance or insignificance of territory and place, the claims of family and home, and individual futurity in light of the nationalization of everyday life and one’s personal and political prospects.

Kenneth Moss is Associate Professor on the Felix Posen Chair of Modern Jewish History and Director of the Leonard and Helen R. Stulman Program in Jewish Studies at the Johns Hopkins University. His first book, Jewish Renaissance in the Russian Revolution (Harvard University Press, 2009), won the Sami Rohr Prize in Jewish Literature.

For more information, please contact Professor James Loeffler atjames [dot] loeffler [at] virginia [dot] edu ( james [dot] loeffler [at] virginia [dot] edu).

"Genocide in the Former Yugoslavia"

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 11:56:49 -0500

Start: 02/24/2012 - 10:00am

End: 02/24/2012 - 10:00am

"Genocide in the Former Yugoslavia"
A public address followed by open discussion

Dr. Marko Hoare
Kingston University, London

Friday, February 24, 2012
10am - noon
Ruffner Hall G004B
University of Virginia

Complimentary food and beverages provided.

Dr. Marko Hoare is a Reader at Kingston University specializing in the history of South East Europe, in particular of Yugoslavia, Serbia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. He is the author of The History of Bosnia: From the Middle Ages to the Present Day (Saqi, 2007); Genocide and Resistance in Hitler's Bosnia: The Partisans and the Chetniks, 1941-1943 (Oxford, 2006); and How Bosnia Armed (Saqi, 2004). He is currently working on a history of twentieth-century Serbia. Prior to his present post at Kingston University, Dr. Hoare was a Research Fellow at the Faculty of History of the University of Cambridge, a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow, a war-crimes investigator at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), and a research assistant at the Bosnian Institute in London. He is currently the Greater Europe Section Co-Director of the Henry Jackson Society, an independent think-tank promoting democratic geopolitics. He is also an advisory editor of Democratiya: The Labour Friends of Iraq Review of Books, and a member of the editorial board of Spirit of Bosnia, an international, interdisciplinary, bilingual, online journal.

Sponsored by the Page-Barbour Initiative on Forced Migration, the Center for International Studies, and the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies.

Corcoran Department of History - Events Feed

Unchosen Peoplehood: Spoiled Identity, Political Extrusion, and the National Horizon of Polish Jews, 1918-1939

"Genocide in the Former Yugoslavia"