An international roster of scholars will discuss the state of scholarship and introduce cutting-edge research on Jews in World War I, examining the war’s importance as a cataclysmic event in Jewish and world history. In shattering empires and creating new states, the war disrupted Jewish ties around the globe and forged new ones, bringing about an entirely new era of ideologies, nation states, and circumstances that have affected Jewish life to the present day.
Judith C. Siegel, Center for Jewish History
David Engel, New York University
Session 1: Keynote Presentation: Jewish Diplomacy and the Politics of War and Peace
Carole Fink, Ohio State University |
Session 2: The Jewish World in 1914 and 1919: What Changed?
Marsha Rozenblit, University of Maryland |
Session 3: Jews in the Military
Derek Penslar, University of Oxford and University of Toronto |
Session 4: Political and Social Transformations during World War I
David Engel, New York University |
Session 5: The War and Jewish Culture
Emily Bilski, Independent Scholar |
Public interested in attending on Sunday, November 9 may purchase tickets online.
Session 1: Western and Central Europe
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Session 2: Eastern and Central Europe
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Session 3: North America
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Session 4: Ottoman Empire
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Emily Bilski, David Engel, Rebecca A. Kobrin, Marsha Rozenblit, Sarah Stein
College faculty and students may register for tickets online at www.cjh.org/thegreatwarconference.
Click here for a copy of the Conference program
Michal Ben Ya’akov (Ph.D., Hebrew University of Jerusalem) is an assistant professor in modern history at the Efrata College of Education in Jerusalem and chair of the history department. She created a unique certificate program for Teaching the Holocaust and its Commemoration at the Efrata College for both pre-service and in-service teachers, and has headed the program since 2007. Her academic research centers on 19th and 20th century Eretz-Israel/Palestine/Israel, with special emphasis on North African and Sephardi Jewry, as well on the experiences of North African Jews during both World Wars. In recent years she has focused on Jewish women, particularly, but not exclusively in those communities.
Emily D. Bilski has published on modernism and on the interface between art, cultural history and Jewish experience, and on contemporary art. She has served as curator and consultant to museums in the United States, Europe and Israel. A graduate of Harvard University, she is the winner of two National Jewish Book Awards, for Berlin Metropolis: Jews and the New Culture: 1898-1918 (University of California, 1999) and The Power of Conversation: Jewish Women and Their Salons (Yale, 2005). She is currently editing the volume of Martin Buber’s writings on art for the complete edition of his works; and writing on the history of Munich’s Thannhauser Gallery.
Paris Papamichos Chronakis is Lecturer in History at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He received his M.A. in Comparative History from Essex University and his Ph.D. in Modern Greek and European History from the University of Crete. A recipient of numerous grants, he was a Rothschild Foundation Europe post-doctoral teaching fellow at the University of Thessaly and a research fellow at UCLA. He is a historian of Southern Europe and the Mediterranean working on the late Ottoman Empire, the modern Greek state, and Sephardic Jewry and holding a special interest in the interrelated histories of the middle classes, interethnic relations, and the passage from empire to the nation-state.
Jessica Cooperman is Assistant Professor of Religion Studies at Mulenberg College. She received her Ph.D. from New York University in modern Jewish history. Her dissertation was entitled, "The Jewish Welfare Board and the American Jewish Cititzen: Jewish Chaplains, Soldiers and Welfare Workers in the First World War."
Erin Corber is a historian of modern France and modern Jewry. She is Visiting Assistant Professor of European History at the University of Maine. Originally from Montréal, QC, she defended her Ph.D. in November, 2013 in the Department of History and Borns Jewish Studies Program at Indiana University, Bloomington. In spring 2014 she was a Postdoctoral Visiting Research Scholar and instructor in the Borns Jewish Studies Program at Indiana University, Bloomington.
Hasia Diner is the Paul S. and Sylvia Steinberg Professor of American Jewish History, Professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies, History, and Director of the Goldstein-Goren Center for American Jewish History at New York University. She received her Ph.D. from University of Illinois at Chicago, her M.A. from University of Chicago, and her B.A. from University of Wisconsin.
David Engel is Greenberg Professor of Holocaust Studies, Professor and Chair of Hebrew and Judaic Studies, and Professor of History at New York University and a fellow of the Goldstein-Goren Diaspora Research Center at Tel Aviv University. He is the author of 7 books on aspects of the history of the Jews in the 20th century and has edited 15 volumes of the series Gal-Ed: On the History and Culture of Polish Jews.
