Innovative, Independent, Inclusive

In the global present, antisemitism thrives on conspiracy theories, yet to date scholars have paid little attention to their content. This project will provide a pathbreaking inventory and analysis of global antisemitic conspiracy theories and their claims to comprehend power relations both locally and globally. It will shed a unique light on the contemporary threat to democratic life and its connection to antisemitism.

In this lecture, Professor Subotic will explore the ways in which the memory of the Holocaust in post-communist Eastern Europe has been used to represent other types of historical crimes. Specifically, she will examine the extent to which this instrumentalization of Holocaust memory has fed the rise of nationalized, particularized, and populist remembrance practices, and has helped produce a crisis in Holocaust memory globally. 

Throughout the twentieth century, Britain used its network of imperial holdings as sites of detention, not only for migrants and refugees, but for civilians and political insurgents. One of the largest cohorts to be interned across the Empire were European Jews. This research project seeks to uncover the neglected histories of these detention sites and explores interconnections with the legacies of empire and decolonisation.

This interdisciplinary research project brings together a team of historians and literary scholars working in English and Yiddish, and two archives, the Jewish Museum London and the Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archive to explore, through new sources and approaches, the multi-relational character of Jewish immigrant culture in 19th and 20th century London.

In James Baldwin’s protracted and ambivalent engagement with Holocaust history and memory in the 1960s, Baldwin coded moral orientations toward the Holocaust to political orientations toward Black oppression and revolt.

In the upheavals, wars, and revolutions that shaped Central and Eastern Europe in the long nineteenth century, Jews found themselves both as victims of violence and as active participants. Dr Jan Rybak analyses the recurring phenomenon of Jewish armed self-organisation and self-defence. Jews participated in the violent transformation of the region, fighting simultaneously for their own protection and their emancipation and to reshape the societies in which they lived.