Lecture Series:

"Nationalism in the Lands of the Habsburg Monarchy: The Challenge to Jewish Identity"

Bohemian National Hall, 321 East 73rd Street (between 1st and 2nd Avenue), New York City

Sponsored by the Society for the History of Czechoslovak Jews and the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences.

Thursday,FEBRUARY 10, 2011 at 7.00 pm
Inaugural Lecture
"Imperial Embraces and Local Challenges: The Politics of Jewish
Identity in Bohemia, 1867-1914”
Hillel Kieval, Washington University in St. Louis

When Jan Neruda’s Pro strach židovský (For Fear of the Jews) appeared in book form in 1870, his publisher Eduard Grégr—in language that would be picked up over and again—referred ominously to the Jews of Bohemia and Moravia as “our fiercest enemies.” Were Jews the enemies of Czech nationalism? Did they champion German cultural and political hegemony in the Bohemian lands? What role did Austrian imperial policies play in structuring Jewish identities? And how did Jews come to express their own sense of self over the course of the 19th and early 20th century? Taking up themes first addressed in The Making of Czech Jewry, Hillel Kieval revisits the position of Jews in the Czech and German national conflict, their identification with Austria and the Habsburg dynasty, and their changing attitudes toward the question of national belonging.

Hillel Kieval is the Gloria M. Goldstein Professor of Jewish History and Thought at Washington University in St. Louis and is the author of Languages of Community: The Jewish Experience in the Czech Lands (University of California Press, 2000) and of The Making of Czech Jewry: National Conflict and Jewish Society in Bohemia, 1870-1918 (Oxford University Press,1988).

Thursday, FEBRUARY 24, 2011 at 7.00 pm
"The Emergence of Slovak Jewish Identity in Interwar Czechoslovakia"
Rebekah Klein-Pejšova, Purdue University

Before the Interwar period, there was no "Slovak" Jewry. This talk considers the emergence of a distinctive Slovak Jewish collective identity among the Jews of the territory of Slovakia, formerly northern Hungary, as they reoriented themselves in the new state of Czechoslovakia after the First World War. This process took place through Jewish national politics, communal architectural enterprise, and how they did - and did not - commemorate their war dead.

Rebekah Klein-Pejsova is Jewish Studies Assistant Professor of History at Purdue University. After completing her M.A. degree at the Central European University in Budapest she earned her Ph.D. from Columbia University in 2007. She is currently working on a book manuscript concerning the dynamics of Jewish nationality and citizenship in Interwar East Central Europe. Her article, "Abandon Your Role as Exponents of the Magyars': Contested Jewish Loyalty in Interwar (Czecho) Slovakia," was published in the November 2009 issue of the journal Association of Jewish Studies Review.

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