Jan earned his PhD from the European University Institute in Florence and has worked at the University of York, the University of Salzburg, and the Birkbeck Institute for the Study of Antisemitism in London. He has held fellowships in Poland, Israel, Germany, and the United States.
His first book ‘Everyday Zionism in East-Central Europe: Nation-Building in War and Revolution, 1914–1920’ was published by Oxford University Press in 2021 and won the 2023 Book Prize of the British and Irish Association for Jewish Studies.
Jewish Armed Self-Defence and Self-Assertion from the Second Partition of Poland to the Holocaust
The project analyses Jewish armed self-organisation and self-defence through the long nineteenth century and beyond. Since the second partition of Poland, during most of the crises, revolutions, and wars that shaped Central and Eastern Europe, Jews took up arms to fend for themselves, to protect their communities, and to take an active part in the transformation of the societies in which they lived. These experiences not only challenge the still-persistent lachrymose narrative of Jewish passivity in the diaspora but point to patterns of agency in the making of European-Jewish modernity. The project shows how these moments were key to Jewish emancipation, and self-assertion, how Jews exerted agency in times of persecution, defended themselves against violence, and how they took part in the transformation of European states and societies.
Centring on local experiences in Poland, Hungary, Moravia, Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Austria, and Lithuania it investigates a pattern of Jewish action and response in times of violence that point towards long-term trajectories towards Jewish resistance during the Holocaust and to the creation of the Israel Defence Forces. By centring on a marginalised – but armed – minority, the project proposes a re-interpretation and re-evaluation of some of the key moments, of revolutions, wars, and state-building, that shaped European societies.