Was New York like Vienna? with Marsha Rozenblit

Jews who fled Nazi Austria after the Anschluss in 1938 went to many places, but primarily to the United States, where they tried to make new homes for themselves. In so doing, many of them imagined that democratic America resembled the old Habsburg Monarchy, with its tolerance for ethnic diversity. They even imagined that the American president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was like the beloved Habsburg Emperor Franz Joseph, and New York was like Vienna. This talk will explore how Jews from Austria coped with American realities and used nostalgia for the Habsburg Monarchy as a way to adjust to their new lives in America.

About the Speaker

Marsha L. Rozenblit is the Harvey M. Meyerhoff Professor of Modern Jewish History at the University of Maryland, where she has been on the faculty since 1978. A social historian of the Jews of the Habsburg Monarchy and its successor states, she is the author of two scholarly books: The Jews of Vienna, 1867-1914: Assimilation and Identity (State University of New York Press, 1983); and Reconstructing a National Identity: The Jews of Habsburg Austria during World War I (Oxford University Press, 2001). She has also co-edited two books: Constructing Nationalities in East Central Europe (Berghahn Press, 2005); and World War I and the Jews: Conflict and Transformation in Europe, the Middle East, and America (Berghahn Press, 2017); and she has written over 35 scholarly articles on such topics as Jewish religious reform in nineteenth century Vienna, Jewish courtship and marriage in 1920s Vienna, and German-Jewish schools in Habsburg Moravia. She served as the president of the Association for Jewish Studies, 2009-2011.

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