Books by Katerina Capkova
Ed. by Kateřina Čapková and Kamil Kijek. Rutgers University Press, 2022
This volume provides new, groundbreaking views of Jewish life in various countries of the pro-Sov... more This volume provides new, groundbreaking views of Jewish life in various countries of the pro-Soviet bloc from the end of the Second World War until the collapse of Communism in late 1989. The authors, twelve leading historians and anthropologists from Europe, Israel and the United States, look at the experience of Jews under Communism by digging beyond formal state policy and instead examining the ways in which Jews creatively seized opportunities to develop and express their identities, religious and secular, even under great duress. The volume shifts the focus from Jews being objects of Communist state policy (and from anti-Jewish prejudices in Communist societies) to the agency of Jews and their creativity in Communist Europe after the Holocaust. The examination of Jewish history from a transnational vantage point challenges a dominant strand in history writing today, by showing instead the wide variety of Jewish experiences in law, traditions and institutional frameworks as conceived from one Communist country to another and even within a single country, such as Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, East Germany, and the Soviet Union. By focusing on networks across east-central Europe and beyond and on the forms of identity open to Jews in this important period, the volume begins a crucial rethinking of social and cultural life under Communist regimes.
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Prague and Beyond presents a new and accessible history of the Jews of the Bohemian Lands written... more Prague and Beyond presents a new and accessible history of the Jews of the Bohemian Lands written by an international team of scholars. It offers a multifaceted account of the Jewish people in a region that has been, over the centuries, a part of the Holy Roman Empire and the Habsburg Monarchy, was constituted as the democratic Czechoslovakia in the years following the First World War, became the Nazi Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and later a postwar Communist state, and is today's Czech Republic. This ever-changing landscape provides the backdrop for a historical reinterpretation that emphasizes the rootedness of Jews in the Bohemian Lands, the intricate variety of their social, economic, and cultural relationships, their negotiations with state power, the connections that existed among Jewish communities, and the close, if often conflictual, ties between Jews and their non-Jewish neighbors.
Prague and Beyond is written in a narrative style with a focus on several unifying themes across the periods. These include migration and mobility; the shape of social networks; religious life and education; civic rights, citizenship, and Jewish autonomy; gender and the family; popular culture; and memory and commemorative practices. Collectively these perspectives work to revise conventional understandings of Central Europe's Jewish past and present, and more fully capture the diversity and multivalence of life in the Bohemian Lands.
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Rutgers University Press, 2020
Diaries, testimonies and memoirs of the Holocaust often include at least as much on the family as... more Diaries, testimonies and memoirs of the Holocaust often include at least as much on the family as on the individual. Victims of the Nazi regime experienced oppression and made decisions embedded within families. Even after the war, sole survivors often described their losses and rebuilt their lives with a distinct focus on family. Yet this perspective is lacking in academic analyses.
In this work, scholars from the United States, Israel, and across Europe bring a variety of backgrounds and disciplines to their study of the Holocaust and its aftermath from the family perspective. Drawing on research from Belarus to Great Britain, and examining both Jewish and Romani families, they demonstrate the importance of recognizing how people continued to function within family units—broadly defined—throughout the war and afterward.
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Seit rund zwei Jahrzehnten erfreuen sich die jüdische Geschichte und Kultur der böhmischen Länder... more Seit rund zwei Jahrzehnten erfreuen sich die jüdische Geschichte und Kultur der böhmischen Länder eines wachsenden Interesses. Damit rückt der historisch multiethnische Charakter der Region verstärkt ins Zentrum der Aufmerksamkeit. Vor diesem Hintergrund ist es umso erstaunlicher, dass bislang noch keine innovative Synthese dieser Forschung vorlag. Vorliegendes Buch aus der Feder eines internationalen Autorenteams nimmt sich daher erstmals der Herausforderung an, die jüdische Erfahrung in den böhmischen Ländern als integralen und untrennbaren Bestandteil der Entwicklung Mitteleuropas vom 16. Jahrhundert bis heute zu erzählen und zu analysieren. Dabei geht es ebenso um Kontakte der jüdischen Bevölkerung mit ihren nichtjüdischen Nachbarn wie um den Blick in die Provinz, das heißt in die ländlichen Regionen und Gemeinden abseits der großen städtischen Zentren Prag, Brno und Ostrava.
