“Jewish space” immediately conjures up images of urban sites bearing visible evidence of Jews or Jewish culture, such as Vienna’s traditionally Jewish Leopoldstadt district. But other spaces can also be implicitly perceived as Jewish, for a variety of reasons. Through historical analysis of Vienna’s built environment and its depiction in the testimony of Austrian Jews forced to leave after 1938, this talk will explore how a complex coding of Jewish difference translated onto space affected how all Vienna’s residents navigated – and imagined – their city.

About the Speaker: Lisa Silverman is Associate Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Her research interests include modern German and Austrian Jewish history, Jewish cultural studies, and the history of the Holocaust and its representation. She is also the author of Becoming Austrians: Jews and Culture between the World Wars (NY Oxford UP) and Interwar Vienna: Culture between Tradition and Modernity (Camden House).