“Representations of Jews in the Contemporary European Popular Culture”

The interest in Things Jewish has become increasingly noticeable in the last decades, with new Jewish museums opening around the globe, Jewish festivals turning into mass events and Jewish heritage becoming a saleable good. At the same time, in many places worldwide the new generation of Jews is rediscovering and redefining their Jewish identity. The new representations of Jewishness, generated both by Jews and non-Jews, reflect the dynamics of this new upsurge of memory. Scholars have been trying to pinpoint the reasons and implications of this recent process, yet a comprehensive analysis of the representations generated by the Jewish heritage boom is still lacking.

In order to investigate the new ways in which Jewish heritage is being discovered and presented at the turn of the 20th/21st centuries, we propose an interdisciplinary conference that would address images of Jews and Jewish culture which circulate in the public sphere and are accessible, co-produced, and consumed by non-Jews too, such as Jewish festivals, folklore, arts, film and cartoons, internet and multimedia, and heritage tourism. The conference proposes a diachronic approach to the representations of Jewishness, examining how the present day manifestations of Jewishness challenge or reproduce old clichés. Although Europe would be the starting point of this conference, contributions dealing with representations of Jews outside of Europe would also be welcome.

Researchers interested in presenting a paper should send a 250-word abstract and a CV by 15 June 2008 to jrconference@gmail.com