Scott Ury
I am a scholar of Jewish and East European histories in modern times, in particular in Polish lands. My research interests include social and political topics like urban history, nationalism studies and the history of migration and also the study of antisemitism and, more recently, memory studies.
I was educated at the University of California, Berkeley and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem where I received my PhD in 2006. Since 2006, I have been affiliated with Dept. of Jewish history at Tel Aviv University (TAU), first as a post-doctoral fellow and later (2010-present) as a faculty member. I have also had the pleasure of holding fellowships at the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Toronto, the University of Warsaw, and the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Over the 2022-2023 academic year, I was the Weinstock/Rohr Visiting Associate Professor in History at Harvard University where I was also affiliated with the Center for Jewish Studies and the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies.
In addition to being an Associate Professor in TAU's Dept. of Jewish history, I am also Director of the Eva and Marc Besen Institute for the Study of Historical Consciousness where I serve as Senior Editor of the peer-reviewed journal, History and Memory: Studies in Representation of the Past. Previously, I was Director of TAU's Stephen Roth Institute for the Study of Antisemitism and Racism (2010-2020).
Since 2008, I have led (or co-led) a series of research groups at TAU and other institutions in Israel related to various aspects of Jewish social, political and intellectual history, including Cosmopolitanism (2008), East European Jewry (2008-2009), Jews and Cities (2009-2012), Antisemitism and Racism (2012-2015), Neighbors and Neighborhoods (2015-2016), Antisemitism and Islamophobia (2017-2018), Jews and the Left (2019-2020), and Writing Jewish Social History (2020-present).
My publications include Barricades and Banners: The Revolution of 1905 and the Transformation of Warsaw Jewry (Stanford, 2012) and seven co-edited volumes on various aspects of modern Jewish history, including Cosmopolitanism, Nationalism and the Jews of East Central Europe (Routledge, 2014), Antisemitism: Historical Concept, Public Discourse (in Hebrew, 2020), Key Concepts in the Study of Antisemitism (Palgrave, 2021), Promised Lands: Jews, Poland and the Land of Israel (Littman, 2023), and Antisemitism and the Politics of History (Brandeis, 2024). I have also written numerous articles, chapters and book reviews, many of which you can find below.
Supervisors: Prof. Jonathan Frankel, z"l and Prof. Ezra Mendelsohn, z"l
I was educated at the University of California, Berkeley and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem where I received my PhD in 2006. Since 2006, I have been affiliated with Dept. of Jewish history at Tel Aviv University (TAU), first as a post-doctoral fellow and later (2010-present) as a faculty member. I have also had the pleasure of holding fellowships at the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Toronto, the University of Warsaw, and the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Over the 2022-2023 academic year, I was the Weinstock/Rohr Visiting Associate Professor in History at Harvard University where I was also affiliated with the Center for Jewish Studies and the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies.
In addition to being an Associate Professor in TAU's Dept. of Jewish history, I am also Director of the Eva and Marc Besen Institute for the Study of Historical Consciousness where I serve as Senior Editor of the peer-reviewed journal, History and Memory: Studies in Representation of the Past. Previously, I was Director of TAU's Stephen Roth Institute for the Study of Antisemitism and Racism (2010-2020).
Since 2008, I have led (or co-led) a series of research groups at TAU and other institutions in Israel related to various aspects of Jewish social, political and intellectual history, including Cosmopolitanism (2008), East European Jewry (2008-2009), Jews and Cities (2009-2012), Antisemitism and Racism (2012-2015), Neighbors and Neighborhoods (2015-2016), Antisemitism and Islamophobia (2017-2018), Jews and the Left (2019-2020), and Writing Jewish Social History (2020-present).
My publications include Barricades and Banners: The Revolution of 1905 and the Transformation of Warsaw Jewry (Stanford, 2012) and seven co-edited volumes on various aspects of modern Jewish history, including Cosmopolitanism, Nationalism and the Jews of East Central Europe (Routledge, 2014), Antisemitism: Historical Concept, Public Discourse (in Hebrew, 2020), Key Concepts in the Study of Antisemitism (Palgrave, 2021), Promised Lands: Jews, Poland and the Land of Israel (Littman, 2023), and Antisemitism and the Politics of History (Brandeis, 2024). I have also written numerous articles, chapters and book reviews, many of which you can find below.
