Module overview
How cold was the Cold War? How impenetrable was the Iron Curtain? How Bipolar was the world before 1989?
The Cold War is typically described as a bloodless standoff between the Socialist East and Capitalist West. In such interpretations, the Iron Curtain neatly divided the world, or at least the Euro-Atlantic World, in two. It isolated Western from Eastern Europeans. The latter, trapped in authoritarian, socialist regimes, yearned for the USA to break the stalemate defeating the evil Soviet Empire.
How true are these old-school interpretations? In this module, we shatter stereotypes and break away from this bipolar image of the world by tracing Jewish stories, looking at the postwar decades from a more global perspective.
We will start by following in the footsteps of Jewish Holocaust survivors rebuilding their lives on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Their stories will help us understand daily life under both Communism and Capitalism and test how permeable the Iron Curtain really was. We will continue by tracing the stories of Israeli Mossad spies hunting for Holocaust perpetrators to examine the way in which the spectre of the past shaped contemporary politics. Finally, we will cast our gaze on the Middle East. Unpicking the stories of the leaders, citizens and subjects of the State of Israel will help us understand the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict. It will also help us put back the ‘war’ into the Cold War. The Middle East was one of the regions where the stand-off between Moscow and Washington erupted in bloody conflict more than once.