MCAHS Summer Research Workshop Microcosms of the Holocaust: Emotional Communities in the Modern Metropoles of Nazi-Occupied Europe

Throughout the big cities of twentieth-century Europe, Jews and Gentiles lived together, often enmeshed in tight networks that crosscut public and private spheres. Both communities are well-studied in the historiography of the Holocaust, but often is isolation. This workshop examines how the interactions of Jews and
Gentiles evolved, during the Holocaust and in the immediate pre- and postwar years. Participants focus on various metropolitan areas in both Eastern and Western Europe where relations between large groups of acculturated Jews and their non-Jewish fellow citizens remained largely free from prewar antisemitic socialization. Drawing on the scholarship on affective relations and the emotional communities they form, the group will analyze transnational patterns in the nature and extent of these relations before the war, their durability (or lack thereof) in the face of increasing antisemitic violence, the extent to which they translated into concrete action during the Holocaust, and the reconstitution of Jewish-Gentile relations in the wake of the Holocaust.