Supervisors: Prof. Jonathan Frankel, z"l and Prof. Ezra Mendelsohn, z"l
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In addition to presenting 1905 as a critical moment in Jewish history, this book also argues that the transformation of the public sphere and the ensuing politicization of ethnicity during elections to the State Duma led to the widespread implementation of antisemitic rhetoric into the Polish political sphere and the subsequent transformation of Polish politics as well as relations between Poles and Jews.
https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=17360
Winner of the 2013 Reginald Zelnik Book Prize in History, sponsored by ASEEES and the Institute of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.
Commendation, Fraenkel Prize, sponsored by the Wiener Library, London.
Papers
This article maps the current study of antisemitism by presenting the various arguments regarding a number of key debates in the field, including those surrounding questions of: eternalism, uniqueness and the impact of the Holocaust as well as the influence of the Israel-Palestine conflict and relations between Muslims and Jews.
This article examines how two central scholars based at the Hebrew University's Institute of Contemporary Jewry, Jonathan Frankel and Ezra Mendelsohn, conceived, created, and codified the academic sub-field of modern Jewish politics. The article begins by discussing studies by earlier historians of the Jews like Salo W. Baron, Shmuel Ettinger, and Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi whose work often touched upon the intersection between Jews and politics. While Mendelsohn and Frankel's research was based upon key concepts developed by these scholars, their focus on the centrality of Jewish agency, the role of the Jewish intelligentsia, and the turn to "the (Jewish) people" helped create a new scholarly framework for imagining, analyzing, and researching modern Jewish politics. Despite their many achievements, they both overlooked several important topics in modern Jewish history including the role of religion, the activities of Jewish women, the experiences of Jews in North Africa and the Middle East, and the impact of Jewish politics on the Palestinians. By examining how these topics are dealt with in more recent works, the penultimate section in this article points to both the continuing influence of Mendelsohn and Frankel's scholarly paradigm as well as some of its inherent limits. In doing so, this analysis of modern Jewish politics makes for an intriguing case study regarding the organization, construction, and production of a particular field of knowledge while simultaneously raising critical questions regarding the very nature, limits, and future of Jewish studies.
Although the tension between history and memory is central to a range of societies, few seem to grapple with these issues more intensely than postcommunist Poland. The sudden collapse of the communist bloc in 1989 and Poland's subsequent entry into NATO in 1999 and the European Union in 2004 led to a state of historiographical, social and, at times, existential vertigo in which all that was once held sacred and true was suddenly the subject of intense historical scrutiny and public debate. The result was a series of soul-searching discussions regarding the delicate, at times explosive, relationship between a heavy past, a bewildering present and a bright future as Poland attempted to exit the long shadow of Soviet domination into realms unknown.
https://www.shazar.org.il/product/%d7%90%d7%a0%d7%98%d7%99%d7%a9%d7%9e%d7%99%d7%95%d7%aa-%d7%91%d7%99%d7%9f-%d7%9e%d7%95%d7%a9%d7%92-%d7%94%d7%99%d7%a1%d7%98%d7%95%d7%a8%d7%99-%d7%9c%d7%a9%d7%99%d7%97-%d7%a6%d7%99%d7%91%d7%95%d7%a8/?code=185-1103
While Michael Checinski's anonymously-published piece “USSR and the Politics of Polish Antisemitism, 1956-1968” from the first issue of Soviet Jewish Affairs in 1971 can be read as both an analysis of antisemitism in Communist Poland and as a scholarly artifact that illustrates the manner in which the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and Jewish communities in the region were studied and understood at the height of the Cold War, it also tells us much about the study of East European Jewry and other, related fields over the past fifty years. Indeed, key parts of Checinski's analysis including its focus on the Soviet Union's anti-Jewish policies, its emphasis on the corrosive if not inherently evil nature of the Soviet Union, and its examination of antisemitism in Poland remain central topics in the study of Soviet and East European Jewry. Moreover, while the Soviet Union has long passed into the annals of history, many of the same historical themes, narrative tropes and scholarly frameworks that once helped researchers frame the study of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe are now critical parts of scholarly efforts to construct and explicate another important sub-field in the realm of Jewish studies, the study of antisemitism, including debates regarding the “New Antisemitism.” In this and other ways, Checinski's essay exemplifies not only the manner in which Cold War tensions, ideologies and anxieties shaped the study of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe for generations but also how they continue to influence the study of Soviet and East European Jewry and other, related fields to this day.
