Abstract: The EU-Funded RELATION – RESEARCH, KNOWLEDGE & EDUCATION AGAINST ANTISEMITISM project (https://www.relationproject.eu) aims at defining an innovative strategy that starts from a better knowledge of the Jewish history/traditions as part of the common history/traditions, and puts in place a set of educational activities in Belgium, Italy, Romania and Spain as well as online actions in order to tackle the phenomenon.
The project activities include the monitoring of antisemitism phenomenon online in the four countries of the project (Belgium, Italy, Romania and Spain) by creating a cross-country web-monitoring of illegal antisemitic hate speech.
The shadow monitoring exercises aim at:
● Analyzing the removal rate of illegal antisemitic hate speech available on diverse Social Media Platforms signatory to the Code of Conduct on countering illegal hate speech online, namely Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and TikTok.
● Analyzing the types of content and narratives collected by the research team.
Partners organizations focused on their country language: French for Belgium, Italian, Romanian and Spanish. Four organizations from four different countries (Belgium, Italy, Spain and Romania) took part in the monitoring exercise: Comunitat Jueva Bet Shalom De Catalunya (Bet Shalom, Spain), CEJI - A Jewish Contribution to an Inclusive Europe
(Belgium), Fondazione Centro Di Documentazione Ebraica Contemporanea (CDEC, Italy), Intercultural Institute Timișoara (IIT, Romania).
The monitoring exercise follows the definition of Illegal hate speech as defined “by the Framework Decision 2008/913/JHA of 28 November 2008 on combating certain forms and expressions of racism and xenophobia by means of criminal law and national laws transposing it, means all conduct publicly inciting to violence or hatred directed against a group of persons or a member of such a group defined by reference to race, colour, religion,
descent or national or ethnic origin.”
The content was collected and reported to social media platforms in three rounds between October 2022 and October 2023. Content was checked for removal after a week or so to give enough time to social media platforms to analyze and remove the content. The monitoring exercises devote particular attention to the intersection of antisemitism and sexism.
Abstract: The EU-Funded RELATION – RESEARCH, KNOWLEDGE & EDUCATION AGAINST ANTISEMITISM project (https://www.relationproject.eu) aims at defining an innovative strategy that starts from a better knowledge of the Jewish history/traditions as part of the common history/traditions, and puts in place a set of educational activities in Belgium, Italy, Romania and Spain as well as online actions in order to tackle the phenomenon.
The project activities include the monitoring of antisemitism phenomenon online in the four countries of the project (Belgium, Italy, Romania and Spain) by creating a cross-country webmonitoring of illegal antisemitic hate speech.
The monitoring exercises aim at:
● Analyzing the removal rate of illegal antisemitic hate speech available on diverse Social Media Platforms, namely Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and TikTok.
● Partners organizations focused on their country language: French in Belgium, Italian, Romanian and Spanish;
● Analyzing the types of content and narratives collected by the research team
Four organizations from four different countries (Belgium, Italy, Spain and Romania) took part in the monitoring exercise. Comunitat Jueva Bet Shalom De Catalunya (Bet Shalom, Spain), CEJI - A Jewish Contribution to an Inclusive Europe (Belgium), Fondazione Centro Di Documentazione Ebraica Contemporanea (CDEC, Italy), Intercultural Institute Timișoara (IIT, Romania).
The monitoring exercise follows the definition of Illegal hate speech as defined “by the Framework Decision 2008/913/JHA of 28 November 2008 on combating certain forms and expressions of racism and xenophobia by means of criminal law and national laws transposing it, means all conduct publicly inciting to violence or hatred directed against a group of persons or a member of such a group defined by reference to race, colour, religion, descent or national or ethnic origin.”
The content was collected and reported to social media platforms between April 21st and 22nd, 2023. Content was checked for removal on April 26th to give enough time to social media platforms to analyze and remove the content.1 The monitoring exercises devote particular attention to the intersection of antisemitism and sexism.
