“A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism in Hungary and Eastern Europe”

The 2018 Joseph and Violet Magyar Lecture in Hungarian Studies, “A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism in Hungary and Eastern Europe,” will be presented by Paul Hanebrink, associate professor of history at Rutgers University. The lecture, hosted by the Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities, will be held Tuesday, April 24, from 5 to 6 p.m. in Clark Hall, Room 309.

About the lecture

For much of the 20th century, Europe was haunted by a threat of its own imagining: Judeo-Bolshevism. This myth—that communism was a Jewish plot to destroy the nations of Europe—was a paranoid fantasy. And yet fears of a Jewish Bolshevik conspiracy took hold during the Russian Revolution and spread across Europe. In his lecture, Hanebrink will question why the myth of Judeo-Bolshevism endured for so long in Hungary and Eastern Europe and what legacy this idea has left for contemporary politics in the region. See more information.