Biographies and Politics: Involvement of Jews and Activists of Jewish Origin in Leftist Movements in 19th and 20th Century Poland

We would like to invite you to propose papers for the international conference:

Biographies and Politics: Involvement of Jews and Activists of Jewish Origin in Leftist Movements in 19th- and 20th- Century Poland.

The conference is jointly organised by the POLIN Museum and the Aleksander Brückner Center for Polish Studies, the Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies of the University of Oxford, and the University College London.

The aim of the conference is to outline the actual involvement of Jews and activists of Jewish origin in the leftist movements of the 19th and 20th centuries from the perspective of individual motivations, ideological choices and personal biographies.

For more detailed CFP please see: https://www.polin.pl/en/biographies-and-politics-conference

We especially invite scholars focusing on biographical research on Jews and activists of Jewish origin in leftist movements in 19th and 20th century Poland.

Possible questions to be addressed might be:

• Was being Jewish an important factor in choosing a specific political path?
• Which other factors led Jews and people of Jewish origin to affiliate with a particular political group?
• How did their leftist involvement influence their attitude towards imperial settings, occupying powers, internationalist movements, as well as Poland and Polish identity?
• How did they assess their leftist engagement later in their lives?

Proposed issues:

• Biographies: individual and collective paths of Jewish leftists, circumstances of social and political involvement in leftist movements and organizations, self-perceptions, alternatives to leftist engagement, entangled ideologies (e.g. leftists Zionists), generational transmission of ideologies;
• Methodologies: biographical approach, gender history, oral history, and others;
• Ideologies: attractive leftists ideas for Polish Jews (socialism, communism, labour Zionism etc.);
• Historical culture and politics of history: Perceptions and instrumentalizations of “Jewish” leftist biographies.

The deadline for submitting the proposals is 31 May 2019.

The conference is organised within the Global Education Outreach Program.

The conference was made possible thanks to the support of Taube Philanthropies, the William K. Bowes, Jr. Foundation, and the Association of the Jewish Historical Institute of Poland.

Contact Info:

geopconference@polin.pl

https://www.polin.pl/en/biographies-and-politics-conference

Conference – Call for Papers

Visual Antisemitism in Central Europe from the Middle Ages to the Present Day

The Institute of Art History of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic

Deadline: 31 May 2018

The Institute of Art History of the Czech Academy of Sciences is organising an international conference devoted to the question of visual antisemitism. Papers examining the theme of visual antisemitism in Central Europe from the Middle Ages to the present day are particularly welcome. The Institute of Art History thereby call on all those interested in taking an active part in the conference to send an outline of their presentation (the title of the paper and a brief summary) to the following address by 31 May 2018 at the latest: janacova@udu.cas.cz

“Odessa, Cosmopolitanism, Modernism”

A research workshop of the Israel Science Foundation

28 June – 3 July 2020

Call for papers

Feldman building, Givat Ram Campus, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Keynote speakers: Steven J. Zipperstein (Stanford University); Israel Bartal (Hebrew University of Jerusalem); Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern (Northwestern University)

Odessa was, in the first half of the nineteenth-century, a new boom town on the Black Sea, on the periphery of the Russian empire, but was home to French, Turks, Greeks, Italians and other foreigners and looked eastwards to the Levant and the Mediterranean, which facilitated both commercial and cultural exchange across the Black Sea. In 1897 Jews made up a third of the population of the city and constituted a growing large minority that was increasingly Russian-speaking and acculturated but, for all its internal heterogeneity, was also conscious of ethnic difference. Odessa, which was experiencing a downturn in its economic fortunes by the end of the nineteenth century, was also one of the first Russian cities to welcome modernity—the telegraph, steamships, motor cars, aviation, and the early cinema, to give just a few examples. The city saw an inflow of Ukrainian laborers, but a Ukrainian cultural presence was felt only later. The imperial Russian intellectual elite, itself diverse in origin and ideological allegiances, notwithstanding anti-Semitism and xenophobia, shared several cultural spaces with Jews and other minorities in literary clubs, the theater, cafes, or literary magazines and newspapers, not to mention publishing houses and poetry readings. While in the heyday of modernism in the early twentieth century it seems to have been impossible to divide off ethnic spaces, we nevertheless observe the emergence of specifically Jewish cultural spheres, constituted by particular spatial practices. Odessa was the cradle of modern Hebrew literature, but also boasted a vibrant Yiddish culture (though hardly comparable with Lvov or Warsaw). Modernization blurred traditional ethnic and religious differences, replacing them with new alignments and divisions, which need to be understood in their concrete spatial, urban context. The difficulty in defining Jewish culture in the modern period is not eased by the old divisions of history into “Jewish” and “non-Jewish” which ignore not only the contacts between Jews and non-Jews, but also the fact that Jews and non-Jews shared social and cultural spaces and were part of an ethnic mix that faced modernity in similar and different ways.

This international workshop is the first to bring together anthropologists, historians, cultural studies scholars, literary specialists and musicologists to discuss the theoretical and practical aspects of Odessa’s unique cosmopolitan network before the Russian Revolution and in its immediate aftermath. The workshop aims to set up a new paradigm for understanding cosmopolitanism in the urban centers of the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires, as well as in east European Jewish history, and other multiethnic societies. It will cover a range of interdisciplinary approaches to inter-ethnic and trans-cultural relations with a particular focus on the unique cosmopolitan networks in Odessa in the period 1895-1925. Among the topics to be discussed will be

• Black Sea as cultural and commercial exchange
• inter-ethnic co-existence and violence
• cosmopolitanism in theory and practice
• immigration and cultural identity
• Jewish urban politics
• Ethnic composition in crime and political movements
• modernist art and literature
• Odessa music and song
• periphery and center
• Odessa/Odesa and the Ukraine
• Russian culture and ethnic identities
• languages in contact and fusion: the case of Odessa Russian
• Odessa as a Hebrew cultural center
• political and cultural uses of the “Odessa myth”

We hope to publish selected papers as chapters in a book.

