Organized by Institute of Contemporary History (Czech Academy of Sciences), Masaryk Institute and Archives (Czech Academy of Sciences) and the Prague Center for Jewish Studies at the Charles University
Return Home: Holocaust Survivors Reestablishing Lives in Postwar Vienna
12 November 2019 - 5:30 PM
Elizabeth Anthony (US Holocaust Memorial Museum) Of the pre-Anschluss total of more than 200,000 Austrian Jews – both self-identified and those categorized as such by National Socialist “racial” policy – more than...
Refugee Camps in Bohemia and Moravia during WWI
22 October 2019 - 5:30 PM
Alena Jindrová (Muzeum Vysočiny Havlíčkův Brod) During WWI, refugees came mainly to the central parts of monarchy – Bohemia, Moravia and Austrian lands (Carinthia, Carniola, Lower Austria, Higher Austria). As the...
The Afterlife of Yizker bikher in Contemporary Jewish Writing
1 October 2019 - 5:30 PM
Marianne Windsperger (Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies) In my PhD dissertation project on “Revisiting and Retelling the Shtetl: Narratives of Searching for Traces in American Jewish Writing” I devote...
How Yiddish Writers Became Yiddish Writers
14 May 2019 - 5:30 PM
Carmen Reichert (Augsburg University) Narrations on the Choice of Yiddish in Autobiographical Writings after Peretz It should come as no surprise that literary autobiographies essentially tell us how writers became...
Subversive Conformism? Youth Culture, Jews and Rock’n’roll in 1960s‘ Poland
30 April 2019 - 5:30 PM
Marcos Silber (University in Haifa) March 1968 was a short but important period in recent Polish history. That year, it seemed, almost the whole world was experiencing a cultural revolution provoked by the youth. Unlike...
Who Will Edit Our History, or Challenges of Editing Holocaust Sources. The Case of Emanuel Ringelblum’s Ghetto Notes
2 April 2019 - 5:30 PM
Joanna Nalewajko-Kulikov (Tadeusz Manteuffel Institute of History, Polish Academy of Sciences) In September 1939 a Polish-Jewish historian, teacher and social activist Emanuel Ringelblum (1900–1944) began taking notes...
Becoming Refugees, Becoming Survivors? Reframing Jewish Children’s Experiences in Transnational, longue durée Perspective
5 March 2019 - 5:30 PM
Laura Hobson Faure (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3) Since the 1990s, historians have sought to incorporate Jewish children’s experiences into the historiography on the Holocaust (Dwork, 1991, Stargardt, 2006),...
The seminar is intended to provide a platform for academic discussion about the latest research on Jewish history especially of the last three centuries. Though primarily focused on the Jews of central and east central Europe, the seminar also includes topics related to the Jews of other regions. The seminar is further enriched by including topics not directly concerned with Jews, but enabling one to see Jewish history from other perspectives (for instance, the perspective of other marginalized communities).
Despite our preference for the methods of historical research, the organizers welcome multidisciplinary approaches to the topics, including those of sociology, political science, religious studies, and art history.
During the pandemic the seminar is taking place only virtually as a zoom session. The language of the seminar is English. The seminar is organized by Kateřina Čapková (Institute of Contemporary History), and Michal Frankl (Masaryk Institute and Archive). Since 2018/2019, they cooperate with the Prague Center for Jewish Studies at the Charles University. Your suggestions of speakers should be sent to either capkova@usd.cas.cz or frankl@mua.cas.cz.