Gennady Estraikh is Clinical Associate Professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies and Rauch Associate Professor of Yiddish Studies at NYU. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Oxford. His research interests include Jewish intellectual history in the 19th and 20th centuries with an accent on Yiddish literary milieus.
Carole Fink, Humanities Distinguished Professor of History Emerita at The Ohio State University, has recently published Cold War: An International History. She is the author of two prize-winning books, Defending the Rights of Others: The Great Powers, the Jews, and International Minority Protection, 1878-1938, and The Genoa Conference: European Diplomacy, 1921-1922, as well as Marc Bloch: A Life in History, which has been translated into six languages. She has received fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the German Marshall Fund, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the American Association of University Women.
Jaclyn Granick will complete her dissertation, "Humanitarian Responses to Jewish Suffering Abroad by American Jewish Organizations, 1914-1929," in spring 2015. She is a Ph.D. candidate in international history at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, Switzerland and is spending the 2014-2015 academic year as a Dr. Sophie Bookhalter Graduate Research Fellow here at the Center for Jewish History.
Mihaly Kalman is a Ph.D. candidate in Jewish Studies at Harvard University. He is currently completing his dissertation on Jewish armed self-defense against the pogroms in Russia and Mandatory Palestine, with a special eye to the history of Jewish paramilitarism during the Russian Civil War.
Jonathan Karp is Associate Professor of Jewish Studies at Binghamton University. He received his Ph.D. from Columbia University. His areas of interest include Jewish cultural and economic history and Jewish-Christian relations. He is the author of The Politics of Jewish Commerce: Economic Thought and Emancipation in Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2012). He served as Executive Director of the American Jewish Historical Society from 2010-2013.
Melissa R. Klapper is Professor of History at Rowan University in Glassboro, NJ. She is the author of Jewish Girls Coming of Age in America, 1860-1920 (NYU Press, 2005) and Small Strangers: The Experiences of Immigrant Children in the United States, 1880-1925 (Ivan R. Dee, Publisher, 2007). Her research has been awarded numerous grants and fellowships from such institutions as the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Schlesinger Library on the History of American Women at Harvard University, and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. Her most recent book, Ballots, Babies, and Banners of Peace: American Jewish Women's Activism, 1890-1940 (NYU Press, 2013), won the 2013 National Jewish Book Award in Women's Studies.
Rebekah Klein-Pejšová is Jewish Studies Assistant Professor of History at Purdue University specializing in Modern Jewish and east central European History. She is the author of Mapping Jewish Loyalties in Interwar Slovakia (forthcoming, Indiana University Press), and recent articles in the Austrian History Yearbook, Shofar, and AJS Review. She received her Ph.D. from Columbia University.
Rebecca Kobrin, Russell and Bettina Knapp Assistant Professor of American Jewish History at Columbia University, works in the field of American Jewish History. She received her B.A. from Yale (1994), and her M.Phil. (1995), and Ph.D. (2002) from the University of Pennsylvania. She served as the Hilda Blaustein Post-Doctoral Fellow at Yale University (2002–2004) and the American Academy of Jewish Research Post-Doctoral Fellow at New York University (2004–2006). Her area of specialty is Jewish immigration history, which she approaches through a transnational lens. Her research interests span from the fields of urban history to American religion and diaspora studies.
Devi Mays is Assistant Professor of Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She received her Ph.D. in History from Indiana University in 2013, and was a Post-Doctoral Fellow in Modern Jewish Studies at the Jewish Theological Seminary. Her research interests include the modern Sephardic diaspora, the Jewish Mediterranean, transnational networks and migration, and how minority groups navigate transitions from empire to nationalizing states.
Deborah Dash Moore is the Director of the Frankel Center for Judaic Studies and a Frederick G.L. Huetwell Professor of History at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Her fields of Study include American Jewish history, 20th century urbanization, migration, and acculturation and community building. She is the author of GI Jews: How World War II Changed a Generation (2004).
Jess Olson is an Associate Professor of Jewish History and the Associate Director of the Yeshiva University Center for Israel Studies. His areas of research include the Jews of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Germany, history of Zionism and Jewish nationalism, and the intersection between Jewish Orthodoxy and political engagement. His recent book, Nathan Birnbaum and Jewish Modernity: Architect of Zionism, Yiddishism and Orthodoxy appeared in 2013 with Stanford University Press
Derek Penslar is the Stanley Lewis Professor of Israel Studies at Oxford and the Samuel Zacks Professor of Jewish History at the University of Toronto. He is a comparative historian with interests in the relationship between modern Israel and diaspora Jewish societies, global nationalist movements, European colonialism, and post-colonial states. Penslar's most recent book is Jews and the Military: A History (2013). He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and of the American Academy for Jewish Research.
