Introduction to the Volume by the editors: François GUESNET (UCL), Antony POLONSKY (Brandeis), Katrin STEFFEN (University of Sussex)
Speakers in order of presentation
Markus Nesselrodt is a historian of Eastern Europe, specializing in Jewish, German, and Polish history from 1800 to the present. His dissertation on the fate of Polish Jews in the Soviet Union during World War II won numerous awards. He is currently writing a book on multiethnic encounters in Warsaw (1795–1830)
Sonia Gollance is Associate Professor of Yiddish Studies at University College London. Her book, It Could Lead to Dancing: Mixed-Sex Dancing and Jewish Modernity (2021), was a National Jewish Book Awards (USA) finalist. She has co-edited special issues of Feminist German Studies and In geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies. Her forthcoming translation of Tea Arciszewska's 1958/59 play Miryeml was supported by a Translation Fellowship from the Yiddish Book Center.
Delphine Bechtel is a full professor at Sorbonne University in Paris. She is the author of La Renaissance culturelle juive en Europe centrale et orientale 1897-1930 (2002) and a co-editor of the volumes Villes multiculturelles en Europe centrale (2008), Le tourisme mémoriel en Europe centrale et orientale, (2013) and Muséographie des violences en Europe centrale et ex-URSS (2016). She has published extensively on German-Jewish and Yiddish cultures, borderlands and multiethnic coexistence, local violence, historiography, memory politics and museography in Central and Eastern Europe, in particular in former Galicia.
Katarzyna Person is a historian of the Holocaust and Deputy Director of the Warsaw Ghetto Museum. She is the author of Assimilated Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto 1940-1943 (2014), Warsaw Ghetto Police: The Jewish Order Service during the Nazi Occupation (2021), Przemysłowa Concentration Camp. The Camp. The Children. The Trials (with Johannes-Dieter Steinert, 2023) among others. She is the author and co-author of five volumes of documents from the Ringelblum Archive.
Joseph Cronin is the Director of the Leo Baeck Institute London and a Lecturer at Birkbeck, University of London. He has written on a range of topics, but has an enduring interest in the relationship between language, migration and social policy in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. His first book was Russian-speaking Jews in Germany’s Jewish communities, 1990–2005
Michael Meng teaches history at Clemson University. He is the author of Shattered Spaces: Encountering Jewish Ruins in Postwar Germany and Poland (2011) and co-author of Revolutionary Biopolitics from Fedorov to Mao (2023). Moreover, he is the co-editor of several volumes including Jewish Space in Contemporary Poland (2015) and Rebuilding Jewish Life in Germany (2020).
François Guesnet is Professor of Modern Jewish History in the Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies at University College London. He holds a PhD in Modern History from Albert-Ludwigs-Universität, Freiburg im Breisgau, and specializes in the early modern and 19th century history of Eastern European, and more specifically, Polish Jews. He has held research and teaching fellowships at the Hebrew University Jerusalem, the University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia), the University of Oxford and Dartmouth College and is co-chair of the editorial board of Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry.
Antony Polonsky is Chief Historian of the Global Educational Outreach Program, POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, Warsaw and Emeritus Professor of Holocaust Studies at Brandeis University. He is co-chair of the editorial board of Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry, and the author of many published works, the most recent being The Jews in Poland and Russia, volume 1, 1350 to 1881; volume 2 1881 to 1914; volume 3 1914 to 2008 (2010, 2012), published in 2013 in an abridged version The Jews in Poland and Russia. A Short History.
Katrin Steffen is DAAD Professor of European and Jewish History and Culture at the University of Sussex and a committee member of the BIAJS. She has taught at different universities in Germany and Poland and was a visiting professor at the L'École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) in Paris in 2017. Before coming to Sussex, Katrin Steffen was a member of Faculty at the Nordost-Institut in Lueneburg. She has published widely on the history of Jews in Europe before, during and after the Holocaust, on memory, forced migrations, and on the transnational history of science, expert cultures and the circulation of knowledge.
Anne-Christin Klotz is a historian and has been a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at the Martin Buber Society of Fellows at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem since 2022. Her research interests include the Holocaust in Eastern Europe, Polish, Jewish and German history and relations and global Yiddish culture. Her book Together against Germany. Warsaw's Yiddish Press in the Struggle against National Socialism (1930-1941) (2022) has received several international awards and was one of the finalists for the Yad Vashem Book Prize 2023. She is currently working on a study of Eastern European Jewish survivor landsmanshaftn as a means of migrant self-help and communities of mourning. At present she is working on an interdisciplinary oral history interview project, which documents antisemitism from a Jewish perspective in Germany since October 07, 2023.