20.11.2023

KEY QUESTIONS Open Lectures online in December 2023

The Taube Department of Jewish Studies at the University of Wroclaw in Poland invites you to an online KEY QUESTIONS Open Lectures series to promote our new International MA Programme in Eastern European Jewish Studies. Please see the attachment or our website for more information.

The KEY QUESTIONS series is scheduled for three consecutive weeks on 7, 13, and 20 December at 18:00 [CET – Warsaw time].

The focus will be on the three main themes of our three-semester MA Programme in English presented by Taube Department faculty members.

Join us on ZOOM

https://huji.zoom.us/j/6349377481

Open Lecture # 1 „Yiddish Culture – Key Questions” December 7, Thursday at 18:00 [CET]

Dr. Karolina Szymaniak will speak on twentieth-century Yiddish literature, Yiddish literary criticism and Yiddish-Polish literary encounters and their discontents. Dr. Szymaniak’s monograph on Rachel Auerbach was awarded the 2016 Polityka Prize for outstanding books on history. Her publications in leading academic journals focus on the Yiddish avant-garde, Yiddish literary criticism, and more. Dr. Szymaniak has taught extensively at numerous Yiddish language and culture programmes throughout the world. 

Open Lecture # 2 Social History and Jewish-Christian Relations in the XX century – Key Questions” December 13, Wednesday at 18:00 [CET]

Dr. Kamil Kijek will talk about the political history of Polish Jews in the second half of the 19th and in the 20th century while collapsing the usual boundaries applied to this period by integrating pre-1939, Holocaust and post-Holocaust periods and focusing on the problems of continuity and discontinuity in modern Polish Jewish history. Dr. Kamil Kijek is a leading social and political historian of Polish Jewry who was involved in the creation of the exhibition in the Polin Museum in Warsaw. The English translation of his enthusiastically received monograph Children of Modernism is currently being prepared for publication.


Open Lecture # 3  „Hasidism – Key Questions” December 20, Wednesday at 18:00 [CET]

Prof. Marcin Wodziński will speak about the social and cultural history of a major Jewish popular mystical movement that originated in Eastern Europe and saw its heyday in nineteenth-century Poland. Prof. Wodziński will look at Hasidism, Hasidic-Haskalah encounters, and Hasidism and Digital Humanities. His research integrates social history, demography, and geography to break new ground in Hasidic and Haskalah studies. Prof. Wodziński’s Historical Atlas of Hasidism received the Jewish Book Award in 2019.