Abstract: The EU-Funded RELATION – RESEARCH, KNOWLEDGE & EDUCATION AGAINST ANTISEMITISM project https://www.relationproject.eu) aims at defining an innovative strategy that starts from a better knowledge of the Jewish history/traditions as part of the common history/traditions, and puts in place a set of educational activities in Belgium, Italy, Romania and Spain as well as online actions in order to tackle the phenomenon.
The project activities include the monitoring of antisemitism phenomenon online in the four countries of the project (Belgium, Italy, Romania and Spain) by creating a cross-country webmonitoring of illegal antisemitic hate speech.
The monitoring exercises aim at
• Analysing the removal rate of illegal antisemitic hate speech available on diverse Social Media Platforms, namely Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and TikTok.
• Partners organisations focused on their country language: French in Belgium, Italian, Romanian and Spanish;
• Analysing the types of content and narratives collected by the research team.
Four organisations from four different countries (Belgium, Italy, Spain and Romania) took part in the monitoring exercise. Comunitat Jueva Bet Shalom De Catalunya (Bet Shalom, Spain), CEJI - A Jewish Contribution to an Inclusive Europe (Belgium), Fondazione Centro Di Documentazione Ebraica Contemporanea (CDEC, Italy), Intercultural Institute Timișoara (IIT, Romania).
The monitoring exercise follows the definition of Illegal hate speech as defined “by the Framework Decision 2008/913/JHA of 28 November 2008 on combating certain forms and expressions of racism and xenophobia by means of criminal law and national laws transposing it, means all conduct publicly inciting to violence or hatred directed against a group of persons or a member of such a group defined by reference to race, colour, religion, descent or national or ethnic origin.”
The content was collected and reported to social media platforms between October 6th and 7th, 2022. Content was checked for removal on October 12th to give enough time to social media platforms to analyse and remove the content. The monitoring exercises devote particular attention to the intersection of antisemitism and sexism.
Abstract: While Holocaust education has been mandatory in Romanian schools for over a decade, educators do not necessarily teach about it. Distortion and obfuscation of Romanian Holocaust crimes during the communist and transition periods means that teachers, like the majority of Romanians, know little about their country’s perpetration of genocides. From 1941 to 1944, the Romanian regime transported part of its Jewish and Romani populations to death camps in Transnistria, where over 200,000 Jews and over 10,000 Roma were killed. Under communism, blame for genocides was placed solely on Nazi Germany, thereby absolving Romanian perpetrators. Post-communism, the official narrative has slowly come under scrutiny, allowing for a restructuring of World War II history to incorporate the deportations and deaths of the country’s Jews and Roma. Ignorance about the Holocaust and prejudice about the minorities affected are at the root of non-compliance in teaching. This is especially the case for the Roma, who are the largest minority in Romania and face continued marginalization and discrimination. In this paper, I focus on cognitive barriers that many history and civics teachers have regarding teaching about the victimization of the Roma minority. These barriers are intrinsically tied to acceptance of new narratives of the Holocaust and reconfigurations of ethnic identities in post-socialist Romania where pressures from the European Union and the USA, among others, have pushed for critical examination of past atrocities in order to strengthen democratic processes.
Abstract: In 2009, the Romanian government unveiled a $7.4 million Holocaust memorial to commemorate over 280,000 Jews and 11,000 Roma who died as victims of the Ion Antonescu regime. Located in central Bucharest, the monument is part of a national agenda, outlined by an international commission, to study the crimes of the Holocaust in Romania and to help the country come to terms with historical atrocities. Under communism and in the early post-communist period, the Romanian state denied its role in the Holocaust. In this article, we explore the representation of the Holocaust and, in particular, Roma victims in the dominant historical narrative and the Holocaust memorial. We delve into discourses around this monument, which feed into a larger dialogue of victim recognition and contested national narratives about the Holocaust. We highlight the construction and contestation of the Holocaust memorial, considering in particular the paradox of Roma victims and suggesting that Roma are simultaneously represented, unrepresented and misrepresented in the historical story and memorial of the Holocaust in Romania.
