Parkes Talks! The Making of “Jew Clubs”: Performing Jewishness and Antisemitism in European Football and Fan Cultures (Pavel Brunssen) Tuesday 29 September 6pm BST

Parkes Talks!
Lectures & Seminars — Semester 1, 2026–27

Tuesday 29 September, 6pm BST | 18:00 | Online | Book now

Why do non-Jewish football fans chant “Yid Army” or wave “Super Jews” banners—especially in support of clubs that are not Jewish? The Making of “Jew Clubs” explores how four major European football clubs—FC Bayern Munich, FK Austria Wien, Ajax Amsterdam, and Tottenham Hotspur—came to be associated with Jewish identities despite never officially identifying as Jewish.

Drawing on archival research, fan culture, media representations, and club histories, Pavel Brunssen examines how Jewishness, antisemitism, and philosemitism have been performed and negotiated in European football over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The talk argues that football stadiums have become unexpected sites where questions of memory, identity, and the legacy of the Holocaust are publicly contested, offering new perspectives on the intersections of sport, history, and Jewish studies.

Tuesday 13 October, 6pm BST | 18:00 | On Campus and Online | Book now

Nearly 90 years after the November 1938 pogrom, knowledge of the persecution of the Jews and the horrors of the Holocaust have become essential learning across the globe. I would hope is also a growing understanding of what it was like to be a refugee – but it is not clear this knowledge has led to more compassionate action. The current rhetoric would suggest our understanding of the horrors of the past no longer carry resonance.

My talk today focuses on one cohort of refugees, those young women who fled Nazi Europe and entered the nursing profession here in Britain. Very little has been written about these women, yet nursing was seen by many of them as a valuable career choice and several became leaders of the profession in the latter decades of the twentieth century. I consider the refugees entry into the profession, the frequent antagonism towards their recruitment by hospitals at a time of severe nursing shortages and their resilience in the face of anti-refugee attitudes and antisemitism. Whilst not conflating the past with the present, I hope my research illuminates the essentiality of migrant labour and the need for empathetic policies.

Tuesday 27 October, 6pm GMT | 18:00 | On Campus and Online | Book now

This talk will explore the history of the Jewish Council for Racial Equality (JCORE), founded by Edie Friedman in Leeds in 1976. JCORE was for many years the primary, if not only, British Jewish campaigning for social justice, migrant rights and anti-racism. In 2022 it merged with the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society to form HIAS+JCORE, under the leadership of Rabbi David Mason. In 2026 HIAS+JCORE and the Parkes Institute published Joseph Finlay’s book Not Only for Ourselves, a story of the council from its founding to the merger, and the book will form the basis of this talk. It will discuss JCORE in the context of Jewish engagement with anti-racism and immigration campaigning in Britain more generally, focusing particularly on JCORE’s Black-Jewish Forum of the 1990s and 2002. Questions considered will include: how and when did Jews involve themselves in this work? Who were their primary partners? What were the challenges they faced? How were antisemitism and racism considered, as separate or connected? Why was it sometimes easier for British Jews to campaign on immigration reform rather than on anti-racism?

Tuesday 10 November, 6pm GMT | 18:00 | On Campus and Online | Book now

Using oral histories of Jewish-Catholic couples who survived the Holocaust in occupied Poland, this talk examines what conjugal mixedness reveals about Nazi necropolitics and how it can help us develop a more coherent framework for understanding the experiences of Jews and non-Jews under Nazi occupation. It advances three main arguments: (1) Viewed through the lived experiences of mixed couples, the persecution of Jews and non-Jews can be understood as part of as part of the same necropolitical power framework, determining differential exposure to death of its subjects; (2) Conjugal mixedness illuminates the inconsistencies and contingencies of Nazi necropolitics and their implications for survival; and (3) The study of mixedness complicates the binary distinction between rescuer and rescued, while enriching our understanding of agency among victims of genocide. These claims will be discussed in relation to the archival material from Visual History Archive and other collections.

Tuesday 24 November, 6pm GMT | 18:00 | On Campus and Online | Book now

Robert Vas (1931-1978) is one of the great forgotten directors of British television documentary. Across twenty years he made over thirty films which covered topics from Laurel and Hardy to Alexander Korda, Hiroshima to Thomas Edison. Born into a Jewish family in Hungary he came to the UK after the Hungarian uprising in 1956, gaining his reputation for two important and relatively well-known short films Refuge England (1958) and The Vanishing Street (1962). But the majority of his films have never been commercially released.

Across 2026 I have been working with colleagues Eleni Liarou (Birkbeck) and John Wyver (Westminster) on drawing attention to Vas and his work. This talk will be an expanded version of a paper given at the symposium on Vas we held at Birkbeck earlier this year. Its focus will be The Issue Should Be Avoided (1971) Vas’s ‘documentary investigation’ into the Katyn Massacre of the early 1940s. At the heart of the film is a tribunal formed of men whose testimony evidences the crimes of thirty years before. ‘These men,’ to quote from Vas’s script, ‘are not survivors or eye-witnesses, but actors.’ The setting is not Katyn but Black Park, Bucks. This complicated form of representation will be discussed with reference to the surviving production files and contemporary reviews.

Tuesday 8 December, 6pm GMT | 18:00 | On Campus and Online | Book now

Charles Causley (1917-2003), a well-known and well-loved figure in modern English poetry, is often stereotyped as a ‘leading Christian poet’. Recent research, however, reveals unexpected patterns of connections with, and insights into, Judaism, Jewish life and culture. These include: unsettling events pre-1939 and during his wartime service in the Royal Navy; mentoring emerging Jewish poets like Karen Gershon, Fay Zwicky and Norman Levine; and influences from the Old Testament and Martin Buber.

Eventually, Causley was occasionally invited as a guest to services, communal events and family occasions in the nearby Jewish community around Exeter. His Launceston home still contains key objects reflecting many of these facets. In this talk, Causley’s growing awareness and understanding of the Jewish world and experience emerges through archival material from Exeter University and elsewhere, illuminating key moments. It culminates with his poem ‘Seder’ an outsider’s powerful and sensitive reflection on the nature and rituals of that ceremony, linking them with Jewish life over millennia, most especially in his own lifetime.