Wandering Jews? The History of Jewish Migrations During the 20th Century

We hope you will join us for this presentation by Tobias Brinkmann of the Penn State Jewish Studies Program. This talk raises the question of whether Jewish migrations are an exceptional phenomenon, related primarily to persecution or whether the experiences and motivations of Jewish migrants resemble those of other migrants. The talk will focus on several scholars who grappled with this question during and after the Holocaust in the 1940s. All were émigrés from Europe who fled Nazi persecution and lost close family members in the Holocaust. Several argued that Jewish migrations were distinctive because Jews were a “wandering people” fleeing constant persecution throughout history. This view still lingers in collective Jewish memory, while others have made a case for contextualizing Jewish migrations.