HJS News
UCL Festival of the Arts May 7-17
Start:
May 7, 2013 1:00:00 PM
End:
May 17, 2013 7:30:00 PM
Location:
various venues, UCL Bloomsbury Campus More...
Europe and the Holocaust - Shifts in Public Debates in Poland, Germany and the UK
The panel investigates shifts in the role of the Holocaust in European
public debates in the recent past. Contrasting developments in Poland,
Germany, and Great Britain, we will identify common threads as well as
differences in perceiving, presenting, memorizing the mass murder of
European Jewries.
More...
Graduate Student Conference: Jewish Spirituality in Eastern Europe
The Yiddish Forverts has recently published a report from the Graduate Student Conference on ‘Jewish Spirituality in Eastern Europe – a Textual Perspective,’ held at the Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies, UCL on 6-7 June, 2012. The article, authored by conference participant Adi Mahalel (Columbia University), is available online on the website of the Forverts: http://yiddish.forward.com/node/4589 More...
New publication: The Russian-Jewish Diaspora and European Culture, 1917-1937
Over a period of three years, the Hebrew and Jewish Studies Department at
UCL has been cooperating in a research project devoted to 'Cultural Continuitiy
in the Diaspora: Paris and Berlin in 1917-1937', based at the Department of
European Studies and Modern Languages, University of Bath, and in cooperation
with the Centre for European and International Studies at the University of
Portsmouth. The project had been funded by the Leverhulme Trust Academic
Collaboration-International Network scheme. Among the initiators of the project
had been the late John D. Klier. More...
International Graduate Student Conference 2012
The Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies at UCL is pleased to announce plans for an International Graduate Student Conference, devoted to explorations of multiple aspects of Jewish spirituality in Eastern Europe, to be held on 5th and 6th of June 2012 in London. The conference organizers invite graduate students and recent PhD holders to submit their proposals. We welcome presentations addressing any aspect of the religious history and religious culture of Eastern European Jewry, with an emphasis on their textual products. We are particularly interested in proposals which open up new perspectives and pose new questions regarding conceptual frameworks and traditional definitions used to describe Eastern Europe in the field of Jewish Studies. Topics may include:
More...
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Anti-Semitism in an Era of Transition. The case of Post-Communist Eastern Central Europe
Funded by the Rothschild Foundation, Europe
Antisemitism in an Era of Transition: The Case of Post-Communist Eastern
Central Europe is the culmination of a research project initiated in 2006
by the late Professor John Klier at the Department of Hebrew and Jewish
Studies. Building on earlier work led by Professor Klier into contemporary
antisemitism in Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, the Project now
continues under Dr François Guesnet. Main Investigator is Dr Gwen Jones
who joined as Postdoctoral Research Associate in January 2009, and Project
Assistant is Ms Agnieszka Oleszak, a PhD candidate in the Department. The
Project works in collaboration with the UCL School of Slavonic and East
European Studies, and is generously funded by the Rothschild Foundation,
Europe.
The Project investigates the scope and significance of antisemitic attitudes, organisations and practices in Eastern Central Europe (Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland and Hungary), by contextualising it in the broader perspective of societies in transition after the fall of Communism. Its activities comprise research, preparation of bibliographies, hosting forums for academic exchange concerning post-Communist antisemitism, and publication.
A substantial bibliography of existing scholarly literature on post-Communist antisemitism has been compiled by Aga Oleszak, while Gwen Jones is working on an annotated bibliography of republished primary antisemitic texts in Hungarian, as well as on the online culture of antisemitism.
In June 2009, the Project held a two-day international workshop, Antisemitism in an Era of Transition: The Case of Post-Communist East Central Europe, at which invited speakers from the UK, Poland, Czech Republic, Italy, Holland and the US discussed the pre-history, transformation and mediality, and ideological contexts of antisemitism in post-Communist Eastern Central Europe.
Developing lines of enquiry from the 2009 workshop, a two-day international conference, Antisemitism in Hungary and Poland: Genealogies, Transitions, Practices, Impact will take place in May 2010 as the closing event of the Project. The conference dedicates the first day to the specific genealogies of antisemitism and focuses on four crucial arenas: religious traditions, the popular press, visions of the body politic, and the Communist movement; the second day investigates the role of antisemitism in the period of transition by focusing on the image of ‘the Jew’ in the 1980s in Polish and Hungarian culture, the function of antisemitism in cultural memory, antisemitism and new media, constituencies of antisemitic ideology, and the conflation of other exclusionary visions such as anti-Roma racism and homophobia.
An edited volume of selected papers from the workshop and conference will be published to document the results of the Project.
Photo: taken in May 2009 by Fumie Suzuki in Zugló (14th district), Budapest. A campaign poster of the liberal Alliance of Free Democrats (Szabad Demokraták Szövetsége), the slogans ‘Szavazz a kirekesztés ellen!’ (Vote against exclusion!) and ‘Egy vagy, de nem vagy egyedül’ (You’re one, but you’re not alone) present the SZDSZ as the party of inclusion competing in the June 2009 European Parliamentary elections.