This article argues that Jewish migration from Eastern Europe to the New World has long been viewed through the lens of a specific historical narrative that revolves around and reinforces key themes such as anti-Jewish prejudice and violence in Eastern Europe, Jewish flight to Western countries, and the successful integration of Jewish immigrants into new societies. While this interpretation of Jewish migration as a story of crisis and redemption was central to key works on Jewish migration to the United States, Israel and other countries, recent academic studies have critiqued such renditions of Jewish migration as a historical drama of persecution, flight and rescue. Despite these interventions, central scholarly works and dominant communal accounts continue to frame and explain Jewish migration through the traditional historiographical paradigm. The continued salience of this particular interpretation of Jewish migration history raises several fascinating questions regarding the connection between academic scholarship and communal interests as well as larger issues related to the tension between history and memory, past and present, Jewish history and general history. The article concludes with a discussion surrounding the possible origins of these tensions as well as potential strategies for resolving these and related questions regarding the study of Jewish migration, in particular, and modern Jewish society, in general.
This article examines the different ways that anti-Semitism and Zionism have confronted and influenced one another through a tension-filled dialectic that is simultaneously self-evident and counterintuitive. The essay begins with a discussion of the central place of anti-Semitism in canonical Zionist texts such as Leon Pinsker’s Auto-Emancipation and Theodor Herzl’s The Jewish State. Both Pinsker and Herzl believed that anti-Semitism was a permanent or immovable force, and this interpretation of anti-Semitism led them to embrace, if not create, political Zionism. The following section analyzes the works of two émigré scholars, Salo W. Baron and Hannah Arendt, who wrote fervently about the need to avoid “the lachrymose conception of Jewish history” and the school of “eternal antisemitism,” and to focus instead on the actions that Jews undertook as historical actors in specific contexts. Despite their influence, the study of anti-Semitism over the past two generations has returned to a perspective that is strikingly similar to traditional Zionist interpretations. The penultimate section of this piece delineates how two historians in Israel, Shmuel Ettinger and Robert S. Wistrich, reinforced and reaffirmed key aspects in this interpretive paradigm, including anti-Semitism’s unique nature as “the longest hatred,” the recurrent abandonment of the Jews by their neighbors, and the strange, befuddling, and problematic relationship between anti-Semitism and Zionism. The essay ends with a discussion of the different ways that anti-Semitism and Zionism continue to interact with and influence one another, in particular through current debates in and between the public and the scholarly realms regarding “the new anti-Semitism.” The article concludes by suggesting that scholars return to the contextual-comparative approach to the study of anti-Semitism as part of larger efforts to separate and insulate academic research on the topic from contemporary political considerations.
https://www.ceeol.com/search/article-detail?id=709138
This article argues that the long-standing turn to "the Jewish community" as a central organizing principle in works dedicated to Jewish history in east European cities has helped create and institutionalize a specific communal model of Jewish urban history, one that prioritizes narratives of Jewish communal order over explorations of the chaos and fluidity that characterize many other studies of the modern city. The article begins by discussing the central place of "the community" in foundational works of Jewish history, continues by examining the critical role played by communal record books (pinkasim) in the construction of east European Jewish history, and then analyzes several works that embraced and reinforced the communal model of Jewish urban history. The article concludes by examining two key archival collections and discussing the various ways that the source material amassed in them illustrates how scholars like Jacob Shatzky and Israel Klausner used historical research and writing as a means to narrativize, domesticate, and make sense of the intersection between Jews and cities.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/ajs-review/issue/0869A8C21A5F033A2B8D9537F325DDF6
This essay provides a historical overview of the history of Jews in Polish lands between 1800-2000. Focusing on central social, religious and political developments among Jews from the final partition of Poland (1795) up to the post-Communist era, the chapter is designed to provide background to students and other readers interested in the topic and the period. Volume 8 of The Cambridge History of Judaism: The Modern World, was edited by Mitchell B. Hart and Tony Michels.
Artykuł stanowi omówienie odmiennych sposobów, jakimi różne społeczności badaczy wyobraża-ją grupę polskich Żydów, badają ją i nauczają o niej. Na podstawie analizy działalności naukowej badaczy z Izraela, Polski i Stanów Zjednoczonych ostatnich dwóch pokoleń autor pokazuje, że każda społeczność badaczy konstruuje własny, specyficzny obraz grupy zwanej "polskimi Żydami" i że obrazy te pozostają pod przemożnym wpływem współczesnych potrzeb i wymogów o naturze społecznej, politycznej i wspólnotowej. Na skutek tych różnic uczeni tworzą często radykalnie odmienne obrazy historii i społeczeństwa polskich Żydów. Różnice stanowią odzwierciedlenie przeszkód i utrudnień, jakie po 1989 roku wiążą się z badaniem i opisywaniem historii i kultury polskich Żydów.