Send abstracts of 500 words with a brief biographical sketch or CV as a word.doc attachment in English by 30 June 2019 to Mirja Lecke (mirja.lecke@rub.de) and Efraim Sicher (sicher@bgu.ac.il)

International academic board

Guido Hausmann, Universität Regensburg, Germany

Brian Horowitz, Tulane University, USA

Mirja Lecke, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany

Efraim Sicher, Ben-Gurion University, Israel

Vera Skvirskaja, Copenhagen University, Denmark

Local organizing committee

Efraim Sicher, Ben-Gurion University (chair)

Sveta Natkovich, Haifa University

Scott Ury, Tel Aviv University

Irena Vladimirsky, Achva College

Semion Goldin, Hebrew University

CALL FOR PAPERS:

QUOTAS IN HIGHER EDUCATION: HISTORIES AND CONTROVERSIES

Budapest, May 18-20, 2020

Organized by the Nationalism Studies Program and Jewish Studies Program at Central European University (Budapest/Vienna) and the Tom Lantos Institute (Budapest)

In 1920, the Hungarian parliament introduced an anti-Jewish quota for admission to universities, thus making Hungary the first country in Europe to pass antisemitic legislation in the post-World War I period. On the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of the so-called “numerus clausus law,” we are organizing an international conference to examine the history of restrictive ethnic and racial quotas in the first half of the twentieth century and the emergence of affirmative quotas some decades later. The three-day conference will be divided into three sections. The first will examine the Hungarian context of the “numerus clausus law.” The second will examine explicit and “hidden” ethnic quotas as well as other restrictive policies on both sides of the Atlantic in the interwar period. The third will examine the reappearance of quota policies in the 1960s, often with the opposite purpose of encouraging greater participation of ethnic and racial minorities (and at times majorities) in higher education.

The conference aims to explore the ideologies of quota regimes and the ways they have been justified, implemented, challenged and remembered. We invite paper proposals on the historical origins of quotas; the moral, legal and political arguments developed by their supporters and opponents; the domestic and international debates surrounding anti-minority and pro-minority quotas; and the consequences – both intended and unintended – of their implementation. We are particularly interested in the role played by the Hungarian “numerus clausus,” not only as a model for other restrictive quotas, but also as a touchstone in the larger debates about liberalism, the “Jewish Question,” and the “Refugee Question” in the interwar period.

We are also interested in the contemporary debates about quotas, especially with regard to “affirmative action” and “positive discrimination” at institutions of higher learning. Today, arguments for and against affirmative action sometimes echo earlier arguments about quotas, and these continuities merit further examination. We welcome papers that attempt to compare quota systems synchronically and/or diachronically, especially across national borders.

Please submit a paper abstract (300 words) and a one-paragraph bio to kissp@ceu.edu by 15 May 2019. We intend to publish the papers in a peer-reviewed conference volume.

The conference will take place on May 18-20, 2020, at Central European University in Budapest, Hungary.

Rural and Urban Jewries Between Tradition and Modernity.

International Junior Scholars Workshop

University of Bamberg

27-29 July 2020

Call for Papers

The dichotomy of ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’ characterizes our image of Jewish history and culture to this day. The dualism of “land equals stagnation” and “city equals modernization” is a common schol-arly pattern that needs to be questioned. The relationship between city and countryside has mostly been seen as a one-way street and as an “either/or,” either city or country. This raises the question: is this dichotomy tenable in light of newer research on transformation processes? Such a stark contrast obscures important questions: What happened in-between city and countryside and in movements that headed in both directions? How are categories like “city” and “countryside” complicated by connections and trans-fers of persons, texts, objects, ideas, and institutions?

This interdisciplinary workshop therefore focuses on the phenomenon of rural Jewries in their relation-ships to urban ones, and is not limited to any given historical period. The focus is on Central Europe (esp. the German-speaking areas), Eastern (Central) Europe, as well as North America. These regions are entangled not least by Jewish migrations in the context of tradition and modernization; they also suggest different responses to the core questions of the workshop.

The following questions shall be discussed at the workshop: Are rural and urban Jewries today still considered as set categories in research? When and where have rural Jews been agents of modernization, and when and where did such impulses come from and urban Jews? The interaction of the different milieus of the rural population with each other as well as that of the country with the city and vice versa should be included.

Potential topics to discuss at the workshop are:

• Discussion of the categories of tradition, modernity, and modernization? With a focus on Jewish life worlds in the city and the country

• Country Jew/City Jew? On a problematic typology

• How did movements from city to the countryside and vice versa look like in different regions from pre-modern times to modern times?

• The role of border crossers between country and city

• Rural and urban Jewries in a transnational comparison

• Interactions among religious and ethnic groups in rural areas

• Interactions between country and city by knowledge transfer, economics, internal migration and trans-national migration

• Popular images of urban and rural Jews and Jewries in literature, theater and film

We invite interested junior scholars of all disciplines to submit proposals by 15 April 2019 for 20-minute papers. Senior scholars will serve as chairs and respondents. Languages at the workshop will be German and English. Pending successful grant applications, travel costs and hotel accommodations will be covered by the organizers. The workshop is sponsored by the German Association for Jewish Studies (Vereinigung für Jüdische Studien). Please send a proposal of up to 400 words and a CV (max. 2 pages) to nachwuchstagungjudaistik@gmail.com

Workshop Organizers: Rebekka Denz, University of Bamberg, Markus Krah, University of Pots-dam, Carsten Schapkow, University of Oklahoma