Abstract: EUJS has published a report on the Rise of Antisemitism at European Universities as a result of the October 7 Massacre. For the compilation of this report, we received more than one hundred and ten (110) reports of antisemitic incidents across Europe. However, this in no way reflects the true magnitude of incidents that have taken place, as many have gone unreported.
This report has been sent out to the European Commission, Members of the European Parliament, major Jewish organisations, Heads of Jewish communities, our Partners, Universities, and the press.
The message we want to spread with the report is: Jewish students do not feel safe on their campuses. Jewish students have even stopped attending classes out of fear due to the extremely hostile campus atmosphere. In 2024, this is unacceptable.
The European Union of Jewish Students will continue to gather information and data on antisemitism from University campuses across Europe. We will continue to fight against all forms of antisemitism, be it on campus or online, and to protect our Jewish students. We will continue, throughout, to advocate for a world that will allow for Jews to showcase and celebrate their Judaism in a positive way. But for this, collaboration on a university, institutional, governmental, and societal level is needed
Abstract: The present report provides an overview of data on antisemitism as recorded by international organisations and by official and unofficial sources in the European Union (EU) Member States. Furthermore, the report includes data concerning the United Kingdom, which in 2019 was still a Member State of the EU. For the first time, the report also presents available statistics and other information with respect to North Macedonia and Serbia, as countries with an observer status to the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA). All data presented in the report are based on the respective countries’ own definitions and categorisations of antisemitic behaviour. At the same time, an increasing number of countries are using the working definition of antisemitism developed by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), and there are efforts to further improve hate crime data collection in the EU, including through the work of the Working Group on hate crime recording, data collection and encouraging reporting (2019–2021), which FRA facilitates. ‘Official data’ are understood in the context of this report as those collected by law enforcement agencies, other authorities that are part of criminal justice systems and relevant state ministries at national level. ‘Unofficial data’ refers to data collected by civil society organisations.
This annual overview provides an update on the most recent figures on antisemitic incidents, covering the period 1 January 2009 – 31 December 2019, across the EU Member States, where data are available. It includes a section that presents the legal framework and evidence from international organisations. The report also provides an overview of national action plans and other measures to prevent and combat antisemitism, as well as information on how countries have adopted or endorsed the non-legally binding working definition of antisemitism adopted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) (2016) as well as how they use or intend to use it.
This is the 16th edition of FRA’s report on the situation of data collection on antisemitism in the EU (including reports published by FRA’s predecessor, the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia).
Abstract: Over the past 3.5 years, the Decoding Antisemitism research project has been analysing antisemitism on the internet in terms of content, structure, and frequency. Over this time, there has been no shortage of flashpoints which have generated antisemitic responses. Yet the online response to the Hamas attacks of 7 October and the subsequent Israeli operations in Gaza has surpassed anything the project has witnessed before. In no preceding escalation phase of the Arab-Israeli conflict has the predominant antisemitic reaction been one of open jubilation and joy over the deaths of Israeli Jews. As demonstrated in the sixth and final Discourse Report, this explicit approval of the Hamas attacks was the primary response from web users. The response to 7 October therefore represents a turning point in antisemitic online discourse, and its repercussions will be felt long into the future.
The report contains analysis of the various stages of online reactions to events in the Middle East, from the immediate aftermath to the Israeli retaliations and subsequent accusations of genocide against Israel. As well as examining online reactions in the project’s core focus—the United Kingdom, France, and Germany—this report also, for the first time, extends its view to analyse Israel-related web discourses in six further countries, including those in Southern and Eastern Europe as well as in North Africa. Alongside reactions to the escalation phase, the report also examines online responses to billionaire Elon Musk’s explosive comments about Jewish individuals and institutions.