This article explores the different ways that the popular Jewish coffee house owner Yehezkel Kotik used his Warsaw cafe as a forum to advance various plans for urban reform and national (Zionist) politics in turn of the century Warsaw.
The article is centered around the tension between Kotik's participation in an urban public sphere and his commitment to Jewish communal concerns, social reform and national politics.
Instead of attempting to resolve these tensions between aspirations of urban cosmopolitanism and the drive of ethno-politics, the article argues that they reflect many of the contradictions that were deeply-embedded within modern Jewish (and Polish) societies for much of the twentieth century.
https://brill.com/edcollbook/title/26737
This bibliographic essay consists of brief summaries over 100 bibliographic sources regarding the history of Jews in Polish lands from 1800-1939. While most of the sources detailed are in English, works in Hebrew, Polish and Yiddish are also included. This essay is geared toward students, scholars and other readers interested in becoming acquainted with the study of Jewish history in Polish lands.
This article examines the impact that legal reforms implemented in wake of the Revolution of 1905 regarding the right to establish charitable, social and educational societies had on the nature of Jewish communal organization and activity throughout the Russian empire. As a result of the reforms of 1906, voluntary societies and organizations were no longer bound to religious institutions or regulated directly by traditional communal elites or government officials. These changes led to the creation of thousands of new Jewish civic organizations and associations in cities and towns across the Russian empire. These new institutions and the Jewish civil society they created are discussed within the context of Europe's largest Jewish community at the time, Warsaw.
https://www.pennpress.org/9780812247275/secularism-in-question/
This article was published in the Hebrew journal Zmanim in 2014.
https://www.openu.ac.il/publications/zmanim/pages/zmanim128.aspx
Written as part of the Oxford Bibliographies On-Line, Jewish Studies series, this bibliographic essay includes brief summaries of approximately 150 bibliographic sources regarding the history of Jews in Warsaw from 1800-2000. While most of the sources detailed are in English, works in Hebrew, Polish and Yiddish are also included. The resource is geared toward students, scholars and other readers interested in becoming acquainted with the history of Jews in the city of Warsaw.
In addition to presenting 1905 as a critical moment in Jewish history, this book also argues that the transformation of the public sphere and the ensuing politicization of ethnicity during elections to the State Duma led to the widespread implementation of antisemitic rhetoric into the Polish political sphere and the subsequent transformation of Polish politics as well as relations between Poles and Jews.
https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=17360
Winner of the 2013 Reginald Zelnik Book Prize in History, sponsored by ASEEES and the Institute of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.
Commendation, Fraenkel Prize, sponsored by the Wiener Library, London.
This article maps the current study of antisemitism by presenting the various arguments regarding a number of key debates in the field, including those surrounding questions of: eternalism, uniqueness and the impact of the Holocaust as well as the influence of the Israel-Palestine conflict and relations between Muslims and Jews.
This article examines how two central scholars based at the Hebrew University's Institute of Contemporary Jewry, Jonathan Frankel and Ezra Mendelsohn, conceived, created, and codified the academic sub-field of modern Jewish politics. The article begins by discussing studies by earlier historians of the Jews like Salo W. Baron, Shmuel Ettinger, and Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi whose work often touched upon the intersection between Jews and politics. While Mendelsohn and Frankel's research was based upon key concepts developed by these scholars, their focus on the centrality of Jewish agency, the role of the Jewish intelligentsia, and the turn to "the (Jewish) people" helped create a new scholarly framework for imagining, analyzing, and researching modern Jewish politics. Despite their many achievements, they both overlooked several important topics in modern Jewish history including the role of religion, the activities of Jewish women, the experiences of Jews in North Africa and the Middle East, and the impact of Jewish politics on the Palestinians. By examining how these topics are dealt with in more recent works, the penultimate section in this article points to both the continuing influence of Mendelsohn and Frankel's scholarly paradigm as well as some of its inherent limits. In doing so, this analysis of modern Jewish politics makes for an intriguing case study regarding the organization, construction, and production of a particular field of knowledge while simultaneously raising critical questions regarding the very nature, limits, and future of Jewish studies.
