Eastern Europe: A Portable Jewish Homeland

Class starts Mar 18 4:00pm-5:30pm

Tuition: $350
YIVO members: $275**
Students: $175 (Must register with valid university email address)

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This is a live seminar course and enrollment will be capped at about 15 students. The course will be conducted in English.

Instructor: Aleksandra Jakubczak

For centuries, Eastern Europe has been a home to Jewish life and culture. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries witnessed a mass Jewish exodus headed for North and South America and the Middle East. Yet the migration of peoples also brought about a migration of the cultural and social structures and norms unique to the Jewish Eastern European experience. The Eastern European heritage marked Jews wherever they went and shaped the character of the Jewish diaspora, defining its language, political affiliations, and community formations.

This course explores the social and cultural history of Eastern European Jewry in a transnational perspective, drawing upon primary, secondary, and digital sources. Students will explore the transformation of Eastern European Jewry from a primarily traditional to a modern society and trace the transcontinental journey of their Eastern European heritage. The history of these cultural formations and migrations will be explored in the context of the central theme of the course - Jewish identity, homeland, and nation.

Course Materials:
The instructor will provide all course materials digitally to students throughout the class.

Questions? Read our 2021 Spring Classes FAQ.

Aleksandra Jakubczak is a Ph.D. candidate at Columbia University, specializing in modern Eastern European Jewish history. Her scholarly interests include the social and economic history of modern Jewry; migration; transnational history; gender, sexuality and women’s history. She holds two MA degrees from Warsaw University in Hebrew Studies and History. In 2015, she was a graduate visiting student at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and, in 2016, a research fellow at the Institute for the History of Polish Jewry and Israel Poland Relations at Tel Aviv University. She is the author of Polacy, Zydzi i mit handlu kobietami [Poles, Jews and the Myth of Trafficking of Women], a scholarly monograph published by Warsaw University Academic Presses in 2020.


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