An Introduction to Central and Eastern Europe (CEE)

This lecture is an introduction to a course that I run at the Centre for European Studies on the subject of the Jewish heritage of Polish Galicia (southern Poland). This territory had an extremely dense Jewish population before the Second World War, which was almost completely wiped out during the Holocaust. However, there are many physical traces of that Jewish past that have survived---empty synagogue buildings, for example, or abandoned Jewish cemeteries, as well as Holocaust memorials dotted around the countryside. What this course is about is how to make sense of these ruins of the past. For example, how do local people cope after a genocide? What memories of the past do they try to preserve, and what gets forgotten? In particular, what is it that gets shown in local museums about the vanished Jewish culture of this region? What are their assumptions about the nature of the Jewish heritage, today often reconstructed also by tourist and other local agencies? The course is intended for interdisciplinary students---no prior knowledge of Jewish culture is required, nor anthropology, nor museum studies, although the course dips into all those fields.