In and Out: Twentieth-Century Jewish Mobility in Eastern Europe

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

This panel reevaluates current approaches to histories of Jewish mobility in Eastern Europe throughout the twentieth century. While scholars have written widely on diasporic communities, they often overlook both the transnational, multidirectional character of the movements and how it can help us better understand the relationships between migrants and states. By looking at both individual and communal reactions to shifting borders and state policies, the panel asks to what extent did Jewish mobility in Eastern Europe represent a form of liberation or subversion of state power? How were Jews–by virtue of their fluctuating citizenship status–better able to engage opportunities to migrate? How does mobility shape the construction of Jewish belonging and diasporic ideas of homeland? This panel not only understands Jewish mobility as a multi-directional, non-linear movement, but puts into dialogue early twentieth-century Jewish migration from empires in East-Central Europe with the subsequent emigration of Jews from the USSR and Eastern Bloc. Consequently, it combines various geographies and methodological approaches. While Alexandra Zborovsky and Christina Florea examine issues of citizenship and statelessness among Jews in post-WWI East Central Europe and post-WWII Soviet Union, Oskar Czendze and Frankee Lyons move to Poland, examining how Jews adapted various conceptions of belonging and diasporic self-perception in moments of state-inflicted communal distress in the mid-1930s and 1960s. Ultimately, this panel offers a new way to understand histories of Jewish migration and movement, namely the ways nation–states attempted to control Jewish movement and how Jews navigated the uprooting consequences of these policies.

Sub Unit

• Jewish Studies

Chair

• Anastasiia Strakhova, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Papers

• Suspended between States: Bukovinan Jews and the Transition from Imperial to National Citizenship - Cristina Florea, Cornell U

• Hometowns Revisited: American Jews, Regional Belonging, and Authoritarianism in Interwar Poland, 1926-1939 - Oskar Czendze, UNC at Chapel Hill

• Soviet Jewish Migration and the Weaponization of Citizenship, 1967-1991 - Alexandra Zborovsky, U of Pennsylvania

Discussant

• Francine R. Hirsch, U of Wisconsin-Madison