Jews have often been represented as the consummate example of an urban people. In Europe and North America, observers as diverse and influential as Karl Marx, Georg Simmel, Robert Park, John Higham, Arthur Ruppin, Walter Benjamin, and seminal figures in the arts from Franz Kafka, to Philip Roth, Woody Allen, -and the painter R.B. Kitaj, have all claimed that Jews not only preferred to live in cities, but also that their long and seemingly "imprinted" pattern of urban dwelling actually shaped the way they lived, interacted with and reflected on their world. Jews were not only a prime case of urban adaptation, but served, indeed, as a prototype for an entire range of new social thought about and cultural representation of the urban experience and the modern world. In the Jew-as-urbanite we are often faced with rhetorical gestures that recall older archetypical "Jewish" representations, such as the wandering Jew able to move freely (and therefore easily depicted as "rootless"). In the postmodern and post-colonialist theories of Jean-Fran(fois Lyotard, Homi Bhabha and others, the "small-j jew" is so emblematic as to risk becoming invisible as a real protagonist in the world.
the urban environment. Among the many questions to be addressed are:
• How (and when) did Jewish newcomers experience new urban environments in Europe, North America and the Middle East?
Conferences
In April 2012 hosted a workshop titled: "Why Jerusalem?”
In June 2012 the group organized a conference under the title: "Jews and Cities: Modern Encounters and Solitudes”