The proposed panel will include papers offering reflections on the relationship between the legal categories of citizenship in EU member states and the concept and philosophical notion of citizenship as related to memory and the past, particularly to the most dramatic historical events, such as genocide and expulsion. These reflections will cover the motivations behind...
Ancestry into Opportunity: Dual Citizenship and Commodification
Since the 1990s, dozens of countries changed their laws to permit multiple citizenship. Numerous European Union (EU) countries – including Spain, Italy, Hungary, Poland and Romania – adopted laws that invite co-ethnics, emigrants and their descendants to reacquire citizenship from abroad. Millions of persons in Latin America, Eastern Europe and Israel have taken advantage of...
Holocaust survivors and their Polish passports – a saga of refusals
Professor Aaron Seidenberg was born in 1943, in the Warsaw Ghetto, as a citizen of Poland, even though his Polish homeland was in ruins, under German occupation. Saved by a Polish family and miraculously reunited with his mother, an Auschwitz Death March survivor, he emigrated to Israel. For more than 15 years, Professor Seidenberg has...
Jewish Past, Mnemonic Constitutionalism and Politics of Citizenship
This paper utilises three case studies to focus on various modes of the Jewish past in constructing citizenship regimes. The first part will explore how secondary EU law has been appropriating Holocaust and other episodes of Jewish history in shaping the narrative of EU citizenship, fundamental rights, anti-discrimination and the rule of law. The second...