POLIN/YIVO Webinar Series: Visions of the Jewish Future in Eastern Europe: Education, Language, and Identity
This is a live, online course held weekly on Zoom. Students will receive a Zoom link after registering for the course here on the YIVO website. This course will be conducted in English.
How did Jewish communities in Eastern Europe imagine their future? One of the most important arenas for these debates was education. This mini-course invites participants to explore the rich and sometimes competing educational worlds available to Jews in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
We will look at a wide range of schools, from Zionist Hebrew schools and secular Yiddish schools in interwar Poland to state schools attended by Jewish children from the nineteenth century to 1939. Through these examples, the course shows how schooling shaped everyday life, cultural belonging, and ideas of Jewish identity. Who founded these schools? What values did they promote? And how did students experience them?
Special attention will be given to questions of language and gender. The course explores why Jewish boys and girls often attended different kinds of schools, and how Orthodox education, Hebrew education, and professional training opened (or limited) possibilities for Jewish women. Together, these stories reveal how education became a key tool for imagining different Jewish futures.
The mini-course is organized by the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews. The course accompanies the new temporary exhibition at the POLIN Museum “The Power of Words. On Jewish Languages,” which explores how Jewish languages developed across centuries and regions and shaped the cultural, religious, and social identity of Jewish communities living in diaspora.
Register: YIVO Institute for Jewish Research (https://polin.pl/en/event/visions-jewish-future-eastern-europe-education-language-and-identity)
Schedule
SESSION 1:
May 17, 2026 | 11:00am – 12:00pm ET
Can one reconcile Poland with the Land of Israel/Palestine? Hebrew education and Jewish visions of the future in Interwar Poland
Instructor: Kamil Kijek
SESSION 2:
May 24, 2026 | 11:00am – 12:00pm ET
Gender and Jewish Education in Modern Eastern Europe
Instructor: Aleksandra Jakubczak
SESSION 3:
May 31, 2026 | 11:00am – 12:00pm ET
For Yiddish to the barricades – TSYSHO schools in the interwar period
Instructor: Anna Szyba
SESSION 4:
June 7, 2026 | 11:00am – 12:00pm ET
Jewish children in public schools in Habsburg Galicia
Instructor: Alicja Maślak-Maciejewska
This course is organized within the Global Education Outreach program, supported by Taube Philanthropies, the William K. Bowes, Jr. Foundation, and the Association of the Jewish Historical Institute of Poland.
Contact Email
ajakubczak@polin.pl
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