All past events

The Leo Baeck Institute London screened Fanny: The Other Mendelssohn free online as part of the LBI Film Club, from 25 June to 2 July 2026. We hope all the film lovers among you enjoyed it. Please join our mailing list to stay updated about future free film screening events.

Step into the extraordinary and long-overshadowed story of Fanny Mendelssohn (1805–1847), a brilliant German-Jewish composer and pianist whose musical genius was overshadowed and…

Gilad Cohen: Zionism Beyond Empires: Reinterpreting pe-1948 ideas of “the Jewish state” in the light of the fin de siècle connected Jewish Polity
(Brandeis University, Modern Jewish History)

Annika Duin: Letters to the Past. Citizen Responses to Antisemitic Violence, 1945–1990 
(Universtity of Bielefeld, History) 

Thomas Coleman Glasman: The role of Politics, Religion and Interpersonal Conflict on the Development of Set Theory, (1879-1932)
(University of Oxford, History of Mathematics)

Luis Gruhler: Commentary as a…

Chair: Dr. Svenja Bethke (Leo Baeck Institute London)

Book presentation by Dr. Elisabeth Wagner: “Lives at the Limits of Convention. The Mosse Women”

Commentators:

Respondent: Elisabeth Wagner

This online event will be held in English.

As part of LBI’s 2026 lecture series on migration, Kobi Kabalek will give a talk on the private and public writings of Robert Weltsch.

This film club event has now ended, however our interview with producer Sir Bernard Zissman is still available to view online.

Theodor Herzl: The Man Behind Israel
(Dom Howlett, James Dann, United Kingdom, 2025) 

This is the keynote speech for the Crossing Borders conference. To book tickets for the main conference, please visit https://www.lbilondon.ac.uk/crossing-borders-2026

The Leo Baeck Institute London is delighted to invite you to a special double‑feature online screening from the LBI Film Club, available free of charge for one week beginning Monday, 19 January 2026. Subscribe to be notified about more FREE Film Club films by visiting https://lbilondon.ac.uk/mailing-list/ and selecting LBI Film Club

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

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

This conference is planned as a follow-up to the seven successful conferences, which took place at Imperial War Museum London in 2003, 2006, 2009, 2012, 2015 and at Birkbeck, University of London, and The Wiener Holocaust Library in 2018 and 2023. It will continue to build on areas previously…

During the Third Reich, German political, social, economic, and private life was transformed to such an extent that the Holocaust became thinkable and, ultimately, possible. Yet many Germans maintained a ‘not Nazi’ subjectivity, drawing a line between themselves and overly zealous ‘150%’ Nazis. This talk uses the extensive private collection of letters and documents of Annemarie and Heinrich Brenzinger, Sandra Lipner’s great-grandparents from south-west Germany, to discuss why bourgeois Germans who were not enthusiastic about Hitler still willingly embraced the…

How do diaries, letters, memoirs, autobiographies capture the lived experiences of migration, exile, multilingualism, & cultural transition?

Crossing Borders brings together researchers exploring how life-writing and ego-documents (diaries, letters, memoirs, autobiographies) capture the lived experiences of migration, exile, multilingualism, and cultural transition. The conference highlights how personal narratives illuminate transnational movement, identity formation, and encounters across borders, languages, and empires.

Topics addressed across the programme…

This online roundtable brought together scholars and practitioners to examine the Kindertransport through archival research, personal testimony, and reflective practice. Exploring sources ranged from international archives to refugees’ own words, the discussion considered how the Kindertransport has been remembered, interpreted, and mobilised in British culture, and why it continues to matter today.

Speakers: 

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…

The inaugural Eva Reichmann Lecture, held as part of the LBI 70th Anniversary Celebrations: 

Eva Reichmann: Witness, Historian, Legacy

This special event celebrated 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 

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

Join us for a compelling lecture which explores the responses of Jews to incidents of persecution and humiliation under Nazi rule, 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 have been 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…

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…

The Leo Baeck Institute London would like to invite you to another free online screening from the LBI Film Club, starting on Friday 19 September 2025. We hope all the film lovers among you will continue to enjoy our selection of thought-provoking films exploring the rich, diverse and multi-faceted Jewish experience. This latest offering is gentle, sometimes tragic, and deeply moving. 