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This book provides the first thorough analysis of official Czechoslovak refugee policy in the 193... more This book provides the first thorough analysis of official Czechoslovak refugee policy in the 1930s. Combining both the perspective of the state officials and the varied perspectives of the refugees themselves, it offers a rich and differentiated picture of the approach of the Czechoslovak state to refugees from Nazi Germany and Austria. It focuses primarily on the experiences of ‘ordinary’ refugees, people without connections to the Czechoslovak elite. Their voices, neglected in other research so far, considerably change the otherwise positive image of Czechoslovakia as a refuge for people fleeing Nazism. Based on many hitherto unknown archive sources from the Czech Republic, the USA, Switzerland, Germany, Israel, and Austria, the book reveals that the circumstances in which the refugees (mostly Jews) found themselves in Czechoslovakia in the 1930s was, as in other European countries, characterized mainly by the despair of the refugees and the restrictive policy of the state.
Das Buch bietet eine erste eingehende Analyse der offiziellen tschechoslowakischen Flüchtlingspolitik in den frühen 1930er-Jahren. Sie entwickelte sich unter dem außen- und innenpolitischen Druck zunehmend restriktiver. Die Perspektive der staatlichen Behörden einerseits, der verschiedenen Gruppierungen unter den Flüchtlingen andererseits, vor allem aber die Betrachtung der ganz "normalen" Flüchtlinge, die nur mit großen Schwierigkeiten überleben konnten, fügen sich zu einem differenzierten Gesamtbild. Dieses korrigiert den gängigen Mythos von der Tschechoslowakei als einem sicheren und in Europa einzigartigen Hafen für Flüchtlinge aus Deutschland und Österreich grundlegend. Die Situation der Menschen, die vor dem NS-Regime in die Tschechoslowakei geflüchtet waren, war dort nicht besser als anderswo in Europa, ähnlich restriktiv und mehrheitlich aussichtslos.
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Československo je v povědomí české i evropské veřejnosti známo jako země, která se k uprchlíkům p... more Československo je v povědomí české i evropské veřejnosti známo jako země, která se k uprchlíkům před nacismem chovala velice vstřícně. Líčení Československa jako ostrůvku svobody však vycházejí především ze vzpomínek poměrně malého počtu privilegovaných intelektuálů a politiků, kterým Československo poskytlo možnost další seberealizace. Kniha Nejisté útočiště se naopak zaměřuje na situaci řadových uprchlíků bez politických či kulturních konexí, kteří v Československu zažili především bídu i beznaděj a setkávali se s odmítavým postojem československých úřadů. Kniha však nezůstává u statického popisu a na základě rozsáhlého výzkumu v archivech České republiky, Německa, Rakouska, Švýcarska, Izraele a Spojených států amerických analyzuje i dynamiku československé politiky vůči uprchlíkům, která se - podobně jako u jiných evropských států - v průběhu třicátých let stále více vyvíjela směrem k restriktivním opatřením.
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Articles by Katerina Capkova
Adolf Ornstein, Vilma Iggersová, Karl Abeles, Sto let jedné židovské rodiny na českém venkově. Praha: Karolinum, 2022
The text is an introduction to the book of which Kateřina Čapková is the editor. The introduction... more The text is an introduction to the book of which Kateřina Čapková is the editor. The introduction discusses the migration and settlement conditions of Jews in the Bohemian countryside. It then explains the context and significance of the three different recollections in the book.
The book "One Hundred Years of a Jewish Family in the Bohemian Countryside" brings together three very different yet interconnected memoirs from three generations of one family. The first part consists of Adolf Ornstein's Czech-language memoirs of the second half of the 19th century, written at the age of 80 in the 1930s, just a few years before his deportation to Theresienstadt, where he perished. The book is published for the first time in Czech, in full text and with notes. The second part consists of the memories of the centenarian historian Vilma Iggers (born 1921) of her childhood in Horšovský Týn and its surroundings.
The third part consists of the unique correspondence of Karel Abeles from 1946-52 from Canadian exile with his former German neighbours from Mířkov, who were exiled to Bavaria after the war. This correspondence has never been published before and is in the book in an excellent translation by Petr Dvořáček. The book is accompanied by about fifty photographs from the family archive from the late 19th century to the post-war years, two family trees and indexes.
The book is a unique document of the interconnected Czech-German-Jewish relations in the Bohemian countryside, as well as a rare source in terms of language (including Yiddish expressions).
