Alexis Hofmeister – författare

Text in German. The port city of Odessa is a special place of remembrance of Jewish history. More than in other metropolises of the tsarist empire, at the end of the 'long' 19th century there was a rich and differentiated system of associations that neither Russia's police license nor the social tensions that regularly erupted in pogroms were able to suppress. Especially the Jewish middle and upper classes saw their cultural ideals realized in this form of self-organization. Alexis Hofmeister examines the formation and structure of Jewish associations in Odessa and shows how a form of bourgeoisie developed here that combined modern, time-specific and traditional Jewish aspects - a mixture that gives the phenomenon of Jewish association formation exemplary importance.

The unifying thread of the interdisciplinary volume Jewish and Non-Jewish Spaces in the Urban Context is the fact that Jewish spaces are almost always generated in relation to non-Jewish spaces; they determine and influence each other.This general phenomenon will be scrutinized and put to the test again and again in a varied collection of articles by international experienced researchers as well as junior scholars using various urban contexts and discourses as data. From the viewpoints of different temporal and regional research traditions and disciplines the contributors deal with the question of how Jewish and non-Jewish spaces are imagined, constructed, negotiated and intertwined. All examples and case studies together create a mosaic of possibilities for the construction of Jewish and non-Jewish spaces in different settings.The list of examined topics ranges from synagogues to ghettos, from urban neighborhoods to cafés and festivals, from art to literature. This diversity makes the volume a challenging effort of giving an overview of the current academic discussion in Europe and beyond. Although the majority of the contributions are focused on Central and Eastern Europe, a more general tendency becomes apparent in all articles: the negotiation of urban spaces seems to be a complex and ambivalent process in which a large number of participants are involved. In this regard, the volume would also like to contribute to trans-disciplinary urban studies and critical research on spatial relations.