Dr. Lichtenstein’s research focuses on minorities, nationalism, state-building, war and genocide in Eastern Europe in the twentieth century. Her monograph, Zionists in Interwar Czechoslovakia: Minority Nationalism and the Politics of Belonging, was published by Indiana University Press in 2016. It explores how Zionist activists attempted to transform Jewish culture and society in ways that would allow Jews to claim belonging in the new multinational state. In Czechoslovakia, Zionists aimed to create objective and legitimate markers of Jews’ ethnic difference as well as to construct a new Jewish ideal that would facilitate Jews’ acculturation, social integration, and civic equality. For these activists, Zionism functioned not as an exit strategy, but as a ticket of admission to European society.
