Polish-Jewish Studies in the 21st Century

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Brief Description

During the two decades since the transition from Communist rule, Poland has experienced many profound changes in public discourse. Few have been as striking as the opening up of Polish-Jewish shared history and culture as a topic of debate, in both productive and challenging ways. Polish scholarship and recent cultural works on Jewish subjects are undoing notions of Polishness as being homogenous. This roundtable is dedicated to moving this conversation forward, especially as it will apply to the intertwined study of these fields in the near future. We will be continuing an ongoing conversation among these participants, as well as many others in both Polish and Jewish studies, which will take place through a series of events and workshops running from the spring of 2014 through the end of 2015 (see http://slaviccenter.osu.edu/about/polish-studies/polish-jewish). For this particular conversation, we have selected scholars from a range of institutions and disciplines (representing anthropology, sociology, history, and literature) who have had different experiences working at the intersection of Jewish and Polish studies. Our goal is to share our collective vision of the field as we imagine it, located in different types of departments, centers, and programs, as well as in individual scholars' projects. We will discuss relevant courses and syllabi that we are collecting among ourselves, and strategies for funding scholars to learn necessary languages and travel to important sites for this research.

Sub Unit

• Jewish studies

Chair

• Jessie Labov, Ohio State U

Roundtable Members

• Shana Penn, Graduate Theological Union

• Karen Underhill, U of Illinois at Chicago

• Genevieve Zubrzycki, U of Michigan

• Erica Lehrer, Concordia U