Daniel Rosenthal received his Ph.D. in History from the University of Toronto in 2014. His doctoral dissertation focused on the ways in which all Jews in Poland, irrespective of religious or political affiliations, refashioned their ideas about death, funerals, and burial in the decades between the World Wars due to new ideas of selfhood, changing forms of social cohesion, and the growing regulation of death by the new Polish republic. He is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Haifa University through the Israeli Inter-University Academic Partnership in Russian and East European Studies.
Marsha L. Rozenblit (PhD, Columbia University) is a social historian of Jews in Central Europe. She is the author of The Jews of Vienna, 1867-1914: Assimilation and Identity (1983) and Reconstructing a National Identity: The Jews of Habsburg Austria During World War I (2001). She has been at the University of Maryland since 1978, serving as the Director of the Meyerhoff Center for Jewish Studies from 1998 to 2003 and currently as the Director of Graduate Studies of the History Department.
Steven Schouten is a Research Fellow at the Scientific Council for Government Policy in the Netherlands. He is a specialist in Modern German-Jewish History, with focus on intellectuals, food and the First World War. He wrote a dissertation on the early life and thought of the German Jewish writer and public intellectual Ernst Toller (1893-1939) (European University Institute, Florence, Italy, 2007) and published, amongst others, ‘Fighting a Kosher War: German Jews and Kashrut in the First World War’, in Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska, Rachel Duffett and Alain Drouard (eds), Food and War in Twentieth Century Europe (Ashgate, 2011).
Matthew Silver, from the Max Stern College of Emek Yezreel, received his M.A. and Ph.D. in Modern Jewish History from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and has taught as a visiting professor at several universities in North America. His book Louis Marshall and the Rise of Jewish Ethnicity in America was selected as a finalist in American Jewish History in the 2013 National Jewish Book Awards. His latest book, In the Service of the West: A New Look at Modern Jewish History (Hebrew) was published by Hakibbutz Hameuchad in September 2014.
Reeva Simon served as Associate Director of the Middle East Institute, Columbia University and has taught history at Columbia and Yeshiva Universities. She is the author of Iraq Between the Two World Wars (2004) and Spies and Holy Wars: The Middle East in Twentieth Century Crime Fiction (2010); co-author of Conflict, Conquest and Conversion: Two Thousand Years of Christian Missions in the Middle East (2012) and is a contributor and co-editor of The Jews of the Middle East and North Africa in Modern Times (2003).
Sarah Abrevaya Stein is Professor of History and Maurice Amado Chair in Sephardic Studies at UCLA. Her award-winning scholarship includes Saharan Jews and the Fate of French Algeria (University of Chicago Press, 2014), Sephardi Lives: A Documentary History (co-edited with Julia Phillips Cohen, Stanford University Press, 2014), and Plumes: Ostrich Feathers, Jews, and a Lost World of Global Commerce (Yale University Press, 2008).
Mirjam Zadoff holds the Alvin H. Rosenfeld Chair in Jewish Studies and is Associate Professor for History at Indiana University, Bloomington. She has studied at the Universities of Vienna and Munich, and from 2006 to 2014 she was Assistant Professor in Jewish History at Munich University. Among her major publications are most recently “Der rote Hiob. Das Leben des Werner Scholem” (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2014; in English: Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, in preparation) and “Next Year in Marienbad. The Lost Worlds of Jewish Spa Culture” (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012).
Polly Zavadivker is Assistant Professor of History and Jewish Studies at the University of Delaware. She received her Ph.D. in History at the University of California at Santa Cruz in 2013. Her dissertation is entitled "Blood and Ink: Russian and Soviet Jewish Chroniclers of Catastrophe from World War I to World War II." It explores the Jewish history of war from 1914 to 1945, as recorded by the writers S. An-sky, Simon Dubnov, Isaac Babel, Vasily Grossman, and others. She has published her research on World War I in The Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook and the forthcoming series Russia's Great War and Revolution (Slavica).
Der Kaiser ruft zum Streit
Courtesy of the Leo Baeck Institute
German army marching through Neu Sendec, Galicia, 1915
Courtesy of the Bundesarchiv Berlin