Keeping Contact: Jewish Cultural Initiatives Across Cold War Borders

Keeping Contact: Jewish Cultural Initiatives Across Cold War Borders builds upon discussions of Jewish survival and cultural viability after the Holocaust in Eastern and Central Europe, including the Soviet Union. This book confronts both a shifting postwar geopolitical landscape and the remnants of devastated European Jewish populations with their global diasporas, tragically and radically transformed. The volume traces the flow of ideas, people, cultural practices and materials, and even bodily remains across securitized Cold War borders, as the postwar geography of European Jewish life largely shifted to Israel and North America. How did Jews and Jewish institutions across hostile Cold War geopolitical boundaries seek and maintain contact with each other? Contact meant continuity. Contact was a means of mapping the Cold War terrain, of exploring strategies of adaptation, conservation, and reconstruction. It meant rabbis’ reprised visits to the USSR, wholesale movement of libraries, dissent, dashed dreams of belonging, and urns of ashes.

Rebekah Klein-Pejšová is an associate professor of history and Jewish studies, and director of the Human Rights Program at Purdue University. She specializes in modern East Central European and Jewish history, with special attention to intergroup relations, refugees, and migration. She is the author of Mapping Jewish Loyalties in Interwar Slovakia, and her current book project examines temporalities of postwar Jewish displacement, dispersion, and diaspora.

Jacob Ari Labendz directs the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Ramapo College of New Jersey. He researches Cold War Jewish history with a focus on Jews in and from Czechoslovakia, cultures of diaspora and belonging, the state management of minority populations and their communal properties, as well as the politics of memory and antisemitism. He is the editor of Jewish Property After 1945 and coeditor of Jewish Veganism and Vegetarianism.