Trauma on the Eastern Front: European Jews and the First World War
David Rechter, Professor of Modern Jewish History, University of Oxford

Date: 21 May 2015
Time: 18.30-20.00
Venue: Birkbeck, University of London, Bloomsbury, WC1E 7HX, Room B33, Torrinngton Square Main Entrance

In Jewish collective memory, the First World War has long been overshadowed by the incomparably greater disaster of World War Two and the Holocaust. But at the time, and for the following generation, Jews regarded the Great War as an unprecedented catastrophe. If for the Jews of eastern Europe in particular the war was a protracted trauma, its effects were profound also for Jews elsewhere in Europe and further afield in the United States and the Middle East. The importance of the war for European and global history has been evident for a hundred years. Its consequences and meanings for Jews and Jewish history, however, have received remarkably little attention. Only by understanding the Jewish experience of the First World War, David Rechter suggests, can we properly grasp the course of later Jewish history and the tragedy that was to come.