In recent years the paradigm of Diasporic culture or identity has increasingly been superceded by or reinterpreted as a transnational paradigm. The shift to transnationalism reflects both contemporary political, social, economic, and technological realities (recent shifts in migration patterns, increased global transportation and telecommunication technologies, the globalized economy, the loosening of political borders)as well as shifts in perception. As individual migrants develop strong ties to more than one "home" country, and geographic and cultural spaces cease to be congruent, the notion of fixed national or cultural identity and the negative valuation of „diaspora“ are called into question. This series of panels explores German Jews or Jews in Germany as actors in the transnational public sphere. With examples from the early twentieth century to the present, Jewish writers, artists, and activists will be examined as vanguards in the creation of transnational identities and cultural spheres.

Possible topics may include:
German Jews and American Jewish Culture
Eastern and Western Jews
Russian Jews in Contemporary Germany
Transnational Activisms—Pacifism, anti-trafficking, Jewish feminism...
Religious movements
The city as transnational Jewish space
The transnational Jewish press
A transnational aesthetic?: the visual arts
Jews and other "transnationals"
Transnational Film
Theorizing Transnationalism, Diaspora, Postnationalism, Cosmopolitanism in the context of German-Jewish Studies
Antisemitism across borders

This seriesof panels is organized by Elizabeth Loentz (University of Illinois at Chicago), Leslie Morris (University of Minnesota), and Lisa Silverman (University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee).

Please send abstracts to Elizabeth Loentz (loentz@uic.edu) by January 30, 2010.