Although the tension between history and memory is central to a range of societies, few seem to grapple with these issues more intensely than postcommunist Poland. The sudden collapse of the communist bloc in 1989 and Poland's subsequent entry into NATO in 1999 and the European Union in 2004 led to a state of historiographical, social and, at times, existential vertigo in which all that was once held sacred and true was suddenly the subject of intense historical scrutiny and public debate. The result was a series of soul-searching discussions regarding the delicate, at times explosive, relationship between a heavy past, a bewildering present and a bright future as Poland attempted to exit the long shadow of Soviet domination into realms unknown.
https://www.shazar.org.il/product/%d7%90%d7%a0%d7%98%d7%99%d7%a9%d7%9e%d7%99%d7%95%d7%aa-%d7%91%d7%99%d7%9f-%d7%9e%d7%95%d7%a9%d7%92-%d7%94%d7%99%d7%a1%d7%98%d7%95%d7%a8%d7%99-%d7%9c%d7%a9%d7%99%d7%97-%d7%a6%d7%99%d7%91%d7%95%d7%a8/?code=185-1103
While Michael Checinski's anonymously-published piece “USSR and the Politics of Polish Antisemitism, 1956-1968” from the first issue of Soviet Jewish Affairs in 1971 can be read as both an analysis of antisemitism in Communist Poland and as a scholarly artifact that illustrates the manner in which the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and Jewish communities in the region were studied and understood at the height of the Cold War, it also tells us much about the study of East European Jewry and other, related fields over the past fifty years. Indeed, key parts of Checinski's analysis including its focus on the Soviet Union's anti-Jewish policies, its emphasis on the corrosive if not inherently evil nature of the Soviet Union, and its examination of antisemitism in Poland remain central topics in the study of Soviet and East European Jewry. Moreover, while the Soviet Union has long passed into the annals of history, many of the same historical themes, narrative tropes and scholarly frameworks that once helped researchers frame the study of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe are now critical parts of scholarly efforts to construct and explicate another important sub-field in the realm of Jewish studies, the study of antisemitism, including debates regarding the “New Antisemitism.” In this and other ways, Checinski's essay exemplifies not only the manner in which Cold War tensions, ideologies and anxieties shaped the study of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe for generations but also how they continue to influence the study of Soviet and East European Jewry and other, related fields to this day.
This article argues that Jewish migration from Eastern Europe to the New World has long been viewed through the lens of a specific historical narrative that revolves around and reinforces key themes such as anti-Jewish prejudice and violence in Eastern Europe, Jewish flight to Western countries, and the successful integration of Jewish immigrants into new societies. While this interpretation of Jewish migration as a story of crisis and redemption was central to key works on Jewish migration to the United States, Israel and other countries, recent academic studies have critiqued such renditions of Jewish migration as a historical drama of persecution, flight and rescue. Despite these interventions, central scholarly works and dominant communal accounts continue to frame and explain Jewish migration through the traditional historiographical paradigm. The continued salience of this particular interpretation of Jewish migration history raises several fascinating questions regarding the connection between academic scholarship and communal interests as well as larger issues related to the tension between history and memory, past and present, Jewish history and general history. The article concludes with a discussion surrounding the possible origins of these tensions as well as potential strategies for resolving these and related questions regarding the study of Jewish migration, in particular, and modern Jewish society, in general.
This article examines the different ways that anti-Semitism and Zionism have confronted and influenced one another through a tension-filled dialectic that is simultaneously self-evident and counterintuitive. The essay begins with a discussion of the central place of anti-Semitism in canonical Zionist texts such as Leon Pinsker’s Auto-Emancipation and Theodor Herzl’s The Jewish State. Both Pinsker and Herzl believed that anti-Semitism was a permanent or immovable force, and this interpretation of anti-Semitism led them to embrace, if not create, political Zionism. The following section analyzes the works of two émigré scholars, Salo W. Baron and Hannah Arendt, who wrote fervently about the need to avoid “the lachrymose conception of Jewish history” and the school of “eternal antisemitism,” and to focus instead on the actions that Jews undertook as historical actors in specific contexts. Despite their influence, the study of anti-Semitism over the past two generations has returned to a perspective that is strikingly similar to traditional Zionist interpretations. The penultimate section of this piece delineates how two historians in Israel, Shmuel Ettinger and Robert S. Wistrich, reinforced and reaffirmed key aspects in this interpretive paradigm, including anti-Semitism’s unique nature as “the longest hatred,” the recurrent abandonment of the Jews by their neighbors, and the strange, befuddling, and problematic relationship between anti-Semitism and Zionism. The essay ends with a discussion of the different ways that anti-Semitism and Zionism continue to interact with and influence one another, in particular through current debates in and between the public and the scholarly realms regarding “the new anti-Semitism.” The article concludes by suggesting that scholars return to the contextual-comparative approach to the study of anti-Semitism as part of larger efforts to separate and insulate academic research on the topic from contemporary political considerations.
