Forum Radio: Learning Czech was key to researching Czech-Jewish identity

Hillel J. Kieval is a historian of Jewish culture who holds the Gloria M. Goldstein Professorship of Jewish History and Thought at Washington University in St. Louis. This semester Kievel, the author of several seminal titles about the history of the Jews in Bohemia and Moravia, taught a course at Charles University based on his most recent work, Blood Inscriptions: Science, Modernity, and Ritual Murder at Europe's Fin de Siècle (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022). In our podcast, Professor Kieval talks about some of the factors that influenced modern Czech-Jewish identity,the heinous blood libel accusation from the Middle Ages to the modern era, and the Czech-Jewish community following the Holocaust.