Rebekah Klein-Pejšová
Please join me in congratulating Rebekah Klein-Pejšová, associate professor of history and Jewish Studies, on her 2015 book Mapping Jewish Loyalties in Interwar Slovakia from Indiana University Press. In the book, she explores how the largely Hungarian-speaking Jews in Slovakia faced the challenge of shifting their political loyalty from defeated Hungary to the newly established Czechoslovakia in the aftermath of the First World War—and proving that they had done so. Fearful that Jews in Slovakia may be potential accomplices to interwar Hungary’s goal of reacquiring that territory, the Czechoslovak administration defined and investigated markers of citizen loyalty based on language usage, communal conflicts, and commemoration of their war dead. The book traces the ascendancy of national security issues over domestic sociocultural conflict as the dominant lens through which the state sees and understands minority loyalty.
Rebekah was invited to speak about the book at the Jewish Cultural Institute (Židovský kultúrný inštitút), in Bratislava, Slovakia last year. While there, she was interviewed by the journal Roš Chodeš, a monthly scholarly and cultural publication of the Czech and Slovak Jewish communities. She has also been invited to speak about her research at the University of Graz, Austria in May.
Her work on the World War One Jewish refugee crisis in Austria–Hungary is forthcoming in contributions to the books Europe on the Move: The Great War and Its Refugees, 1914–1918 from Manchester University Press, and World War One and the Jews (Berghahn Books).
Congratulations, Dr. Klein-Pejšová!
David A. Reingold
Justin S. Morrill Dean
College of Liberal Arts