Additionally, the report provides a retrospective overview of the project’s development over the past 3.5 years, tracking its successes and challenges, particularly regarding the conditions for successful interdisciplinary work and the ability of machine learning to capture the versatility and complexity of authentic web communication.
To mark the publication of the report, we are also sharing our new, interactive data visualisations tool, which lets you examine any two discourse events analysed by our research team between 2021 and 2023. You can compare the frequencies and co-occurrences of antisemitic concepts and speech acts by type and by country, look at frequencies of keywords in antisemitic comments, and plot keyword networks.
Abstract: Common antisemitic visual representations are rooted in Ancient Christianity and the Middle Ages, but we have also witnessed new developments after the Holocaust and the condemnation of fascism. Stereotyping and dehumanization through zoomorphism, demonization, exaggeration of certain physical features anchored in the false presumptions of physiognomy and other visual devices have been weaponized across the centuries for racist and antisemitic agendas. This study undergoes a comparative analysis of two corpuses of antisemitic images from the Romanian press and social media at a distance of one century between them. I analyze the persistency, transformations, and new developments of antisemitic image codes popularized by the Romanian far-right from the start of the 20th century, through to the rise of fascism and the Second World War, up to the present-day social media. This visual qualitative analysis with critical historical insights is carried out on the following corpuses: a) a contemporary subset of 81 memes, digital stickers, and other visuals from 17 Romanian far-right Telegram channels and groups posted over the course of one year (August 2022 – August 2023); and b) 70 archival political cartoons published by 17 far-right ultranationalist newspapers (and one pro-Soviet communist newspaper) between 1911 and 1948. Findings show how persistent certain antisemitic stereotypes have proven across time and different cultural spaces – the hook-nose, zoomorphism, the blood-libel accusations, Judeo-Bolshevism, the satanic representations – and how the visual dimension serves to efficiently implant antisemitic narratives in the collective mind. These (visual) narratives are skillfully recontextualized to fit new (geo-)political realities – the post-Holocaust times, the COVID-19 crisis, the war in Ukraine.
Abstract: The historiography and the memory of the Holocaust, of the Romanians, and of Romanian Jews can be understood only through knowledge of the peculiarities of the Holocaust in Romania within the wider context of Holocaust Studies. Certain characteristic features of the history of the modernization of Romania in the twentieth century turned the “Jewish problem” into an ideologically active element, present on a large scale in the public sphere. Unquestionably, the tragedy of the Romanian Jewry was bound up with the European context, but it also had its own manifestations because of the political regime in Romania from 1938 to 1944. Six decades ago, Lucretiu Pătrăşcanu accurately remarked that “anti-Semitism in Romania still remains a Romanian phenomenon, which should be examined in its specific nature, and not only in what it imitates” (1944, 171). Romanians never embraced this research project; instead, they explained the Romanian Holocaust by blaming it on imported Fascism. One of the most frequently invoked reasons for this neglect is the ideology of national Communism; in this view, everything Romanian was good, while the origin of evil was always from outside. According to this preconception, risen to the rank of a “theory” of history, atrocities either did not occur in Romania from 1938 to 1944 or, if they happened, were caused by external forces.
Abstract: For many decades, the Holocaust in South-Eastern Europe lacked the required introspection, research and study, and most importantly, access to archives and documentation. Only in recent years and with the significant help of an emerging generation of local scholars, the Holocaust from this region became the focus of many studies.
In 2018, under the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure umbrella, the Elie Wiesel National Institute for the Study of the Holocaust in Romania organized a workshop dedicated to Holocaust research, education and remembrance in South-Eastern Europe. The present volume is a natural continuation of the above-mentioned workshop with the aim of introducing the current state of Holocaust research in the region to different categories of scholars in the field of Holocaust studies, to students and—why not—to the general public. Our scope, not an exhaustive one, is to present a historical contextualization using archival resources, to display the variety of recordings of discrimination, destruction and rescue efforts, and to introduce the remembrance initiatives and processes developed in the region in the aftermath of the Holocaust.