https://www.ceeol.com/search/article-detail?id=709138
This article argues that the long-standing turn to "the Jewish community" as a central organizing principle in works dedicated to Jewish history in east European cities has helped create and institutionalize a specific communal model of Jewish urban history, one that prioritizes narratives of Jewish communal order over explorations of the chaos and fluidity that characterize many other studies of the modern city. The article begins by discussing the central place of "the community" in foundational works of Jewish history, continues by examining the critical role played by communal record books (pinkasim) in the construction of east European Jewish history, and then analyzes several works that embraced and reinforced the communal model of Jewish urban history. The article concludes by examining two key archival collections and discussing the various ways that the source material amassed in them illustrates how scholars like Jacob Shatzky and Israel Klausner used historical research and writing as a means to narrativize, domesticate, and make sense of the intersection between Jews and cities.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/ajs-review/issue/0869A8C21A5F033A2B8D9537F325DDF6
This essay provides a historical overview of the history of Jews in Polish lands between 1800-2000. Focusing on central social, religious and political developments among Jews from the final partition of Poland (1795) up to the post-Communist era, the chapter is designed to provide background to students and other readers interested in the topic and the period. Volume 8 of The Cambridge History of Judaism: The Modern World, was edited by Mitchell B. Hart and Tony Michels.
Artykuł stanowi omówienie odmiennych sposobów, jakimi różne społeczności badaczy wyobraża-ją grupę polskich Żydów, badają ją i nauczają o niej. Na podstawie analizy działalności naukowej badaczy z Izraela, Polski i Stanów Zjednoczonych ostatnich dwóch pokoleń autor pokazuje, że każda społeczność badaczy konstruuje własny, specyficzny obraz grupy zwanej "polskimi Żydami" i że obrazy te pozostają pod przemożnym wpływem współczesnych potrzeb i wymogów o naturze społecznej, politycznej i wspólnotowej. Na skutek tych różnic uczeni tworzą często radykalnie odmienne obrazy historii i społeczeństwa polskich Żydów. Różnice stanowią odzwierciedlenie przeszkód i utrudnień, jakie po 1989 roku wiążą się z badaniem i opisywaniem historii i kultury polskich Żydów.
This article explores the different ways that the popular Jewish coffee house owner Yehezkel Kotik used his Warsaw cafe as a forum to advance various plans for urban reform and national (Zionist) politics in turn of the century Warsaw.
The article is centered around the tension between Kotik's participation in an urban public sphere and his commitment to Jewish communal concerns, social reform and national politics.
Instead of attempting to resolve these tensions between aspirations of urban cosmopolitanism and the drive of ethno-politics, the article argues that they reflect many of the contradictions that were deeply-embedded within modern Jewish (and Polish) societies for much of the twentieth century.
https://brill.com/edcollbook/title/26737
This bibliographic essay consists of brief summaries over 100 bibliographic sources regarding the history of Jews in Polish lands from 1800-1939. While most of the sources detailed are in English, works in Hebrew, Polish and Yiddish are also included. This essay is geared toward students, scholars and other readers interested in becoming acquainted with the study of Jewish history in Polish lands.
This article examines the impact that legal reforms implemented in wake of the Revolution of 1905 regarding the right to establish charitable, social and educational societies had on the nature of Jewish communal organization and activity throughout the Russian empire. As a result of the reforms of 1906, voluntary societies and organizations were no longer bound to religious institutions or regulated directly by traditional communal elites or government officials. These changes led to the creation of thousands of new Jewish civic organizations and associations in cities and towns across the Russian empire. These new institutions and the Jewish civil society they created are discussed within the context of Europe's largest Jewish community at the time, Warsaw.
https://www.pennpress.org/9780812247275/secularism-in-question/
This article was published in the Hebrew journal Zmanim in 2014.
https://www.openu.ac.il/publications/zmanim/pages/zmanim128.aspx
Written as part of the Oxford Bibliographies On-Line, Jewish Studies series, this bibliographic essay includes brief summaries of approximately 150 bibliographic sources regarding the history of Jews in Warsaw from 1800-2000. While most of the sources detailed are in English, works in Hebrew, Polish and Yiddish are also included. The resource is geared toward students, scholars and other readers interested in becoming acquainted with the history of Jews in the city of Warsaw.
