Emigration, Collectivization, and Desecration: The State Management of Jewish (and Israeli) Affairs in Global Perspective

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

This panel explores how states and other actors in Central Europe (and Israel) responded to local manifestations of global trends related to Jewish and Israeli affairs. Our papers acknowledge and seek to transcend the local and regional nature of these politics, in order to situate them in a global context—an attempt to avoid grounding our analyses in the geographical and ideological presumptions of the very Cold War we study. Rebekah Klein-Pejšová approaches postwar Czechoslovakia’s management of Jewish emigration in light of the global pressures of state consolidation and the mass movement of people(s) after WWII. Attilla Novák explores mutually referential debates in Hungary and Israel over the significance of local factors in collectivization. Jacob Ari Labendz offers an analysis of how Czechoslovak State Security responded to the novel manifestation of the global “Swastika Epidemic” in their country. Each paper recognizes the factors that lent domestic character to global phenomena, while also demonstrating how domestic politics not only shaped but constituted international trends and crises.

Sub Unit

• Jewish Studies

Chair

• Kimberly Elman Zarecor, Iowa State U

Papers

• 'Our Overseas Staff Members Have Terminated Their Services Here': The AJDC Staff Leaves Czechoslovakia after 1948 - Rebekah Klein-Pejsova, Purdue U

• Kibbutz(im) and Cooperatives: Cooperative Ideas in 1960s Socialist Hungary—With Israeli Flavor - Attila Novák, Ludovika U of Public Service (Hungary)

• State Security and the Swastika Epidemic in Czechoslovakia - Jacob Ari Labendz, Ramapo College of New Jersey

Discussant

• Kimberly Elman Zarecor, Iowa State U