ATLANTA—Dr. Jelena Subotic, Professor of Political Science has been awarded the 2020 Joseph Rothschild Prize in Nationalism and Ethnic Studies for her book Yellow Star, Red Star: Holocaust Remembrance after Communism. The book explains how East European countries after the collapse of communism pursued new strategies of Holocaust remembrance where the memory, symbols, and imagery of the Holocaust became appropriated to represent crimes of communism.
The prize is awarded by the Association for the Study of Nationalities for an outstanding book published in the previous calendar year on Russia, Eastern Europe or Eurasia which pays substantial attention is to issues of ethnicity and/or nationalism.
Dr. Subotic writes about international relations theory, memory politics, human rights, transitional justice, international ethics, state identity, and the politics of the Western Balkans. Her first book, Hijacked Justice: Dealing with the Past in the Balkans (Cornell University Press, 2009) examined the contested way in which international norms of transitional justice were appropriated by domestic political elites in the Western Balkans in the aftermath of the Yugoslav wars.
Her work has been awarded a number of research grants, including from the National Science Foundation and USAID. Subotic is also a frequent commentator on war crimes and the politics of the Balkans on international media outlets.
Yellow Star, Red Star: Holocaust Remembrance after Communism was published by Cornell University Press in 2019.