“Well researched . . . A major contribution to our understanding of the dilemmas and challenges faced by Czechoslovak Jewry in the interwar period.” —Michael Miller, Central European University In the aftermath of World War I, the largely Hungarian-speaking Jews in Slovakia faced the challenge of reorienting their political loyalties from defeated Hungary to newly established Czechoslovakia. Rebekah Klein-Pejšová examines the challenges Slovak Jews faced as government officials, demographers, and police investigators continuously tested their loyalty. Focusing on “Jewish nationality” as a category of national identity, Klein-Pejšová shows how Jews recast themselves as loyal citizens of Czechoslovakia. Mapping Jewish Loyalties in Interwar Slovakia traces how the interwar state saw and understood minority loyalty and underscores how loyalty preceded identity in the redrawn map of east central Europe. “This book makes a crucial contribution to the question of minority loyalties in Central Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. It points to a dramatic divergence of the constructions of loyalties between the majority and minority populations.” —Slovakia “After WW I, former Hungarian territory became part of the newly established state of Czechoslovakia. Jews who had lived under Hungarian rule faced the problem of status and identity in a new state . . . The overall picture the author presents is skillfully balanced by effective individualized treatments of individuals and events . . . Recommended.” —Choice “Klein-Pejšová has contributed a succinct and sophisticated profile of an understudied community, one that can help us understand the impossible dynamic faced by all Jews who lived among multiple nationalities with competing national claims.” —Slavic Review

The Jew in Czech and Slovak Imagination,1938-89 is the first critical inquiry into the nature of anti-Jewish prejudices in both main parts of former Czechoslovakia. The authors identify anti-Jewish prejudices over almost fifty years of the twentieth century, focusing primarily on the post-Munich period and the Second World War (1938–45), the post-war reconstruction (1945–48), as well as the Communist rule with both its thaws and returns to hardline rule (1948–89). It is a provocative examination of the construction of the image of ‘the Jew’ in the Czech and Slovak majority societies, the assigning of character and other traits – real or imaginary – to individuals or groups. The book analyses the impact of these constructed images on the attitudes of the majority societies towards the Jews, and on Holocaust memory in the country. "This meticulously researched study covers the late 1930s to the 1960s in Czechoslovakia, then when Slovakia became a separate country under Nazi domination during WW II and much of the Czech Republic was a German 'protectorate.'...Summing Up: Highly recommended. Graduate students, faculty, professionals." - R.M. Seltzer, emeritus, Hunter College, CUNY, in: CHOICE 55.12 (2018)

This book presents an unconventional history of minority nationalism in interwar Eastern Europe. Focusing on an influential group of grassroots activists, Tatjana Lichtenstein uncovers Zionist projects intended to sustain the flourishing Jewish national life in Czechoslovakia. The book shows that Zionism was not an exit strategy for Jews, but as a ticket of admission to the societies they already called home. It explores how and why Zionists envisioned minority nationalism as a way to construct Jews' belonging and civic equality in Czechoslovakia. By giving voice to the diversity of aspirations within interwar Zionism, the book offers a fresh view of minority nationalism and state building in Eastern Europe.

Lessons and Legacies XIII: New Approaches to an Integrated History of the Holocaust is an edited collection of thirteen original essays that reflect current research on the Holocaust in a range of disciplines.

World War I utterly transformed the lives of Jews around the world: it allowed them to display their patriotism, to dispel antisemitic myths about Jewish cowardice, and to fight for Jewish rights. Yet Jews also suffered as refugees and deportees, at times catastrophically. And in the aftermath of the war, the replacement of the Habsburg Monarchy and the Russian and Ottoman Empires with a system of nation-states confronted Jews with a new set of challenges. This book provides a fascinating survey of the ways in which Jewish communities participated in and were changed by the Great War, focusing on the dramatic circumstances they faced in Europe, North America, and the Middle East during and after the conflict.

"A comprehensive history of the Jews of the Bohemian Lands whose goal is to narrate and analyze the Jewish experience in the Bohemian Lands as an integral and inseparable part of the development of Central Europe and its peoples from the sixteenth century to the present day"--

The Rights of the Roma writes Romani struggles for citizenship into the history of human rights in socialist and post-socialist Eastern Europe. If Roma have typically appeared in human rights narratives as victims, Celia Donert here draws on extensive original research in Czech and Slovak archives, sociological and ethnographic studies, and oral histories to foreground Romani activists as subjects and actors. Through a vivid social and political history of Roma in Czechoslovakia, she provides a new interpretation of the history of human rights by highlighting the role of Socialist regimes in constructing social citizenship in postwar Eastern Europe. The post-socialist human rights movement did not spring from the dissident movements of the 1970s, but rather emerged in response to the collapse of socialist citizenship after 1989. A timely study as Europe faces a major refugee crisis which raises questions about the historical roots of nationalist and xenophobic attitudes towards non-citizens.