Jewish and Non-Jewish Spaces in the Urban Context

Alina Gromova studied Jewish studies and English studies in Berlin, Potsdam, and Melbourne. In 2013, she completed her doctoral thesis on Russian-speaking Jews in Berlin, for which she received the Humboldt Award in the field of Judaism/antisemitism. During her doctoral studies, she worked as a guide at the Jewish Museum Berlin and helped to establish a foundation for the promotion of Jewish women.

Sebastian Voigt lives in Munich and Leipzig and is a research assistant at the Institute of Contemporary History in Munich. He studied history, German, philosophy, and pedagogy in Freiburg im Breisgau, Amherst/Massachusetts, and Leipzig. From 2003 to 2012, Voigt held a position at the Simon Dubnow Institute for Jewish History and Culture of the University of Leipzig. From 2009 to 2012, he was a doctoral fellow of the Hans Böckler Foundation, and in 2013, he successfully defended his doctoral thesis on the topic Zwischen Résistance und Holocaust. Zur Erfahrungsgeschichte von Pierre Goldman, Daniel Cohn-Bendit und André Glucksmann im Nachkriegsfrankreich [Between the Résistance and the Holocaust. On the Experiences of Pierre Goldman, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, and André Glucksmann in Post-War France]. Currently he is researching the origins and evolution of European knowledge societies. He is coeditor of the series Relationen. Essays zur Gegenwart [Relations. Essays on the Present], published by Neofelis.

The unifying thread of the interdisciplinary volume Jewish and Non-Jewish Spaces in the Urban Context is the fact that Jewish spaces are almost always generated in relation to non-Jewish spaces; they determine and influence each other.

This general phenomenon will be scrutinized and put to the test again and again in a varied collection of articles by international experienced researchers as well as junior scholars using various urban contexts and discourses as data. From the viewpoints of different temporal and regional research traditions and disciplines the contributors deal with the question of how Jewish and non-Jewish spaces are imagined, constructed, negotiated and intertwined. All examples and case studies together create a mosaic of possibilities for the construction of Jewish and non-Jewish spaces in different settings.

The list of examined topics ranges from synagogues to ghettos, from urban neighborhoods to cafés and festivals, from art to literature. This diversity makes the volume a challenging effort of giving an overview of the current academic discussion in Europe and beyond. Although the majority of the contributions are focused on Central and Eastern Europe, a more general tendency becomes apparent in all articles: the negotiation of urban spaces seems to be a complex and ambivalent process in which a large number of participants are involved. In this regard, the volume would also like to contribute to trans-disciplinary urban studies and critical research on spatial relations.