Wednesday, 28. June 2017, 18:00 - 19:30

Herrengasse 17, 1010 Vienna

VWI goes to the Czech Centre Vienna

Usually, the creation of the State of Israel is cast as a story that begins with Herzl and is brought to fulfilment by the Holocaust. My book project, Uncertain Citizenship: Jewish Belonging and the “Ethnic Revolution” in Poland and Czechoslovakia, 1917-1947, considers the resolution of questions concerning Jewish political belonging and citizenship in Europe as the contingent result of transnational debates, diplomatic manoeuvrings, demographic pressures and policies on multiple levels across three decades.  In sum, by exploring conversations spanning this incisive thirty-year period, I show how the process by which East Central Europeans ‘solved’ questions of Jewish citizenship offers a synecdoche for the history of the unprecedented nationalisation of space in the region more generally.  Arguably, the overall disentangling of populations in post-Second World War East Central Europe demanded the simultaneous embrace of a Jewish homeland in Palestine as a territorial nationalist project.

Commented by Michal Fankl

Sarah A. Cramsey is a Research Fellow at the VWI. She is a Professor of Practice of Jewish Studies at Tulane University. A graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, Oxford University, and the College of William & Mary in Virginia, she has been awarded various fellowships for research in the Czech Republic, Poland, the United Kingdom, Israel, and the United States.

Michal Frankl is a Senior Researcher at the Masaryk Institute and Archives of the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague. An author of several books and many articles, his research interests include modern antisemitism, refugee policies, and the Holocaust in East Central Europe. He is the leader of the work package “New views on digital archives” in the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI-2).

Click here to download the invitiation as a PDF file.

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