Using an array of personal letters, diary entries and other sources, this article argues that the confrontation with large urban arenas led to a widespread state of loneliness and an ensuing sense of despair among many young Jewish men across East Central Europe and that many of them found relief from this state of dislocation and confusion by forging strong, homosocial bonds of male friendship that ultimately laid the foundations for the development of Jewish nationalism in the region.
Key figures in this study include the young David Ben-Gurion, Yosef Haim Brenner and Uri Nissan Gnessin.
This groundbreaking anthology addresses the history and challenges of using "antisemitism" and related terms as tools for historical analysis and public discourse. Drawing together seventeen chapters by prominent scholars from Europe, Israel, and the United States, the volume encourages readers to rethink assumptions regarding the nature and meaning of Jewish history and the history of relations between Jews and non-Jews.
The volume begins with a revised and updated version of David Engel’s seminal essay “Away from a Definition of Antisemitism.” Subsequent contributions by renowned specialists in ancient, medieval, and modern history, religious studies, and other fields explore the various and changing definitions and uses of the term “antisemitism” in a range of contexts, including ancient Rome and Greece, the Byzantine Empire, medieval Europe, early modern and modern Europe, North America, and the United Kingdom. The volume also includes a section that focuses on the Second World War, including the Holocaust and its memory. Engel offers a contemporary response to conclude the book.
Discussion of volume in The Times of Israel:
https://www.timesofisrael.com/has-the-term-antisemitism-been-overused-or-overblown-beyond-usefulness/
This volume provides an in-depth and multifaceted investigation of how Polish Jews, Polish Zionism, and Polish culture influenced Israel's cultural and political development, as well as of how the Zionist project influenced Jewish life in Poland.
From its inception as a political movement, Zionism had as its main goal the creation of a 'New Jew' who could contribute to building a Jewish state, preferably in the historic homeland of the Jewish people, where Jews would free themselves from the negative characteristics which, in the view of the ideologues of Zionism, had developed in the diaspora. Yet, inevitably, those who settled in Palestine brought with them considerable cultural baggage. A substantial proportion of them came from the Polish lands, and their presence significantly affected the political and cultural life of the Yishuv, and later the State of Israel.
Throughout the volume's twenty-four chapters, scholars of history, literature, politics and memory studies from Israel, Poland, and the United States explore different aspects of this influence, as well as the continuing relationship between Israel and Poland, up to the present day.
While this special issue of History and Memory focuses on the intersection between history, memory and society in Poland, the questions raised by the issue's six articles are also relevant for scholars interested in the wider study of memory, including: the critical role of historical memory in periods of radical transition; the intricate connection between national movements and accompanying struggles over collective memory; the central place that minority groups often play in the construction of national memories, histories and societies; the local, urban and material aspects of historical memory; and various attempts to come to terms with (or, alternatively, to refuse to come to terms with) the dark, traumatic chapters that lurk in every nation's historical closet, from slavery in the United States to the Holocaust in Germany to Stalinism in the Soviet Union, and beyond.
Panel discussion hosted by Polin Museum of Polish Jewish History via Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/FriendsofPOLINMuseum/videos/509434393561832/?fref=tag
This volume includes over twenty essays regarding the relationship between select "Key Concepts" and antisemitism in the academic and public realms.
Written by leading scholars from a range of disciplines, each chapter highlights the history of a particular concept, details its various uses and changing meanings over time, and highlights its central role in the current study of and debates regarding antisemitism.
Structured around concepts rather than chronology or geography, the volume is designed as a pedagogical tool for scholars teaching undergraduate and graduate courses about antisemitism, the Holocaust, and Genocide Studies as well as about other forms of prejudice and hatred.
Key Concepts in the Study of Antisemitism also serves as an up to date reference book for scholars and students embarking on new research projects or those interested in learning more about the study of antisemitism and its relationship to other fields.
Co-edited by Guy Miron of Israel’s Open University and Scott Ury of Tel Aviv University, this volume was published as a special, year-long issue of the journal Zion: A Quarterly for Research in Jewish History in cooperation with the Zalman Shazar Center.
Beginning with a Hebrew translation of David Engel’s 2009 essay “Away from a Definition of Antisemitism,” the volume includes over twenty contributions in Hebrew by a range of scholars based in Europe, Israel and North America regarding the history, implementation and usefulness of the term “antisemitism.”
