Kenneth Moss

Assistant Professor
Modern Jewish history; Russia and Eastern Europe; nationalism; theory and practice of cultural history

The Johns Hopkins University
Department of History
2850 North Charles Street
Baltimore MD 21218

Telephone: 410-516-3325
E-mail: kmoss5@jhu.edu

Office Hours: On Research Leave, 2009-2010
Dell House 1403A

Curriculum Vitae
 

I am a modern Jewish historian with a particular interest in the cultural, political, and social history of Jews in Imperial Russia, East-Central Europe, Palestine, and the State of Israel.

In my research to date, I have sought to address two central features of Jewish modernity: the role of “culture” itself as an idea and institution in the larger remaking of modern Jewish thought and cultural practice, and the ways in which modern Jews have negotiated the idea and institutional reality of nationhood across lines of ideology, belief, and party. My first book, Jewish Renaissance in the Russian Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009) takes up these questions through the lens of the East European Jewish nationalist intelligentsia’s efforts to create a self-consciously modern, post-traditional “Jewish culture” in the midst of the Russian Revolution.

I am now working on a history of the Jewish encounter with the nation as concept and practice in the 19^th and 20^th centuries, supported by a Charles A. Ryskamp Fellowship of the American Council of Learned Societies 2009-2010. One aspect of the project focuses on how disparate realms of East European Jewish family life, civic life, religious practice, and leisure and tourism were affected by the spread of nationalism in the Russian Empire and Eastern Europe, 1890-1939 and by the formation of a new Jewish society in Palestine framed by Jewish nationalism in a variety of forms. Against the background of this sociocultural investigation, I am seeking to write an intellectual history of how Jews of every ideological inclination, religious variety, and sociocultural hue framed responses to the growing presence of nationhood as idea and institution on their streets, in their relations with their neighbors, in their own communities and texts, and on the world stage. My goal is to move beyond the study of Jewish nationalism (or anti-nationalism) per se to illuminate how Jewish “thinkers” of all sorts – from social scientists and feminist intellectuals to religious leaders to young people not yet embedded in the adult world – were compelled to rethink territory, family, home, and selfhood in light of this nationalization of life and life-chances. In turn, I hope to use this study of the place and problem of the nation in East European Jewish life to ground a larger conceptual history of the Jewish encounter with the nation-idea which will engage the question of the relationship(s) between nationhood, the 20^th century political order, and religion/secularity from the 19^th century to the present.

My course offerings at Johns Hopkins include a year-long introduction to Jewish history from antiquity to the present, an introduction to Eastern European Jewish history, and more specialized seminars on:

--modern Jewish culture in theory and practice
--the interplay of high culture, politics, religion, and language in Eastern European Jewish life
--the problem of ‘tradition’ in modern Jewish thought, culture, and religion
--capitalism, class, and social conflict in modern Jewish history
--city, state, and territory in modern Jewish history.

As a member of the History Department's modern Europe faculty, I also teach on general and comparative topics in European history. Recent graduate seminars include:

"The Cultural Sphere"
"Nationalism and Nationhood"

Primary research foci:

-- Jewish cultural, political, and social history 18th-20th c., esp. in Imperial Russia, East-Central Europe, Palestine/Yishuv, and the State of Israel

-- modern Hebrew and Yiddish culture

-- history of Russia (imperial and Soviet) and Eastern Europe with particular interest in questions of empire and ethnoreligious difference, nation-formation and the nation-state, and reception of pan-European ideologies of national, social, and self-transformation

-- nationalism and the nation

-- the history of the idea and practice of “secular” culture

-- ideologies of societal and self-transformation in modernity

-- language in Jewish society

-- history of printing, publishing and the book in Eastern European Jewish society

Current research

-- the Jewish encounter with the nation as concept and practice in the 19^th and 20^th centuries; how Jews of all ideological stripes negotiated the growing centrality of nationhood (that of others’ and their own) in public and private life (supported by Charles A. Ryskamp Fellowship of the American Council of Learned Societies 2009-2010)

-- the Jewish political and social imagination in interwar Eastern Europe and Palestine

-- Jewish feminism in interwar Eastern Europe and Palestine

-- the Jewish secular-religious Kulturkampf in Eastern Europe

Other research interests

-- religiosity and secularity in the everyday life of Eastern European Jewry

-- the Jewish “middle class” and its roles in Jewish political and intellectual life from 18^th century balebatim to the present

Recent and forthcoming publications

Jewish Renaissance in the Russian Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).

“Arnold in Eishyshok, Schiller in Shnipishok: Imperatives of ‘Culture’ in East European Jewish Nationalism and Socialism” in Journal of Modern History, forthcoming winter 2009.

Edited volume, The Journal of Israeli History, v. 27, 2 (September 2008), special section on “East European Jewry, Nationalism and the Zionist Project.”

“Bringing Culture to the Nation: Hebraism, Yiddishism, and the Dilemmas of Jewish Cultural Formation in Russia and Ukraine, 1917-1919” in Jewish History 22 (2008): 263-294.

“1905 as a Jewish cultural revolution? Revolutionary and evolutionary dynamics in the East European Jewish cultural sphere, 1900-1914” in The Revolution of 1905 and Russia’s Jews: a Turning Point?, eds. Stefani Hoffman and Ezra Mendelsohn (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008).

"Not The Dybbuk but Don Quixote: Translation, Deparochialization, and Nationalism in Jewish Culture” in Culture Front: Representing Jews in Eastern Europe, ed. Benjamin Nathans and Gabriella Safran (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008).

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