Resurrecting the Jew: Nationalism, Philosemitism, and Poland’s Jewish Revival
Geneviève Zubrzycki (Ann Arbor)
- Beginning:
- Thursday, 06 June 2024 14:15
On 6 June 2024 we will welcome Geneviève Zubrzycki to our Regensburg Research Colloquium. She will give a lecture on "Resurrecting the Jew: Nationalism, Philosemitism, and Poland’s Jewish Revival". The lecture will be held in English.
Abstract:
Since the early 2000s, Poland has experienced a remarkable Jewish revival, largely driven by non-Jewish Poles with a passionate new interest in all things Jewish. Klezmer music, Jewish-style restaurants, kosher vodka, and festivals of Jewish culture have become popular, while new museums, memorials, Jewish studies programs, and Holocaust research centers reflect soul-searching about Polish-Jewish relations before, during, and after the Holocaust. In Resurrecting the Jew, Geneviève Zubrzycki examines this revival and asks what it means to try to bring Jewish culture back to life in a country where 3 million Jews were murdered and where only about 10,000 Jews now live. Drawing on a decade of participant-observation in Jewish and Jewish-related organizations in Poland, a Birthright trip to Israel with young Polish Jews, and more than a hundred interviews with Jewish and non-Jewish Poles engaged in the Jewish revival, Resurrecting the Jew presents an in-depth look at Jewish life in Poland today.
Geneviève Zubrzycki:Geneviève Zubrzycki is William H. Sewell Jr. Collegiate Professor of Sociology at the University of Michigan, where she directs the Weiser Center for Europe and Eurasia and the Copernicus Center for Polish Studies. A historical and cultural sociologist, she has published widely on nationalism and religion; collective memory, national mythology and the politics of commemoration; and visual culture and materiality. She’s the author of the award-winning The Crosses of Auschwitz: Nationalism and Religion in Post-Communist Poland (Chicago 2006), Beheading the Saint: Nationalism, Religion and Secularism in Quebec (Chicago 2016), and Resurrecting the Jew: Nationalism, Philosemitism and Poland’s Jewish Revival (Princeton 2022). In 2021 Zubrzycki was the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship and was awarded the Bronislaw Malinowski Prize in the Social Sciences from the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America. Her latest book, Resurrecting the Jew, was awarded the Wayne S. Vucinich Prize by the Association for Slavic, East European, & Eurasian Studies for the most important contribution to Russian, Eurasian, and East European studies in any discipline of the humanities or social sciences, and the Rachel Feldhay Brenner Award by Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America for its contribution to Polish-Jewish Studies.
Cooperation:
Leibniz ScienceCampus Europe and America in the Modern World
Venue:
GS OSESUR, Landshuter Straße 4, 93047 Regensburg, room 319 (3rd floor)