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Jewish Lives under Communism. New Perspectives, eds. Kamil Kijek, Katerina Capková, New Brunswick, N.J., , 2022
This volume provides new, groundbreaking views of Jewish life in various countries of the pro-Sov... more This volume provides new, groundbreaking views of Jewish life in various countries of the pro-Soviet bloc from the end of the Second World War until the collapse of Communism in late 1989. The authors, twelve leading historians and anthropologists from Europe, Israel and the United States, look at the experience of Jews under Communism by digging beyond formal state policy and instead examining the ways in which Jews creatively seized opportunities to develop and express their identities, religious and secular, even under great duress. The volume shifts the focus from Jews being objects of Communist state policy (and from anti-Jewish prejudices in Communist societies) to the agency of Jews and their creativity in Communist Europe after the Holocaust. The examination of Jewish history from a transnational vantage point challenges a dominant strand in history writing today, by showing instead the wide variety of Jewish experiences in law, traditions and institutional frameworks as conceived from one Communist country to another and even within a single country, such as Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, East Germany, and the Soviet Union. By focusing on networks across east-central Europe and beyond and on the forms of identity open to Jews in this important period, the volume begins a crucial rethinking of social and cultural life under Communist regimes.
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Soudobé dějiny 2019, 26(1):9-31
Článek původně vyšel v anglické verzi pod názvem "Beyond the Assimilationist Narrative: Historiog... more Článek původně vyšel v anglické verzi pod názvem "Beyond the Assimilationist Narrative: Historiography on the Jews of the Bohemian Lands and Poland after the Second World War" v polském časopise Studia Judaica, roč. 19, č. 1 (37) (2016), s. 129-155. Podle autorky (a nejen pro polskou a českou, respektive československou historiografii) platí, že zatímco koncept asimilace byl široce kritizován a zpochybněn pro starší období dějin Židů, v dílech o době po druhé světové válce tento přístup stále dominuje. V důsledku to znamená, že poválečná existence a zkušenost nábožensky založených českých a polských Židů je buď popřena, nebo marginalizována a historie Židů, často vnímaných jako monolitní sociální skupina, je zavádějícím způsobem vykládána jako příběh lineární asimilace. Děje se tak do značné míry na základě nepřípustného zobecňování situace v centru (Praze, Varšavě) na poměry v periferii. Přitom zhruba polovinu poválečných Židů v českých zemích tvořili imigranti, kteří před válkou žili na Podkarpatské Rusi nebo na východním Slovensku a kteří pak formovali nové komunity s pomocí odlišných tradic, a podobně téměř polovina poválečných Židů v Polsku žila v Dolním Slezsku, kam byli většinou repatriováni ze Sovětského svazu. Oproti asimilačnímu narativu, zatíženému nacionalismem a poplatnému oficiálnímu výkladu z dob komunistického režimu, nabízí autorka alternativy, které by respektovaly komplexnost a pluralitu lidské společnosti.
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Studia Judaica, 2016
By comparing the historiography on postwar Jewish history in the Bohemian Lands and Poland the ar... more By comparing the historiography on postwar Jewish history in the Bohemian Lands and Poland the article is an analysis of not only the differences but also, indeed especially, the similarities between the paradigms of interpretation used in interpreting the Jewish experience in the two regions. The author argues that whereas the concept of assimilation was widely criticized and rejected for the earlier periods of Jewish history, it still dominates the works on the period after the Second World War. Consequently, the existence and experience of religious Jews have either been neglected or marginalized, and the history of Jews — who are often seen as a rather monolithic group of people — is misleadingly told as a story of linear assimilation. The author suggests alternatives to those nationalist and often pro-socialist interpretations.
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Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 2018
The postwar experiences of German-speaking Jews who were forced to leave Czechoslovakia or who de... more The postwar experiences of German-speaking Jews who were forced to leave Czechoslovakia or who desperately wanted to leave Czechoslovakia intersected with multiple migrations from and across the Bohemian Lands: the well-known forced expulsions of Germans from Czechoslovakia, the “voluntary” resettlement of German-speaking Czechoslovak anti-fascists, the Zionist-organized mass migration of Jews from Eastern and Central Europe (especially Poland) to the American Zone of
Germany, and the migration of Jews from Subcarpathian Ruthenia and eastern Slovakia to the Bohemian lands. In contrast to a historiography that tends to study these migrations separately and adhere to national (and nationalist) categories, this article analyzes the entangled web of migrations and the agencies, ideologies, legal systems, and individual perspectives their intersection involved. As a result, it challenges several established interpretations of postwar Czechoslovak history, the Brichah (the underground movement dedicated to the migration of East European Jews to Palestine), and the politics of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC).
