Public lecture by Kenneth Moss

Title TBD. Kenneth Moss is Associate Professor, Felix Posen Chair in Modern Jewish History at Johns Hopkins University. 'I study modern Jewish history from the mid-18th century to the present, with a particular interest in Jewish political, intellectual, and cultural histories in 19th and 20th-century Russia and Poland/Eastern Europe, Palestine, and Israel to the present day. My research to date has focused (in reverse chronological order) on East European Jewish political culture, thought, and choice in the interwar period; interwar Jewish social and moral thought, particularly evolving Jewish conceptions of the relationship between economic and political upheaval, majority-minority relations and identities, political rationality and irrationality, explanation and extrapolation, power and powerlessness, and futurity and risk; the history and sociology of Jewish nationalism from the 1880s to the 1930s; the intertwined histories of Zionism and Jewish Diasporism; the history and interpretation of Yiddish and Hebrew literary culture; and the Jewish negotiation of modern concepts of culture, the aesthetic, and the secular. Currently, as I complete a book on interwar Polish Jewish political culture, my research interests are turning toward the post-war world, with particular interests in the history of Israeli thought, culture, planning, and extrapolation regarding the future; the persistence/resurgence of Jewish religiosity especially in non-liberal forms; the history of American Yiddish literary culture as a site of social thought and historical reflection on the American century. My teaching interests extend across a wide array of topics in modern Jewish history as well as 20th century and contemporary social theory; the history and sociology of nationalism; the institution of culture; the history of religion in modernity. My current book project, provisionally entitled The Unchosen People: Danger, Powerlessness and the Recasting of Polish Jewish Culture, Thought, and Politics in the Age of Fascism, is under advanced contract from Harvard University Press.'