Events

Since 1949, the Federal Republic of Germany has allowed former citizens, whose citizenship was revoked by the Nazis due to their Jewish faith or ‘race’, to reclaim it. Yet, over the past 75 years, there have been significant changes regarding which German Jews – and which descendants – can enjoy that right. This talk tracks those developments, from the restrictive, often antisemitic decisions made in the 1950s, to attempts to uphold those regulations in the following decades, through to the 2021 reform of the German Nationality Act that finally redressed such exclusions.

Due to the horrors of the Third Reich, we have come to think of German nationalism as inherently antisemitic, racist, antidemocratic, and violent. This talk challenges this conventional interpretation. It shows how the defenders of the Weimar and First Austrian Republics used the großdeutsch idea, the notion that Austria should be part of a German nation-state, to create a democratic nationalism. Unlike their conservative and right-wing opponents, these republicans did not view democracy and Germany, socialism and nationalism, or Jew and German as mutually exclusive categories. As…

This event is also the LBI Summer Lecture 2025

Hitler and the history of the Nazis remain extremely popular topics and ones that never cease to attract people’s interest, even fascination. It is crucial to comprehend the nature of Mein Kampf, the mindset of its author, Adolf Hitler, and the ideology he espoused that brought untold tragedy to millions of people – death, destruction, genocide and war. The book presents a dangerous set of ideas, regrettably ones that still have followers today, one hundred years after Mein Kampf was originally penned…

Writing on the Wall: The Unfolding Persecution of Jews 1933 to 1939

This lecture looks at the response of Jews to incidents of persecution and humiliation from Hitler coming to power in 1933 through to the outbreak of the Second World War. It will argue that while the Holocaust could not be predicted the level of persecution escalated during the period.

Professor Frank McDonough is an internationally renowned expert on the Third Reich. He was born in Liverpool, studied history at Balliol College, Oxford and gained a PhD from…

Join us for the inaugural Eva Reichmann Lecture: 

Eva Reichmann: Witness, Historian, Legacy

This special event celebrates the legacy of Dr. Eva Reichmann, a pioneering historian whose groundbreaking work continues to shape our understanding of Nazi persecution and Holocaust historiography.

Welcome & Introduction 

Dr. Joseph Cronin (Director, Leo Baeck Institute London) and Dr. Toby Simpson (Director, The Wiener Holocaust Library) will open the evening by reflecting on Eva Reichmann’s…

In the early twentieth century, German-Jewish thinkers converged upon Daoism as a means to criticise state power and the dominance of economic productivity in modern society. Figures like Moses Mendelssohn, Franz Rosenzweig, and Walter Benjamin explored how Daoist ideas could inspire alternative ways of organising social and economic life, thereby challenging stereotypes of ‘China’ as passive or non-productive. This talk examines how their engagement with Daoism offered a vision of religion’s role in everyday life that moved beyond racialised notions of activity and inactivity, and the…

Eighth international multidisciplinary conference, to be held at Birkbeck, University of London, and The Wiener Holocaust Library, London, 7-9 January 2026

A call for papers is now open for this conference: https://www.leobaeck.co.uk/news/2024/11/call-papers-beyond-camps-and-forced-labour-current-international-research-survivors

The conference will be held in-person only, with no opportunity to attend virtually.