Irit Chen

Ms. Irit Chen

Posen Doctoral Fellow, The Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism
Irit Chen

Irit Chen is 2018 Felix Posen Doctoral Fellow at the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. She is a Ph.D. student at the Department for Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University. Her dissertation project, written under the supervision of Prof. Yfaat Weiss and Dr. Sharon Livne, focuses on the Purchasing Mission to Cologne, the Israeli executive body which was sent to the Federal Republic of Germany in years 1953-1965 in order to implement the Reparations Agreement, before diplomatic relations were established. The purpose of this research is to examine the activities of the mission in light of the ambivalent policy that characterized the early contacts between Israel and Germany after the Holocaust, in shadow of the Antisemitism that did not extinct in West Germany, and in light of the affiliation of the Purchasing Mission members to the Jewish-German identity. The research examines the renewed encounter between German-Jews, Germans and Israelis in the first decades after the Holocaust and seeks to explorer whether due to the double affiliation of the mission's members, who returned to their country of origin as Israeli representatives, they were agents of socialization who led to reconciliation between the two countries.  

Irit completed her Master degree (Summa cum laude) in Modern German and European Studies at the University of Haifa. Her Master Thesis entitled "Contact but no Established Relations: The Israeli Consulate in Munich between Israel and Germany, 1948-1953" received the Graduate Studies Dean's Prize for Outstanding Master Thesis. She received her Bachelor in Psychology and Political Science (Summa cum laude) from the University of Haifa.

 

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