A Catholic Woman and Her Jewish Family in Nineteenth-Century Poland: A Coming-of-Age Tale about National Identity, Religion and Alienation

Dr. Karen Auerbach, Department of History and the Carolina Center for Jewish Studies, UNC-CH

This talk reconstructs the life history and fractured identity of a young Polish woman from a Jewish family in Warsaw at the turn of the twentieth century as she navigated evolving conceptions of nation, ethnicity, religion and race. Drawing on her diary and family papers, the talk will examine her family’s path from Judaism to Catholicism as a case study of the ambiguities and contradictions in the role of religion and culture in notions of national belonging in fin-de-siecle Eastern Europe and beyond. 

This lecture is the first in a three-part series of webinars covering this topic. 
The other two speakers are Anna Hájková (4/7) and Marion Kaplan (4/21).