Campus
- Downtown Toronto (St. George)
Fields of Study
- Jewish Cultures, Languages, and Literatures
- Jewish History and Social Sciences
Areas of Interest
- Modern Jewish History
- Central and Eastern Europe
- American Jewish History
- Migration/Diaspora Studies
- Yiddish Popular Culture
Name of Postdoctoral Fellowship
Description
During his postdoctoral fellowship, Czendze is preparing his first monograph, “Galicia on the Hudson: Migration and Jewish Belonging Before the Holocaust.” Situated in New York’s Lower East Side between 1890 and 1939, the book traces how Jews from Habsburg Galicia, the second-largest group of eastern European Jewish immigrants, produced and mobilized the Yiddish cultural label of the Galitzianer to foster a sense of belonging in the diverse immigrant neighborhood. It challenges the centrality of the nation to modern ideas of the self and community. The book demonstrates how regional belonging intensified in the diaspora during the major upheavals of war, migration, and state-building. Czendze is also starting research on his second project, “Jews on Holiday: A Global History of Jewish Travel,” which examines ideas of time, technology, and global-local interactions to offer a new history of Jewish tourism throughout the 20th century.
Biography
Oskar Czendze is a cultural and social historian of the modern Jewish experience in East Central Europe and North America. His research focuses on global histories of migration, travel, and Yiddish culture, with a particular interest in cross-cultural encounters and questions of memory, belonging, and place in the modern era. Before arriving at the University of Toronto, he earned his doctorate in History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He held major research fellowships and grants from the Center for Jewish History in New York, Botstiber Institute for Austrian-American Studies, American Academy for Jewish Research, and Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. His works have been published in the Dubnow Institute Yearbook, Journal of East Central European Studies, and PaRDeS: Journal of the Association for Jewish Studies in Germany.