Professor Tarun Khaitan engages with Professor Cécile Fabre, and her paper entitled, 'Doxastic wrongs and true beliefs'. Join us for the last PLP Colloquium of this academic year, which is sure to be a very exciting one! The event will take place on Zoom, so please make sure to register by sending an email to oxfordplpevents@gmail.com in order to receive the paper and the Zoom link.

In June 1938, only four months after the so-called Anschluss, the Nazi administration in Salzburg region announced a ban on Jews and other non-Aryans dressing in local Volkstrachten—both authentic and popularised styles. This Trachtenverbot highlighted specific forbidden garments—Lederhosen, traditional fulled-wool jackets, white Wadenstutzen, alpine hats and Dirndl—and anyone in breach of the rules was subject to a fine of 133 marks or a period of 2 weeks in prison.

Challenging the commonly held view that Yiddish was suppressed and even banned by the Israeli authorities, Rachel Rojanski offers a radical new interpretation of the interaction between Yiddish and Israeli Hebrew culture. Based on detailed archival research, this talk will follow the development of Yiddish in Israel and present Yiddish culture’s vibrant growth in Israel’s first decades. It will argue that although the Israeli leadership made promoting Hebrew a high priority, it did not have an explicit policy on Yiddish.

At the centre of this study stands the organizational array of civic and voluntary entities that represented sectors and subgroups in the Jewish population of pre-independence and formative Israel as they coped with the blow occasioned by the war that engulfed them from late 1947 to early 1949.

The German philosopher Martin Heidegger's idiosyncratic and deeply philosophical account of the German volk stood at the heart of his political support of National Socialism. This, however, did not prevent some of his Jewish thinkers to identify with the volkish elements in his philosophy and find them pertinent for describing their own condition as Jews in the modern world.

This online event features as one of several this term which focusses on 'Political economy of European climate action', and is hosted by the European Political Economy Project (EUPEP) at the European Studies Centre.

Speakers: Jake Barnes (The Newcomers Project, Environmental Change Institute, Oxford), Jenny Palm (International Institute of Industrial Environmental Economics, Lund University)
Chair: Kalypso Nicolaidis (St Antony’s College, Oxford; School of Transnational Governance, European University Institute)

The talk will discuss the shaping of Holocaust memory in the Ultraorthodox (Haredi) society in Israel and the survivors’ role in this process. The reappearance of Ultraorthodox society on the historical map, after the severe blow it suffered in the Holocaust, in demographic, geographic, ideological, theological, and moral terms, was an enigma: How did it chart a new path after it lost the core of its future generation and was deprived of its best teachers, leaders, and rabbis?

A close examination of one unique Jewish group that was active at the turn of the century, between the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the rise of Great Britain in the Middle East, a group that was preoccupied with Jewish-Arab relations and the Balfour Declaration, reveals an interesting complex picture. It appears that not all the Jews of the Old Yishuv supported the Declaration, and not all the Arabs denounced it and were opposed to the arrival of the Jews to Palestine.

Drawing on an ethnographic study into child care and health in Jerusalem, this paper explores the cultural politics of protection that surrounds responses to public health intervention during outbreaks of infectious disease. This paper situates the voices of Orthodox and Haredi Jewish parents alongside activism and print cultures (pashkevilim) that circulated anonymous messaging in Jerusalem neighbourhoods – casting public health intervention against historical narratives of danger and deception.