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Francoise S. Ouzan and Manfred Gerstenfeld (eds), Postwar Jewish Displacement and Rebirth 1945-1967. Leiden and Boston: Brill 2014Francoise S. Ouzan and Manfred Gerstenfeld (eds), Postwar Jewish Displacement and Rebirth 1945-1967. Brill, 2014
The article analyses the different legal positions of the Jews in postwar Poland and in Czechoslo... more The article analyses the different legal positions of the Jews in postwar Poland and in Czechoslovakia. It focuses on Jewish migrants, and argues that the different legal setting had a far-reaching impact on the post-war Jewish institutional framework, language patterns, and the construction of memory in the two neighbouring countries.
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Études Germaniques 75 (2020), 1 p. 157-170, 2020
This article does not address Kafka’s Zionist sympathies but examines how his work was influenced... more This article does not address Kafka’s Zionist sympathies but examines how his work was influenced by his Zionist friends who were members of the Praguian Bar Kochba association. Some Kafka scholars, for example, Christoph Stölzl, claim that Kafka stayed away from his friends’ Zionism because of his critical attitude towards nationalism. This article shows, on the contrary, that if Kafka distanced himself from nationalist ideas and from political Zionism, he owed it precisely to his friends.
Hugo Bergmann, Robert Weltsch and Gustav Landauer were supporters of a critical cultural Zionism regarding the situation in Palestine. Kafka’s short story “Jackals and Arabs” illustrates this assertion perfectly. The article also analyses the influence of German idealism and Masaryk’s humanism on cultural Zionists and hence on Kafka.
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Leo Baeck Institute Year Book, 2017
Historians have devoted increasing attention in the past decade to the aftermath of the Shoah, fo... more Historians have devoted increasing attention in the past decade to the aftermath of the Shoah, focusing in particular on the Displaced Persons (DP) camps in the occupation zones of Germany and Austria. A number of important studies have brought the crucial topic of migration to the fore, examining the flight of Jewish DPs and their frustration at being denied entry to their chosen destinations—mostly to Palestine, but also to the United States and elsewhere. For the most part these studies deal with Yiddish-speaking eastern European (primarily Polish) Jews who saw no future in a Europe awash with antisemitism; the overwhelming majority dreamt of joining the ranks of the Jewish state-in-the-making in Palestine. In this reading the DP camps constitute an important part both of European and Israeli history, and slot comfortably into Zionist and cold war narratives on Europe—and especially on eastern Europe—that rejected any future for Jews in post-war Europe and instead valorized Palestine as the appropriate national project.
The following articles complicate this perspective in a number of ways. Many German-speaking Jews experienced discrimination and feared violence in the post-war months and years not because they were Jewish, but rather because they were German. Some became Zionists after the war, but this did not necessarily entail a loss of emotional ties to German culture and language. Moreover, even though many eventually settled in the United States and Israel, a considerable number opted to remain in Europe. Some even settled in Germany and endeavoured to re-establish Jewish communities in the face of stinging criticism from the new centres of the Jewish world in Israel and the United States.
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Studia Judaica, 2016
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W. Borodziej and J. von Puttkamer, Immigrants and Foreigners in Central and Eastern Europe during the Twentieth Century, 2020
What became typical of Czechoslovakia was not the glory of a generous haven, but rather a high co... more What became typical of Czechoslovakia was not the glory of a generous haven, but rather a high concentration of refugees with minimal funds and absent travel documents. In sum, this all suggests that Czechoslovakia was, in fact, closer to being a typical country regarding its reluctant acceptance and treatment of refugees, where refugees who were granted entry experienced an above-average level of misery in their daily lives.
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Books by Katerina Capkova
Prague and Beyond is written in a narrative style with a focus on several unifying themes across the periods. These include migration and mobility; the shape of social networks; religious life and education; civic rights, citizenship, and Jewish autonomy; gender and the family; popular culture; and memory and commemorative practices. Collectively these perspectives work to revise conventional understandings of Central Europe's Jewish past and present, and more fully capture the diversity and multivalence of life in the Bohemian Lands.
In this work, scholars from the United States, Israel, and across Europe bring a variety of backgrounds and disciplines to their study of the Holocaust and its aftermath from the family perspective. Drawing on research from Belarus to Great Britain, and examining both Jewish and Romani families, they demonstrate the importance of recognizing how people continued to function within family units—broadly defined—throughout the war and afterward.