Abstract: Linking our own research interest for the processes of public memory building and remembrance of difficult pasts through the lens of heritage-work, the aim of the current study is to address discourses on ‘the Holocaust issue’ and perceptions of Jews in Romania after more than two decades since the 1989 Revolution. Our focus is mainly on the perceptions of Jewish people from the city of Oradea, a territory where two thirds of about 27000 Jews were killed during WWII. By examining private initiatives of heritage-making carried out with the purpose of contributing to the preservation of the memory of those killed during WWII and comparing them with the official ones, we intend to disclose aspects of the ‘social distance’ and intercultural communication on this Romanian territory where Jews and Roma people were ghettoized, then sent directly to extermination camps (mainly to Auschwitz), where a genocide was carried out. The symbolic re-enactment of Jewish history in the public sphere through heritage-making helps remodel perceptions, attitudes, and behaviours in a multi-ethnic society by promoting moral values regarding other human beings such as tolerance and mutual respect. Therefore, our study inquires to what extent the public memory relating to the Holocaust contributed to shaping social relationships in a multi-cultural society. Our anthropological reflection on the (re-)enactment of the Jewish history during the Holocaust through heritage-making and its social appropriation offer insights into (1) discourses on the Holocaust in Romania and the way in which public memory operates, (2) perceptions of Jews among local people from Oradea and, (3) the building of identity narratives on the acknowledgment or denial of a dark side in our past.
Abstract: The Fifth Survey of European Jewish Community Leaders and Professionals, 2021 presents the results of an online survey offered in 10 languages and administered to 1054 respondents in 31 countries. Conducted every three years using the same format, the survey seeks to identify trends and their evolution in time.
Even if European Jewish leaders and community professionals rank antisemitism and combatting it among their first concerns and priorities, they are similarly committed to expanding Jewish communities and fostering future sustainability by engaging more young people and unaffiliated Jews.
The survey covers a wide variety of topics including the toll of COVID-19 on European Jewish communities and a widening generational gap around pivotal issues. Conducted every three years since 2008, the study is part of JDC’s wider work in Europe, which includes its partnerships with local Jewish communities and programs aiding needy Jews, fostering Jewish life and leaders, resilience training.
The respondents were comprised of presidents and chairpersons of nationwide “umbrella organizations” or Federations; presidents and executive directors of private Jewish foundations, charities, and other privately funded initiatives; presidents and main representatives of Jewish communities that are organized at a city level; executive directors and programme coordinators, as well as current and former board members of Jewish organizations; among others.
The JDC International Centre for Community Development established the survey as a means to identify the priorities, sensibilities and concerns of Europe’s top Jewish leaders and professionals working in Jewish institutions, taking into account the changes that European Jewry has gone through since 1989, and the current political challenges and uncertainties in the continent. In a landscape with few mechanisms that can truly gauge these phenomena, the European Jewish Community Leaders Survey is an essential tool for analysis and applied research in the field of community development.
Abstract: Many in Europe today are concerned about the rise in violence against Jews, which clearly raises fears in Jewish communities on the Continent. Neither Jewish communities nor individual Jews can be protected unless there is data on antisemitic incidents and scientifically thorough situation analysis. We need to know and analyze the current social attitudes related to antisemitism, to the coexistence with Jews, mutually held prejudices, related taboos in a representative sample of the European countries’ population.
This is the reason why we have launched the largest European antisemitism survey. The research, initiated by the Action and Protection League and carried out by the polling companies Ipsos and Inspira, aims to provide a comprehensive picture of antisemitic prejudice in 16 countries in the European Union.
Data were collected between December 2019 and January 2020 in 16 European countries: Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, United Kingdom. 1000 people were surveyed in each country.
We used a total of 24 questions to measure antisemitism. We measured the cognitive and conative dimensions of prejudice with 10 questions, and three additional questions for the affective dimension of antisemitism, that is, to measure the emotional charge of antisemitic prejudice. We mapped secondary antisemitism relativizing the Holocaust with seven questions and antisemitic hostility against Israel with four questions. We used two and three questions, respectively, to measure sympathy for Jews and for Israel.
