Lecture format: on site
Room: 2R-EG-07 (lecture hall of the Institute for Eastern European History).
Street address: Spitalgasse 2,  Campus of the University of Vienna, Hof 3.

In the autumn of 1917, Jews, and Jewish socialists in particular, saw themselves entering a new world. Or, rather, they saw two new worlds promised to the Jewish masses – one of liberation of all mankind and one that would create a Jewish homeland after almost 2,000 years of exile. The Russian and subsequent European revolution promised the dismantling of the old world of capitalism, war, and oppression and a great many Jewish socialists threw themselves into this struggle. At the same time, the British government promised the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, seemingly fulfilling the Zionist vision for the national redemption of the Jewish people. In the wake of war, revolution, and pogroms these two worlds collided and tore apart the Jewish left. This seminar analyses this conflict between revolutionary universalism and national liberation, between Communism and Zionism, and the dialectics of Jewish liberation by centring on the experiences of Jewish revolutionaries and the debates within the World Union of Poalei Tsion from the revolutions of 1917 to the split of the organisation in the summer of 1920.

Dr. Jan Rybak is the Alfred Landecker Lecturer at Central European University’s Jewish Studies Program. He received his PhD from the European University Institute in Florence and has previously worked at the University of York, Birkbeck, and multiple other institutions. His first book ‘Everyday Zionism in East-Central Europe: Nation-Building in War and Revolution, 1914–1920’ was published by Oxford University Press in 2021 and won the Book Prize of the British and Irish Association for Jewish Studies. He is currently working on a book manuscript focused on the topic of this talk.

The event will be recorded and uploaded to RECET's YouTube channel