Das Buch bietet eine erste eingehende Analyse der offiziellen tschechoslowakischen Flüchtlingspolitik in den frühen 1930er-Jahren. Sie entwickelte sich unter dem außen- und innenpolitischen Druck zunehmend restriktiver. Die Perspektive der staatlichen Behörden einerseits, der verschiedenen Gruppierungen unter den Flüchtlingen andererseits, vor allem aber die Betrachtung der ganz "normalen" Flüchtlinge, die nur mit großen Schwierigkeiten überleben konnten, fügen sich zu einem differenzierten Gesamtbild. Dieses korrigiert den gängigen Mythos von der Tschechoslowakei als einem sicheren und in Europa einzigartigen Hafen für Flüchtlinge aus Deutschland und Österreich grundlegend. Die Situation der Menschen, die vor dem NS-Regime in die Tschechoslowakei geflüchtet waren, war dort nicht besser als anderswo in Europa, ähnlich restriktiv und mehrheitlich aussichtslos.
Articles by Katerina Capkova
The book "One Hundred Years of a Jewish Family in the Bohemian Countryside" brings together three very different yet interconnected memoirs from three generations of one family. The first part consists of Adolf Ornstein's Czech-language memoirs of the second half of the 19th century, written at the age of 80 in the 1930s, just a few years before his deportation to Theresienstadt, where he perished. The book is published for the first time in Czech, in full text and with notes. The second part consists of the memories of the centenarian historian Vilma Iggers (born 1921) of her childhood in Horšovský Týn and its surroundings.
The third part consists of the unique correspondence of Karel Abeles from 1946-52 from Canadian exile with his former German neighbours from Mířkov, who were exiled to Bavaria after the war. This correspondence has never been published before and is in the book in an excellent translation by Petr Dvořáček. The book is accompanied by about fifty photographs from the family archive from the late 19th century to the post-war years, two family trees and indexes.
The book is a unique document of the interconnected Czech-German-Jewish relations in the Bohemian countryside, as well as a rare source in terms of language (including Yiddish expressions).
Germany, and the migration of Jews from Subcarpathian Ruthenia and eastern Slovakia to the Bohemian lands. In contrast to a historiography that tends to study these migrations separately and adhere to national (and nationalist) categories, this article analyzes the entangled web of migrations and the agencies, ideologies, legal systems, and individual perspectives their intersection involved. As a result, it challenges several established interpretations of postwar Czechoslovak history, the Brichah (the underground movement dedicated to the migration of East European Jews to Palestine), and the politics of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC).
Hugo Bergmann, Robert Weltsch and Gustav Landauer were supporters of a critical cultural Zionism regarding the situation in Palestine. Kafka’s short story “Jackals and Arabs” illustrates this assertion perfectly. The article also analyses the influence of German idealism and Masaryk’s humanism on cultural Zionists and hence on Kafka.
The following articles complicate this perspective in a number of ways. Many German-speaking Jews experienced discrimination and feared violence in the post-war months and years not because they were Jewish, but rather because they were German. Some became Zionists after the war, but this did not necessarily entail a loss of emotional ties to German culture and language. Moreover, even though many eventually settled in the United States and Israel, a considerable number opted to remain in Europe. Some even settled in Germany and endeavoured to re-establish Jewish communities in the face of stinging criticism from the new centres of the Jewish world in Israel and the United States.
Prague and Beyond is written in a narrative style with a focus on several unifying themes across the periods. These include migration and mobility; the shape of social networks; religious life and education; civic rights, citizenship, and Jewish autonomy; gender and the family; popular culture; and memory and commemorative practices. Collectively these perspectives work to revise conventional understandings of Central Europe's Jewish past and present, and more fully capture the diversity and multivalence of life in the Bohemian Lands.
In this work, scholars from the United States, Israel, and across Europe bring a variety of backgrounds and disciplines to their study of the Holocaust and its aftermath from the family perspective. Drawing on research from Belarus to Great Britain, and examining both Jewish and Romani families, they demonstrate the importance of recognizing how people continued to function within family units—broadly defined—throughout the war and afterward.
