Moss suggests that after World War One, the 5 million Jews of non-Soviet Eastern Europe came to experience nationhood not primarily as an ideology to be embraced or rejected but as fact imposed by the world around them. He will explore how this process rendered Jews a national group defined less by cultural difference its members had chosen than by stigma, extrusion, and a sense of futurelessness. He will draw out some of the historical implications of this rethinking for how we conceive the relationship between Jews and nationalism generally and Zionism in particular.
Kenneth B. Moss is the Felix Posen Associate Professor of Modern Jewish History at the Johns Hopkins University. His first book Jewish Renaissance in the Russian Revolution (Harvard, 2009) was chosen as a co-winner of the 2010 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature. It will be published in Hebrew by the Mercaz Zalman Shazar. He has published many articles on the history of Hebrew and Yiddish culture, Jewish culture and politics in late imperial and early Soviet Russia, the history of nationalism, and related topics in such venues as in the Journal of Modern History, Jewish Social Studies,and Jewish History. Moss is now working on a book entitled The Unchosen People, which will examine East European Jewish political culture in the age of the nation-state. He lives in Baltimore with his wife and two children.
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