Join the Institute for the second of a two part series on The Jews of Eastern Europe featuring Natalia Aleksiun, author of Conscious History: Polish Jewish Historians before the Holocaust, and Kenneth B. Moss, author of An Unchosen People: Jewish Political Reckoning in Interwar Poland.

Until the Second World War, Eastern Europe was home to the largest Jewish community in the world. This demographic concentration fostered the development of many important religious, cultural, literary, and political movements that continue to define Jewish life to this day. Focusing on recent scholarship that deals with Yiddish literature and Jewish life in interwar Yiddishland, this book series hopes to shed light on how the history of this important Jewish community a century ago has much to teach us today.

Dr. Natalia Aleksiun is the Harry Rich Professor of Holocaust Studies at the University of Florida, Gainesville. She holds doctoral degrees from Warsaw University, Poland, and NYU, U.S. She specializes in the social, political, and cultural history of modern East European and Polish Jewry and the Holocaust.

Aleksiun has written extensively on the history of Polish Jews, the Holocaust, Jewish intelligentsia in East Central Europe, Polish-Jewish relations, and modern Jewish historiography. In addition to her 2021 book Conscious History: Polish Jewish Historians before the Holocaust (Littman Library of Jewish Civilization), she is the author of Dokad dalej? Ruch syjonistyczny w Polsce 1944–1950 (Where To? The Zionist Movement in Poland, 1944–1950) (Warsaw, 2002) and co-editor of several volumes, including Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry, vol. 29: Writing Jewish History in Eastern Europe (2017) (with Brian Horowitz and Antony Polonsky) and European Holocaust Studies, vol. 3: Places, Spaces and Voids in the Holocaust (2021) (with Hana Kubátová). She edited a critical edition of Gerszon Taffet’s Zagłada Żydów żółkiewskich (2019). She also serves as co-editor of East European Jewish Affairs. Currently, she is completing a new book about Jews in hiding in eastern Galicia during the Holocaust.

Kenneth B. Moss is the Harriet and Ulrich E. Meyer Professor of Jewish History at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Jewish Renaissance in the Russian Revolution (Harvard University Press, 2009), which received the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, and An Unchosen People: Jewish Political Reckoning in Interwar Poland, which was supported by a Ryskamp Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies and which has just appeared from Harvard University Press. He is co-editor with Ben Nathans and Taro Tsurumi of From Europe’s East to the Middle East (UPenn, 2021). With Israel Bartal, he is co-editing volume 7 of the Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization: National Renaissance and International Horizons, 1880–1918 (Yale University Press, forthcoming). From 2014 to 2020, he coedited Jewish Social Studies. For many years, he was the Posen Professor of Modern Jewish History at a university in the city where Shaul Tshernikhovski's poetry first appeared in print, in 1892.

Supported by the generosity of the Radov Family.

This event will be on ZOOM.

While all Institute events are free and open to the public, we do encourage a suggested donation of $10.