Das Buch bietet eine erste eingehende Analyse der offiziellen tschechoslowakischen Flüchtlingspolitik in den frühen 1930er-Jahren. Sie entwickelte sich unter dem außen- und innenpolitischen Druck zunehmend restriktiver. Die Perspektive der staatlichen Behörden einerseits, der verschiedenen Gruppierungen unter den Flüchtlingen andererseits, vor allem aber die Betrachtung der ganz "normalen" Flüchtlinge, die nur mit großen Schwierigkeiten überleben konnten, fügen sich zu einem differenzierten Gesamtbild. Dieses korrigiert den gängigen Mythos von der Tschechoslowakei als einem sicheren und in Europa einzigartigen Hafen für Flüchtlinge aus Deutschland und Österreich grundlegend. Die Situation der Menschen, die vor dem NS-Regime in die Tschechoslowakei geflüchtet waren, war dort nicht besser als anderswo in Europa, ähnlich restriktiv und mehrheitlich aussichtslos.
The book "One Hundred Years of a Jewish Family in the Bohemian Countryside" brings together three very different yet interconnected memoirs from three generations of one family. The first part consists of Adolf Ornstein's Czech-language memoirs of the second half of the 19th century, written at the age of 80 in the 1930s, just a few years before his deportation to Theresienstadt, where he perished. The book is published for the first time in Czech, in full text and with notes. The second part consists of the memories of the centenarian historian Vilma Iggers (born 1921) of her childhood in Horšovský Týn and its surroundings.
The third part consists of the unique correspondence of Karel Abeles from 1946-52 from Canadian exile with his former German neighbours from Mířkov, who were exiled to Bavaria after the war. This correspondence has never been published before and is in the book in an excellent translation by Petr Dvořáček. The book is accompanied by about fifty photographs from the family archive from the late 19th century to the post-war years, two family trees and indexes.
The book is a unique document of the interconnected Czech-German-Jewish relations in the Bohemian countryside, as well as a rare source in terms of language (including Yiddish expressions).
Germany, and the migration of Jews from Subcarpathian Ruthenia and eastern Slovakia to the Bohemian lands. In contrast to a historiography that tends to study these migrations separately and adhere to national (and nationalist) categories, this article analyzes the entangled web of migrations and the agencies, ideologies, legal systems, and individual perspectives their intersection involved. As a result, it challenges several established interpretations of postwar Czechoslovak history, the Brichah (the underground movement dedicated to the migration of East European Jews to Palestine), and the politics of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC).
Hugo Bergmann, Robert Weltsch and Gustav Landauer were supporters of a critical cultural Zionism regarding the situation in Palestine. Kafka’s short story “Jackals and Arabs” illustrates this assertion perfectly. The article also analyses the influence of German idealism and Masaryk’s humanism on cultural Zionists and hence on Kafka.
The following articles complicate this perspective in a number of ways. Many German-speaking Jews experienced discrimination and feared violence in the post-war months and years not because they were Jewish, but rather because they were German. Some became Zionists after the war, but this did not necessarily entail a loss of emotional ties to German culture and language. Moreover, even though many eventually settled in the United States and Israel, a considerable number opted to remain in Europe. Some even settled in Germany and endeavoured to re-establish Jewish communities in the face of stinging criticism from the new centres of the Jewish world in Israel and the United States.
More recently, two decades of research on Jews in the Soviet Union has altered this paradigm. New historical, sociological, ethnographic and literary research has revealed various instances where forms of resistance or innovative reactions by individual Jews or Jewish institutions to “Jewish policies” of the state produced unintended effects. While much research on this topic is still required with regard to the different parts of USSR, there is even more work to be done regarding other countries of the post-1945 communist bloc. The goal of the conference is to inspire and to gather together scholars who are working on project with related questions and perspectives.
Conference organizers are inviting researchers from the field of Jewish history and culture under communism. The conference organizers welcome research covering all aspects of Jewish life, including everyday experience, culture in the wider context (literature, theater, film), autobiographies, etc. We ask all the conference participants to prepare papers related to the problems of Jewish agency, subjectivity, or Jewish contributions to the transformation of communist societies. We invite conference participants to focus their research on answering one or more of the following questions:
- Were there initiatives of Jewish individuals or institutions which enabled re-negotiation of the relationship between the state administration and the Jewish population despite the restricted legal setting imposed on the Jews and the society as the whole? Where can we find spaces of Jewish (relative) freedom under communism Should research on Jewish agency under communism include inquiries on Jewish participation in the security, intelligence or other such organs of the communist states? If yes, how should we approach this problem? What was the meaning of the Holocaust experience and of Holocaust memory for Jewish subjectivity and agency under post-1945 communist regimes?
