Dr. Rebecca Kobrin, the Joseph Engel Visiting Professor of American Jewish History at Harvard University, will speak on Tuesday, November 26 at 1:45 p.m. in the Alumni Lounges (SC138) of the Robert A. Scott Student Center at Ramapo College of New Jersey about “Competing Diasporas, Shifting Centers: Bialystok’s Jews in the Age of World Wars.” The program will be presented under the auspices of the Gross Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies and is free and open to the public.

Professor Kobrin’s talk will be based on the work that she began in connection with the publication of her book, Jewish Bialystok and Its Diaspora, published by Indiana University Press in 2010. As in most of Eastern Europe, the period of the world wars transformed the demography and cultural life of Polish Jewish community Bialystok. It reshaped Jews’ understanding and performance of their diasporic identities to the point that this led the migrants to imagine themselves as exiles not only from the mythic Land of Israel but most immediately from their east European homeland.

Rebecca Amy Kobrin is an American Russell and Bettina Knapp Associate Professor of American Jewish History at the Harriman Institute, Columbia University and a director of the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies. Since July 1, she has been the Joseph Engel Visiting Professor of American Jewish History at Harvard University.