The Bar Ilan department of General History in association with the Yad Vashem International Institute for Holocaust Research will hold an international conference titled The Road Not Taken: Alternative Plans for the Post-War World on June 8-9, 2015. The conference will discuss the alternatives for the new order brought up during the war and immediately after it, yet did not materialize. The organizers are pleased to invite researchers of different disciplines to present their studies in 20-minute sessions.
Paper submissions from graduate students and senior faculty are welcome. Submissions shall relate to the following topics:
- New geopolitical divide
- The future of Germany
- She’erit Hapleita – what will become of Holocaust survivors?
- World Jewry and the question of shared fate and remembrance
- A new course of action for Japan, China and the East Asian countries
- The fate of the Empires
- Law and international institutions
- War criminals
- Refugees, displaced persons and prisoners of war
- Philosophy, culture and reflections
- Memory and Commemoration
- New concepts of Gender
May 1945 marked the end of WWII and the Jewish Holocaust in Europe. Three months later, the war ended in the East-Asian/Pacific Ocean front. Even as the war still raged on, allied leaders were immersed in numerous discussions on the nature of the post-war world and the political, economic and social routes it was to take. Conferences held during the final days of the war and immediately after it brought up hard hitting issues: establishing a new international organization to replace the long-defunct League of Nations, trials of war criminals, the future of Germany, the fate of surviving European Jews and the Jewish world in general, the future of the European colonies in Southeast Asia (among other places), remapping the Middle East and of course, the question of the Land of Israel. The world, it seemed, was at a crossroads.
This held true in the moral aspect as well. The unprecedented violence of the war, the Jewish Holocaust and mass murders perpetrated by the Nazis and their allies, the disintegration of all known social international orders - these shook the modernist paradigm to the very core. The values of the rational, enlightened Western society formed in the latter half of the 18th century were put on trial and found wanting. The so-called cultural pessimism which reared its head at the turn of the centuries has become a vivid reality by the middle of the 20th century.
New expressions in art and philosophy have marked the new course taken by post-war society. Post-war historians tend to analyze the immediate events and continuous processes brought on by the dynamics of the end of the war. Yet, in order to better understand the historical changes, one should also explore the alternatives that did not materialize; the “zero-hour” forged by the war’s end became an unprecedented source of alternative cultural and historical processes. Why then did some ideas become a reality while others did not? Was this new order forced upon society? Did the common citizen have any influence over the tides of history? Could one even choose from the array of possibilities? And who were these new thinkers?
300-word proposals with a short bio-brief and academic affiliation can be sent to General-History.Dept[at]mail.biu.ac.il