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Two international conferences, a website, and digital resources on Jewish culture and “feuilleton,” a newspaper insert popular throughout Europe from the 19th to the early-20th centuries. (12 months)

This convening grant would fund two conferences to bring together international scholars working on the feuilleton, an important and immensely popular feature in newspapers that has been largely forgotten. Our project proposes the feuilleton as a new area for interdisciplinary and multilingual inquiry, seeing the feuilleton as a critical juncture in the production of modern cultures and the public sphere. It focuses on the unique place of the feuilleton in modern Jewish cultures, which were highly multilingual and transnational. By assembling scholars in literature, history, and communications from North America, Europe, and Israel, we will examine the development of the feuilleton as a new form of media and make key texts accessible online for scholars, students, and the public. We will explore and sharpen the topic of investigation, identify and discuss significant periodicals and feuilletons, and plan subsequent publication in print and digital forms.

To study the life, work and times of Jindrich Plachta. Plachta was a comic theater and film actor and a writer of feuilletons in Czech newspapers. He was active from the 1920's. until the 1950's. He functioned under three extremely different political systems: the democratic first Czechoslovak Republic; the German Protectorate; and finally, the Communist Republic. Study will determine how this was accomplished. Such an in depth study of Plachta, who had close contact with Social Democratic leaders and writers, will add another dimension to the study of popular culture and its impact on the party's development.