The Posen Society of Fellows

The work complicates prior reductive, redemptive narratives of musical activity in Theresienstadt that rely upon tropes of resistance and defiance. Through a contextualized analysis of musical works that were rehearsed and performed in the camp-ghetto, the work establishes a historically nuanced understanding of the performances’ multifaceted function in Theresienstadt and in postwar contexts.

The project examines the potentially 'emancipatory' effects of the Great War on Jewish women's lives through the prism of wartime German labour history. It elucidates qualitative and quantitative changes in the working lives of German-Jewish women, paying special attention to role of Jewish ready-to-wear-clothiers and Jewish feminists in influencing women’s participation in the workforce.

A study of the special role that technocratic experts in the late Yishuv and early State of Israel played in building legal and economic institutions using the colonial scaffoldings from British Mandate Palestine and other former colonies. The project thereby connects the histories of Palestine and Israel with late British Empire decolonization and postcolonial state formation.

The project examines the largely overlooked input of Eastern European Jews to the German Jewish Enlightenment. This contribution is elucidated through the case of Salomon Dubno (1738-1813), a Polish Jewish poet, grammarian, and a teacher, best known for his collaboration with Moses Mendelssohn on the German Pentateuch translation and commentary, one of the most important Haskalah projects.

An investigation of how the return of Jews and Judaism to Spain animates often-incompatible claims about the nature Jewishness and Jewish culture, and who/what counts as Jewish. It sheds light on the fraught state of European multiculturalism and outlines what “return” and “inclusion” might entail, in an era when representing Jewish pasts and securing Jewish futures are increasingly part of statecraft across Europe.

The thesis uncovers the traces of traditional Jewish modes of reading within the prominent and self-proclaimed secular method of “close reading” in the literary theory of “New Criticism,” as it travels from the U.S. to Israel and Brazil. In all three locations the textual, ritual, and bodily practices that accompanied the traditional sefer offer a model both for the thinkers who develop this paradigm, and for the authors who attempt to subvert it.

Views of conversion from Judaism to Christianity and vice versa in the early and mid-twentieth expose the profound differences between secular and religious Zionist definitions of Who is a Jew. The research shows that Zionists did not have a clear stance on conversion and there was, in fact, much more contact between converts to Christianity and secular Zionists than we might expect. Looking at cases of intermarriage, the position of intellectuals (e.g. Yosef Haim Brenner) and secular and religious parties in the young State of Israel, this thesis elucidates Israeli secularism through a unique, under-researched prism.

This is a study of the legal secularization of Jewish family practices in early 20th-century France and the United States. The juridical encounters of Jewish immigrants with civic courts and family law and their impact on the separation of church and state are reflected in the rise of civil marriage and divorce. These processes affected Jewish immigrants' transition to modernity, changing their sense of Jewish identity as they became new French or American citizens

Connecting modern Jewish history with questions of empire, religion, race and nationalism in France and French North Africa, the thesis analyses the political meaning of Jewish-Muslim-Christian encounters in Algeria. It touches on both Jewish and Muslim acculturation and assimilation and their interplay with the modern-secularist character of French republicanism, focusing on the recently prominent interest in the history of Empires.