With the exception of questions about affective antisemitism, all questions were asked in the same form: Respondents were asked to indicate on a five-point scale how much they agreed with the statements in the question (strongly agree; tend to agree; neither agree nor disagree; tend to disagree; strongly disagree).
Abstract: Many in Europe today are concerned about the rise in violence against Jews, which clearly raises fears in Jewish communities on the Continent. Neither Jewish communities nor individual Jews can be protected unless there is data on antisemitic incidents and scientifically thorough situation analysis. We need to know and analyze the current social attitudes related to antisemitism, to the coexistence with Jews, mutually held prejudices, related taboos in a representative sample of the European countries’ population.
This is the reason why we have launched the largest European antisemitism survey. The research, initiated by the Action and Protection League and carried out by the polling companies Ipsos and Inspira, aims to provide a comprehensive picture of antisemitic prejudice in 16 countries in the European Union.
Data were collected between December 2019 and January 2020 in 16 European countries: Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, United Kingdom. 1000 people were surveyed in each country.
We used a total of 24 questions to measure antisemitism. We measured the cognitive and conative dimensions of prejudice with 10 questions, and three additional questions for the affective dimension of antisemitism, that is, to measure the emotional charge of antisemitic prejudice. We mapped secondary antisemitism relativizing the Holocaust with seven questions and antisemitic hostility against Israel with four questions. We used two and three questions, respectively, to measure sympathy for Jews and for Israel.
With the exception of questions about affective antisemitism, all questions were asked in the same form: Respondents were asked to indicate on a five-point scale how much they agreed with the statements in the question (strongly agree; tend to agree; neither agree nor disagree; tend to disagree; strongly disagree).
Abstract: The research studies dedicated to the memory of the Second World War have become a research priority in Europe, particularly after the fall of the communist regime and the re-establishment of the balance of power between the East and the West, in close connection with the social, cultural, and identity-based policies promoted by the European Union. The main objective of such studies is to understand the manner in which the Second World War is remembered, starting from the assumption that “the past is always practiced in the present, not because the past imposes itself, but because subjects in the present fashion the past in the practice of their social identity” (Friedman, 1994 quoted by Kapralski, 2017, 2). Research efforts have been mostly aimed at the study of war “narratives” in general and the Holocaust narrative in particular, the latter becoming the dominant narrative in Europe after the 1990s. Following this line of research, the current study seeks to outline the agenda of commemorative events dedicated to the memory of the Holocaust in Romania, as well as the actors and the narratives they promote, relying on a corpus of 116 online press contents commemorating the Holocaust, as published in the online edition of Adevărul, in the period between March 2015 and March 2020.
Abstract: In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Jewish socialist movement played a vital role in protecting workers’ rights throughout Europe and the Americas. Yet few traces of this movement or its accomplishments have been preserved or memorialized in Jewish heritage sites.
The Remembered and Forgotten Jewish World investigates the politics of heritage tourism and collective memory. In an account that is part travelogue, part social history, and part family saga, acclaimed historian Daniel J. Walkowitz visits key Jewish museums and heritage sites from Berlin to Belgrade, from Krakow to Kiev, and from Warsaw to New York, to discover which stories of the Jewish experience are told and which are silenced. As he travels to thirteen different locations, participates in tours, displays, and public programs, and gleans insight from local historians, he juxtaposes the historical record with the stories presented in heritage tourism. What he finds raises provocative questions about the heritage tourism industry and its role in determining how we perceive Jewish history and identity. This book offers a unique perspective on the importance of collective memory and the dangers of collective forgetting.
