We are pleased to share this Call for Submissions for the conference The War That Never Ended: Jewish Experiences of World War I in Central and Eastern Europe, at the POLIN museum in Warsaw, November 23-25, 2026. Deadline for submission is June 22.
This conference seeks to bring together scholars working on the Jewish experience of World War I in Eastern Europe, with particular attention to social, economic, gendered, and local perspectives. While some scholars have focused on political or cultural transformations and others on anti-Jewish violence, this conference aims to foster dialogue across these approaches and encourage new methodological and thematic interventions.
Possible topics include, but are not limited to the following. There is ample scope for issues relating to Jewish built heritage:
- Jewish mobility, including displacement, refugees, internment, and postwar resettlement
- War experiences mediated by gender, age, and class
- Economic destruction and reconstruction of Jewish livelihoods
- Daily life during wartime
- Violence broadly understood, but including pogroms, sexual violence, and non-physical violence
- Transformation of communal and religious Jewish life under wartime conditions
- Jewish communal responses and relief efforts
- Memory and commemoration, testimony, and representations of World War I in Jewish sources
- World War I in visual representations and art
- Regional and local case studies across Eastern Europe
- Jewish literature reckoning with the Great War
- Jewish soldiers’ experiences
- Jews and the state in wartime and postwar realities
Papers that explore the consequences of the Great War during the interwar period are also welcome.
Proposals are invited from scholars at all career stages (starting with advanced PhD students) and from a range of disciplinary perspectives, including history, gender studies, Jewish studies, literary studies, sociology, and anthropology.
Click here for the online application form
Deadline for submissions: 22 June 2026
For questions, contact: [email protected]
Conference language: English
The organizers will provide meals and accommodation during the conference. Speakers may apply for partial reimbursement of travel expenses (for speakers traveling form Europe up to 200 USD; within Poland up to 75 USD; from Israel up to 300 USD; from elsewhere up to 750 USD) if no other funding is available. Preference for funding will be given to early-career and independent researchers. The organizers reserve the right to record and publish conference proceedings.
Conference committee:
- Elissa Bemporad (Queens College and CUNY Graduate Center)
- Aleksandra Jakubczak (POLIN/Technical University of Berlin)
- Vladyslava Moskalets (Center for Urban History, Lviv)
- Kamil Ruszala (Jagiellonian University)
- Jan Rybak (Central European University)
- Marcos Silber (University of Haifa)