Central European Zionisms and the Habsburg Colonial Imaginary

Register at: https://z.umn.edu/ScottSpectorColloquium

 

The Austro-Hungarian monarchy was the home of many Zionist thinkers, including authors of some startlingly distinct and creative variants of thoughts on a Jewish
homeland. The common thread running through some of these particularly innovative visions may have been spun from a cultural imaginary of the East rooted
in the lived experience of Habsburg subjects in Vienna, Prague, and Galicia. How were these creative and idiosyncratic variants of European Zionism—better put,
Zionisms—linked to their common context, the specific geo-cultural imaginary of Austria-Hungary?

Registered participants please contact jwst@umn.edu for the precirculated paper to be discussed at the colloquium.

Scott Spector is the Rudolf Mrázek Collegiate Professor of History and German Studies at the University of Michigan. A cultural and intellectual historian of modern Central and East Central Europe, he specializes in Habsburg and Jewish culture, sexual science and sensational culture, and fin-de-siècle studies. He is the author of Prague Territories: National Conflict and Cultural Innovation in Franz Kafka's Fin de Siècle, Violent Sensations: Sexuality, Crime, and Utopia in Vienna and Berlin, 1860-1914, and Modernism without Jews? German-Jewish Subjects and Histories.

Cosponsored by: Center for Austrian Studies, Dept. of German, Nordic, Scandinavian & Dutch, and the Center for German & European Studies.