Research fields on Jewish history

Jewish history cannot be seen in isolation from general history. Jews always acted and acted within societies and in interaction with their non-Jewish environment. Based on this, Jewish history must also always be understood as an intervention in traditional (regional) historiography, which, in part following national narrative patterns, sought to exclude Jewish history from general history or did not understand/understand it as its object of investigation.

To counter this, the Center for Jewish Studies focuses on Jewish regional history and critical (contemporary) historical research. CJS staff deal with the Jewish history of the 19th and 20th centuries in Austrian/Habsburg regions as well as with questions of anti-Semitism, persecution and robbery by the National Socialists and (Jewish) post-war history. The latter includes questions of memory studies as well as the examination of National Socialism and its crimes in Austrian society, culture and politics. The Center for Jewish Studies has established itself within the research landscape in Graz as a center of critical (contemporary) historical research and is actively involved in current historical and socio-political debates.

Jewish literatures deal with the diverse linguistic and cultural forms and interactions that have emerged in the literary-textual field since the Haskalah. Characterized by imperial, post-imperial, national or post-national experience, they each exhibit moments of entanglement, negotiation and mediation. Processes of encounter, transfer, translation and transmission, the negotiation of difference and similarity, and appropriation led, for example, to the formation of Jewish language cultures in German and Russian as well as to the emergence of modern Yiddish and Hebrew literature. From a comparative point of view, the objects, forms of representation and interactions of Jewish literatures that unfold(ed) in the European context and beyond it in migration are examined.

The cultural studies-oriented research focuses on Jewish and non-Jewish encounters and interactions and their effects on people's life plans. It primarily examines experiences and practices from everyday life as well as their cultural processing. The central analytical tool used in the associated work is the category of space.

One focus of the work on forms of Jewish-non-Jewish coexistence is the analysis of narrative formations in the field of Jewish studies in order to develop and test new methodological approaches. This makes a significant contribution to overcoming the theoretical distance often found in Jewish Studies.

Current research focuses on popular cultural activities and forms of entertainment, migration processes and Jewish-non-Jewish communication and interaction spaces. By examining these, possibilities for overcoming Jewish-non-Jewish dichotomies are considered. This is done, among other things, with the cultural studies concepts of performance and similarity.