Joshua Shanes
Professor of Jewish Studies; Director, Arnold Center for Israel Studies. Joshua Shanes’ research interests focus on Central and East European Jewry in the 19th and 20th centuries, specifically turn-of-the-century Galicia and the rise of Zionism as a countermovement to the traditional Jewish establishment. His first book, Diaspora Nationalism and Jewish Identity in Habsburg Galicia appeared with Cambridge in 2012.
In 1939, on the eve of the Holocaust, east European Jewry constituted the most important and culturally influential Jewish community in the world. As a result of half a century of mass migration, up to 90% of world Jewry either lived in Eastern Europe or were children of immigrants from there. Jews were particularly prominent in East European cities. In Galicia, for example, Jews constituted a plurality or majority of nearly every major city. (L’viv was an exception, where they made up “only” a quarter of the population.) This course will survey the modern history of this once vital community – social, economic, political, religious and cultural – from the Polish partitions until...