Presented by Dr. Marsha Rozenblit
Harvey M. Meyerhoff Professor of Modern Jewish History at the University of Maryland
Vienna was home to one of the largest Jewish communities in Europe in the early twentieth century. These Jews, mostly immigrants from other parts of Austria-Hungary, especially Bohemia and Moravia (today's Czech Republic), Hungary, and Galicia (today partly in Poland and partly in Ukraine), or their Viennese-born children happily acculturated into Viennese German culture and society. Some of them even became leading figures in Viennese culture. But all of them lived in a very antisemitic city, where the Christian Social Party, led by Karl Lueger, came to dominate politics in the late nineteenth century and in the interwar period. While the party never overtly discriminated against the Jews, it did create an environment that made the Jews nervous about their place in society.
This talk will explore what it meant to be a Jew in Vienna, the Vienna in which Rabbi Joshua Haberman, z”l grew up.
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Barring technical issues, the recording of this program will be posted on our Program Recording Archive.
This program is sponsored by the Schick family, in loving memory of Renee and Frank Schick.
Marsha Rozenblit is the Harvey M. Meyerhoff Professor of Modern Jewish History at the University of Maryland, where she has been on the faculty since 1978. A social historian of the Jews of nineteenth-century Central Europe, she is the author of two scholarly books: The Jews of Vienna, 1867-1914; Assimilation and Identity (1983) and The Jews of Habsburg Austria During World War 1 (2001).
She has also edited two scholarly books: Constructing Nationalities in East Central Europe (2001) and World War I and the Jews: Conflict and Transformation in Europe, the Middle East and America (2017); and she has published about 35 scholarly articles on such topics as Jewish marriage and courtship in 1920s Vienna, Jewish religious reform in 19th century Vienna, and German-Jewish Schools in Moravia. Prof. Rozenblit was born, raised, and educated in New York, and she received her Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1980. She has served as the president of the Association for Jewish Studies (2009-2011) and as the director of the Meyerhoff Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Maryland (1998-2003 and 2006-2007).