The sixth session of the International Forum of Young Scholars on East European Jewry was held in Odessa, Ukraine  on July 1-4, 2013.

This session was organized by the Leonid Nevzlin Research Center for Russian and East European Jewry in cooperation with the Simon Dubnow Institute for Jewish History and Culture at Leipzig University, the Department of History and the Elie Wiesel Center for Judaic Studies, Boston University and I.I. Mechnikov Odessa National University. The latter hosted the event.

 

 

Fifteen young scholars from five countries (selected from an impressive pool of more than forty applicants) participated this year in the Forum. The Forum’s program included familiarization with the Jewish history of Odessa, presentations of ongoing research by the participants, and various professional development workshops. A significant component of the workshop was devoted to individual advisory sessions with leading scholars in East European Jewish studies: Prof. Israel Bartal (Hebrew University of Jerusalem), Dr. Jonathan-Chen (Hebrew University of Jerusalem), Prof. David Engel (New York University), Prof. Zvi Gitelman (University of Michigan), and Prof. Gabriella Safran (Stanford University).

 

 

 

Participants of  2013 Fourm in Odessa:

 

1. Ofer Dynes (Harvard University): Jewish Culture and the Logic of the State, 1772-1881
2. Melissa Hibbard (University of Illinois at Chicago): Ethnic Politics of Child Health and Welfare in Poland, 1914-1950
3. Mihaly Kalman (Harvard University): Shtetl Heroes: Jewish Self-Defense from the Pale to Palestine, 1881-1936
4. Elena Keidosiute (Vilnius University): Jewish Conversions to Catholicism: Institutionalized Missions in Lithuanian Territory
5. David Kowalski (Simon Dubnow Institute for Jewish History and Culture): Poland's Last Jews. The Year 1968 and the Habitual Return of Jewish Belonging in Postwar Poland
6. Brendan McGeever (University of Glasgow): Anti-Semitism and Revolution: the Bolshevik and Soviet Government’s Confrontation with Anti-Semitism in Revolutionary Russia, 1917-1922
7. Elly Moseson (Boston University): The Baal Shem Tov's Role in The Emergence of Hasidism
8. Jay (Koby) Oppenheim (City University of New York): Once Removed: A Comparative Study of ‘Russian Jews’ in New York and Berlin
9. Rachel Rothstein (The University of Florida): A Relationship of Equals?: Polish and American Jews and the Creation of a New Polish Jewishness since 1968
10. Marina Sapritskaya (London School of Economics): Negotiating Traditions: Transformations of Jewish Identities and Community Building in Post-Soviet Odessa
11. Joanna Sliwa (Clark University): Oppression and Agency: A Social History of Jewish Children in German-Occupied Kraków
12. Taro Tsurumi (New York University): Russian Zionism: Ideology and the Empire, 1904-1920s
13. Alex Valdman (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev): Jewish-Russian Intelligentsia in Late Imperial Russia
14. Zohar Weiman-Kelman (University of California): Queer Keytn: Histories of Jewish Women Writers
15.  Sarah Zarrow (New York University): The Social Role of Ethnography in Interwar Poland

 

Program of the Forum in PDF