- What are the examples and nature of mutual influences between the Jews and their wider social, political (ideology and praxis) or cultural surroundings in communist period? What were transnational/trans-border relations among Jewish communities in various communist states and with communities from the other side of the "Iron Curtain"?
- Can we identify any elements of continuity from the pre-communist epochs in Jewish activities, social and cultural patterns of behavior, or reactions toward the communist reality? What elements of Jewish tradition were still relevant in the new realities of communist rule and which were suppressed or re-negotiated?
- What is the significance of the "global turn" in contemporary historiography for research on Jewish history under communism? How may research on Jewish agency under communism better serve the integration of Jewish history with histories of other Eastern European communities of the same period?
We invite papers related to particular communist countries; comparative research among them; and specific case studies, local histories, or biographical research.
The goal of the conference is to discuss the above-mentioned issues and to set new directions in the study of Jewish history and culture under Communism.
For more, please see: http://www.romanihistories.usd.cas.cz/conferences/tracing-the-legacies-of-the-roma-genocide/
The experience of the Jews under the Communist régimes of east-central and eastern Europe has been a hotly debated topic of historiography since the 1950s. Until the 1980s, Cold War propaganda exerted a powerful influence on most interpretations presented in articles and books published on both sides of the ‘Iron Curtain’. Moreover, most works focused both on the relationship between the régime and the Jews living under it and on the role of the Jews in the Communist/Socialist movements and the political events connected with the rise of antisemitism and emigration.
The following topics are of particular importance for us:
1. The legal positions of the Jews of the Communist/Socialist countries of Europe and the institutional opportunities for the Jews there (including religious, cultural, educational, and charitable institutions).
2. The ways of preserving and developing ‘Jewishness’ under the Communist regimes, within and outside the official organizations, in private and in public.
3. Family and gender aspects of Jewish life under Communism.
4. Networks across the ‘Iron Curtain’ and across the state borders in the ‘Soviet bloc’.
5. Yiddish culture and education under the Communist régimes.
See also conference reports:
https://www.academia.edu/15803564/Conference_Report_Czech-Jewish_and_Polish-Jewish_Studies_Dis_Similarities
http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl?trx=vx&list=H-Soz-u-Kult&month=1504&week=b&msg=aVSke/d4u3u9rU//veKEWA&user=&pw=
Applying gender analysis to the field of Holocaust Studies has yielded important results. Whereas before the 1990s, most Holocaust scholarship focused almost exclusively on the experiences of male victims, expanding to include women’s experiences has both opened up new areas of inquiry and raised crucial questions about established areas. And yet this developing scholarly conversation has limitations as well. As Joan Ringelheim, an early adopter, pointed out in her later work, scholarship about women during the Holocaust easily becomes essentializing; at times even suggesting that women were somehow more capable of facing the Nazi onslaught. More recently Pascale Rachel Bos has argued that many of the perceived differences between the experiences of men and women may have more to do with the way the different genders were taught to express themselves than with actual differences. Even more fundamentally, however, examining the Holocaust and its aftermath through the lens of gender requires breaking up the Jewish or Roma family.
Published: 03 February 2020
The experience of the Roma and Sinti during World War II is still a neglected topic, although the consequences of the wartime genocide and persecution are still felt by Roma communities today. Moreover, even in the few publications about the Roma and Sinti Holocaust, the perspective taken from documents written during the war by the state administration and police forces often prevails. On the contrary, the key idea of our project is to convey to the widest possible readership the testimony of the Roma and Sinti themselves and thus their personal and irreplaceable experience of the Second World War. We hope that the Testimonies of Roma and Sinti project will contribute to greater awareness of their genocide and will be an irreplaceable source of information for researchers, relatives of the victims, or anyone else interested in this important topic.
English version: www.romatestimonies.com
Czech version: www.svedectviromu.cz
philological, religious studies or interdisciplinary projects, especially focusing on older and modern Jewish history and culture. We offer support and grants for PhD candidates, internationally-run programme and opportunities for research and study in the region.
Please contact our doctoral programme director, dr. Pavel Sládek
(pavel.sladek@ff.cuni.cz), to consult your research proposals. The deadline for applications is 5 September 2021.
In case of your interest in a topic from modern Jewish history, you may consult dr. Katerina Capkova (capkova@usd.cas.cz)
Here the link - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2U29A9-baQo