Abstract: This article addresses the persistence of anti-Semitism in Romania, placed in the context of some recent debates concerning the memory of the Holocaust in the country, as well as in the area of Central and Eastern Europe more broadly. It argues that, despite significant improvements in terms of legislation, the memory of the Holocaust remains a highly contested issue in contemporary Romania, torn between the attempts to join in the European memory of the Holocaust and local legacies that on the one hand focus primarily on the suffering of Romanians under the communist regime, and on the other perform a symbolic “denationalisation” of the Jewish minority in the country, whose own suffering is thus excised from national memory. It does so by focusing in particular on the debates surrounding the adoption of Law 217/2015, meant to clarify earlier legislation on Holocaust denial, and comparing them with those prompted by the Ukrainian “memory laws” passed in the same year. Taking into account both the national and international reactions to these very different pieces of legislation, the article shows the still-persisting discrepancy between a (mostly Western) “European” memory of the legacy of the twentieth century and local memory topoi characteristic of the countries that were part of the former socialist bloc.
Abstract: Travelogue – On the Contemporary Understandings of Citizenship among European Jews – title and subject of Theodor Barth’s thesis – encompasses six books with ethnography based on a multi-sited fieldwork, in Central- & Eastern European Jewish communities.
The books are concerned with aspects of their own conditions of production, from fieldwork research to writing, alongside the ethnographic subject of the Travelogue: the conditions of Jewish communities (mainly in cities of Central and Eastern Europe) in the last half of the 1990s (1995-99).
The books root the model experiments developed throughout the Travelogue in different ethnographic contexts.
Book 1 (Spanning the Fringes – Vagrancy to Prague) is a traveller’s tale with quite contingent, serendipitous, and very short-term trips to sample Jewish life in St. Petersburg, Vilnius, Warsaw, Kiev, Bucharest, Sofia, and Budapest.
Book 2 (The Minutes of the ECJC) is a commentary and analysis around a conference which the candidate attended in Prague in 1995 of the European Council of Jewish Communities (ECJC). It focuses on the political work and changing strategies of the ECJC. This book establishes some of the terms of the problems of community-Jews in Europe.
Book 3 (The Zagreb Almanach) is a description and analysis of the candidate’s stay with the Jewish community of Zagreb, focusing on a place, a green room, the community centre itself—this is the closest to a traditional site of community living in his ethnographic research.
Book 4 (The Books of Zagreb and Sarajevo) provides a contemporary and contextualized reading of a key Jewish ritual complex—the Passover Seder and its text, the Haggadah. This is a cultural object for systematic iteration and commentary, on which to articulate in depth a number of his insights gained more diffusely from observation. Among all the books, book 4 is the one intensive piece in which the textual analysis defines a process through which the candidate intends to sensitise the reader to how pattern can emerge from details.
Book 5 (Thirteen Kisses—a Manual of Survival From Sarajevo) relates a testimonial account of how the activist group La Benevolencija functioned in Sarajevo humanitarian relief during the Bosnian War of 1992-95. The candidate hopes to demonstrate a slow transition from wartime testimonials in the presence of an anthropologist, to recognition in the urban commonwealth in the aftermath of the war. He also invites the reader to consider the particularities of survivor testimonies and contrast these to how the war-zone was perceived from the outside.
Book 6 (The Account of the Lifeline) provides an understanding of a search and accountability model developed by La Benevolencija—in co-operation with the Joint—during the war in Bosnia (1992-95). It consolidates and expands the account of the Jews in Sarajevo and their humanitarian actions, through the candidate’s work on archives of the Joint (American Joint Distribution Committee) in Paris.
The six books of the Travelogue are rounded up in three concluding sections, containing 1) a synopsis of the findings across the books (Frames – Modeling Disordered Systems), 2) an account for the process of visual modeling throughout the books (Design – Choices and Aggregates), 3) a bibliographic presentation in which various sources influenced the conceptual choices and experiments that are made throughout the manuscript are discussed (Bibliography: Reflective Readings). In this way, the candidate hopes to retrace his steps from the findings, via the crafting of the volume back to the ranks of colleagues and readers.
