The Society for the History of Czechoslovak Jews presents a book panel with editors and contributors to the volume Prague and Beyond: Jews in the Bohemian Lands (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021) at the Bohemian National Hall in New York City. The event will also be livestreamed to the society’s YouTube channel.
Prague and Beyond presents a new and accessible history of the Jews of the Bohemian Lands written by an international team of scholars. It offers a multifaceted account of the Jewish people in a region that has been, over the centuries, a part of the Holy Roman Empire and the Habsburg Monarchy, was constituted as the democratic Czechoslovakia in the years following the First World War, became the Nazi Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and later a postwar Communist state, and is today’s Czech Republic. This ever-changing landscape provides the backdrop for a historical reinterpretation that emphasizes the rootedness of Jews in the Bohemian Lands, the intricate variety of their social, economic, and cultural relationships, their negotiations with state power, the connections that existed among Jewish communities, and the close, if often conflictual, ties between Jews and their non-Jewish neighbors.
Prague and Beyond is written in a narrative style with a focus on several unifying themes across the periods. These include migration and mobility; the shape of social networks; religious life and education; civic rights, citizenship, and Jewish autonomy; gender and the family; popular culture; and memory and commemorative practices. Collectively these perspectives work to revise conventional understandings of Central Europe’s Jewish past and present, and more fully capture the diversity and multivalence of life in the Bohemian Lands.
Speakers
Kateřina Čapková, Institute of Contemporary History, Czech Academy of Sciences
Benjamin Frommer, Northwestern University
Verena Kasper Marienberg, North Carolina State University
Hillel Kieval, Washington University, St. Louis
Chaired by Chad Bryant, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
The event is organized in partnership with the Leo Baeck Institute with support of the Consulate General of the Czech Republic in New York, Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Czech Republic, the Bohemian Benevolent and Literary Association, and the East Central European Center at the Harriman Institute.
