Vanishing Diaspora? Ruin, Revival, and Jewish Life in Post-Holocaust Europe

Catalog description

This course explores the lives and fates of European Jews as they re-encountered, reimagined, and reconstructed their communities in the grim aftermath of World War II. Attending to a variety of national and ideological contexts, with a particular focus on Eastern Europe and the communist bloc, the course traces how Jews wrestled with their present and future in the wake of continent-wide calamity, the founding of the state of Israel, Soviet influence, Cold War geopolitics, the collapse of communism, and, finally, the post-Soviet order of the 1990s and 2000s. It likewise traces how postwar European Jewry grappled with the anxieties of immigration and return, the wages of acculturation and assimilation, and the interplay between cultural destruction, revival, and nostalgia in the face of persistent antisemitism, explosive Holocaust memory politics, and significant foreign Jewish philanthropy. Drawing on a wide range of printed, visual, and oral sources, this highly interdisciplinary course investigates questions particular to the Jewish experience, but also broader concerns about European inclusion, interethnic relations, and diasporic identity in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. All readings are in English. **For time and location, email [email protected]**