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.

Since 2012, China has experienced an official revival of Maoist culture and politics, as part of a generalized invigoration of ideology under Xi Jinping. Despite the huge human cost of Mao’s rule, on 1 October 2019 (the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China) the Chinese Communist Party celebrated Mao as august builder of the party and nation. This ideological, authoritarian retrenchment, alongside the PRC’s newly assertive foreign policy, has alarmed Western governments.

The literature on organizational performance and self-regulating feedback loops tends to focus on reform under-reactions. Why, despite multiple negative stimuli, do organizations fail to adapt sufficiently to reduce the gap between aspirations and achievements? Explaining the reverse situation, in which disproportionately large remedial action is undertaken in response to only slight organizational errors, usually involves entirely different ways of theorizing organization-environment relations, such as neo-institutionalist accounts of legitimacy-seeking managers.

Discussants: Alida Haworth and Giuseppe Spatafora