Individuals and libraries interested in receiving more information about the volume or purchasing a copy can visit the website of the Zalman Shazar Center at:
https://shazar.org.il/Book/%D7%90%D7%A0%D7%98%D7%99%D7%A9%D7%9E%D7%99%D7%95%D7%AA+%D7%91%D7%99%D7%9F+%D7%9E%D7%95%D7%A9%D7%92+%D7%94%D7%99%D7%A1%D7%98%D7%95%D7%A8%D7%99+%D7%9C%D7%A9%D7%99%D7%97+%D7%A6%D7%99%D7%91%D7%95%D7%A8%D7%99.aspx?name=%D7%90%D7%A0%D7%98%D7%99%D7%A9%D7%9E%D7%99%D7%95%D7%AA%3A+%D7%91%D7%99%D7%9F+%D7%9E%D7%95%D7%A9%D7%92+%D7%94%D7%99%D7%A1%D7%98%D7%95%D7%A8%D7%99+%D7%9C%D7%A9%D7%99%D7%97+%D7%A6%D7%99%D7%91%D7%95%D7%A8%D7%99&code=185-1103
Starting with a number of articles on the Jews of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Poland and Hungary, continuing with several studies of Jewish encounters with the advent of nationalism and antisemitism, and concluding with a set of essays on Jewish history and politics in twentieth-century eastern Europe, pre-state Palestine and North America, the volume discusses the different methodological, research and narrative strategies involved in transforming past events into part of the larger canon of Jewish history.
https://brill.com/view/title/33352
The volume includes contributions by historians and social scientists alongside memoir material regarding the historical experiences of Jewish immigrants as well as the impact that anti-Jewish violence and government policies had on individual decisions to emigrate. By examining the phenomenon of Jewish migration from a number of disciplinary perspectives and in a variety of centers in Europe, Israel and North America, the articles in this volume challenge many longstanding assumptions regarding the connection between Eastern Europe and Jewish migration.
Jewish Migration in Modern Times focuses on complex questions regarding historical agency as well as those related to the reception of Jewish immigrants in different locales and many of the personal dilemmas faced by those who debated the choices, decisions and directions of their life-changing moves to new lands.
For more information regarding how you or your institution can procure a copy of the volume please see:
https://www.routledge.com/Jewish-Migration-in-Modern-Times-The-Case-of-Eastern-Europe-1st-Edition/Goldin-Spiro-Ury/p/book/9780367183684
or
https://www.amazon.com/Jewish-Migration-Modern-Times-Eastern/dp/0367183684/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=Jewish+Migration+in+Modern+Times%3A+The+Case+of+Eastern+Europe&qid=1560680067&s=gateway&sr=8-1
The twelve chapters amassed in this volume address these and other questions including: What lies at the roots of the longstanding connection between Jews and cosmopolitanism? How has this relationship changed over time? What can different cultural, economic and political developments teach us about the ongoing attraction and tension between Jews and cosmopolitanism? And, what can these test cases tell us about the future of Jews and cosmopolitanism in the twenty-first century?
This book was originally published as a special issue of the European Review of History.
https://www.routledge.com/Cosmopolitanism-Nationalism-and-the-Jews-of-East-Central-Europe/Miller-Ury/p/book/9781138018525
A leading critic of Polish literature, Artur Sandauer (1913-1989) takes a hard, at times painful, look at the critical role that Jews and individuals of Jewish descent played as both creators and objects of literature and culture in twentieth-century Poland.
Through an engaging series of essays, Sandauer analyzes major figures in Polish literature via the prism of one central, if at times muted, issue: the Jews. Sandauer begins his analysis by looking at such classics of Polish literature as Mickiewicz, continues by discussing the experiences of writers in the interwar era such as Tuwim and Schulz, challenges reigning myths of the war years with critical examinations of works by Andrzejewski and Miłosz, exposes the problematic relationship between writers and the Communist regime through the career of Ważyk, and concludes with hope for Poland's future with discussions of Szymborska and, in a bold display of intellectual honesty, himself.
Written during the period of martial law, Sandauer's work stands as a testimony to the power of the written word as well as the renaissance in Jewish studies taking place in post-Communist Poland.
https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/51568
November 16, 2021, 1:00PM (EST) / 20:00 (Israel time)
Registration is required to attend this Webinar. Register in advance here:
https://umass-amherst.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_DswXeXOYTXGryWISnsrsYg