Languages of Marginality and Domination: Jews in Interwar Yugoslavia – Emil Kerenji

The appearance of Yugoslavia on the political map of Europe in the aftermath of World War I confronted the culturally and linguistically diverse Jewish populations of the former Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian imperial borderlands with the question of what it meant to be a “Yugoslav” Jewish community. From Zionism to Sephardism, Jewish activists negotiated the meanings, limitations, and fractures of Jewish politics in the complex mosaic of the newly unified western Balkans. Debates on various political questions, amply and eagerly featured in the newly blossoming Jewish press in Serbo-Croatian, reflected profound Jewish anxieties about Jewish cultural diversity and marginality, both in the context of Yugoslavia and global Jewish politics and culture. This presentation outlines the most important political debates in the Serbo-Croatian Jewish press in Yugoslavia until the outbreak of World War II: the question of cultural hegemony of Yugoslav Zionism amidst the Ashkenazi/Sephardi communal rivalry; the question of purported political “backwardness” of the formerly Ottoman Sephardi communities in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Macedonia; and the question of national and international Jewish “colonization” and the relationship to Palestine. In so doing, it portrays the community in flux, marks the period of profound transformation, and traces the literal and metaphorical new languages of community.

Emil Kerenji is a historian of modern Jewish and East European history, with expertise in the history of the Holocaust and World War II in Yugoslavia and the Balkans more broadly. His research focuses on the relationship of genocidal violence against Jews and violent nationalizing regional policies of states allied with Nazi Germany. He is also an expert on the history of Jewish communities in the western Balkans. Emil Kerenji has worked as a staff historian at the Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum since 2009. He authored and co-authored the Museum’s publications on the history of Jewish responses to the Holocaust, as well as many academic articles, essays, and academic and literary translations.

Thursday, February 11, 2027 • 306 Royce Hall • 2 PM
Languages of Marginality and Domination: Jews in Interwar Yugoslavia
Emil Kerenji (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum)
Moderator: Sarah Abrevaya Stein (UCLA)

Al Finci Distinguished Lecture in Jewish Studies