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The Passport in Jewish and non-Jewish life Following WWI

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Sunday, February 12, 2017
3:00 am - 5:00 am
Yaron Jean
North Carolina Jewish Studies Seminar

Passports and state issued travel documents have been known since antiquity. Yet, their actual role as powerful instruments of mass exclusion was fully realized only after World War I. The dissolution of the imperial order and the rising of new nation states in the territories of the former imperial states made passports into a powerful political instrument for the restriction of freedom of movement of individuals on the principle of collective sameness. Consequently, passports not only protected state borders against "undesired elements" but also placed hundreds of thousands of war refugees beyond the pale of law and protection. In his essay, Yaron Jean will address the manifold story of modern state issued travel documents after World War I and their political use against specific populations in Europe of the interwar period.

aron Jean teaches modern history at the University of Haifa and Sapir College, Negev. He studied history and political science at the universities of Tel Aviv, Munich and Cologne and received his PhD. in modern history from the Hebrew University, Jerusalem in 2006. Yaron is the author of Noises of Modernity. Hearing Experiences in Germany 1914-1945 (Heb.) (Tel Aviv, 2011) and Portable Identities:Travel Documents and the Question of Stateless Refugees in Europe between the Two World Wars (Eng.) (Göttingen/Bristol, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, forthcoming 2017).

Contact: Deirdre White