On a train to Auschwitz, 15-year-old Eva made a promise to her older brother Heinz: if he did not…

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. This lecture focusses on some key themes of the text, as well as…

The annual Leo Baeck Institute Fellowship Seminar brought together the 2024/25 cohort of Fellows to present and discuss their doctoral research in the field of German-Jewish history and culture. Hosted at Birkbeck, University of London, and co-organised with the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes and the Leibniz Institute for Jewish History and Culture – Simon Dubnow, the seminar featured a series of in-depth presentations, responses, and interdisciplinary conversations.

The two-day programme included:

We are delighted to invite you to a special evening marking the 70th anniversary of the Leo Baeck Institute.

The evening will feature musical performances by members of the Barenboim-Said Academy, an introduction by Professor Michael Brenner, President of LBI International, and a keynote speech by Dr Doron Rabinovici: ‘On the Reality of Yesterday and the Possibility of Tomorrow – On Jewishness in the German Context’.

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.

Historians have traditionally argued that antisemitic violence in Nazi Germany rose gradually, from low levels during the first years of Hitler’s rule to a high point in the Reich-wide pogrom of November 1938. Before the Holocaust, based on research in more than twenty German archives, demonstrates that this long-held assumption is wrong. During the months-long Nazi takeover of power, beginning a mere five weeks after Hitler became Chancellor, waves of antisemitic violence engulfed large parts of Germany. Before the Holocaust examines the multitude of…

The Leo Baeck Institute London would like to invite you to another free online screening at our LBI Film Club starting on Tuesday the 17th of December 2024. 

We hope that all the film lovers among you will continue to enjoy our selection of interesting and thought-provoking films linked to the immensely rich, diverse and multi-faceted Jewish experience and will relish this latest, gentle, funny and profoundly moving offering in our LBI Film Club programme:

 …

18th, 20th of November, 2nd, 9th  December 2024
4.00-6.00pm Berlin Time
 

Participants:

Aebischer, Emilie: Writing History in the Face of Fanaticism: Ernst Cassirer and his Reception as a Historian (University of St. Andrews, History)

Aizenberg, Tamar: The Third Generations: Grandchildren of Holocaust Survivors, Grandchildren of Perpetrators and Holocaust Memory (Brandeis University, Jewish Studies)

18th, 20th of November, 2nd, 9th  December 2024
4.00-6.00pm Berlin Time
 

Participants:

Aebischer, Emilie: Writing History in the Face of Fanaticism: Ernst Cassirer and his Reception as a Historian (University of St. Andrews, History)

Aizenberg, Tamar: The Third Generations: Grandchildren of Holocaust Survivors, Grandchildren of Perpetrators and Holocaust Memory (Brandeis University, Jewish Studies)

The ability to accurately describe the past is not confined to historians alone. Artists use their creative expression to explore the cruelties of history, aiming to shape a more ethical present and future. In the case of Grzegorz Kwiatkowski, art is also mixed with activism and active efforts to preserve the memory of the victims and their cultural heritage. Kwiatkowski, whose grandfather was a prisoner of the Stutthof concentration camp, and whose wife’s Jewish family hid during the war in a forest near Rzeszów, has been leading an artistic and activist battle to fight antisemitism,…

We cordially invite you to celebrate the exhibition opening with us!

After a brief welcome, Dr. Irene Aue-Ben-David, Director of the Leo Baeck Institute Jerusalem, will present the project behind the exhibition. The Library of Lost Books is a worldwide search for the library of the Berlin Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums, which was once looted by the Nazis. Prof. Dr. Christian Wiese, Director of the Buber-Rosenzweig Institute at Goethe University, will then give a short introduction to the history of the university and the Jewish scholarly movement.

The…

(André Schäfer and Jascha Hannover, Germany 2017)

He was one of Hollywood’s greatest writers and directors: Born Samuel Wilder in Galicia, Billy Wilder fled from Berlin as a young reporter via Paris to New York when the Nazis rose to power. Original footage of Wilder, conversations with his colleagues, archive and new film material document an eventful century in history. Never Be Boring: Billy Wilder presents a portrait of a man who was anything but boring.

As a gay high-performance runner, antifascist intellectual and sportswriter, Alex Natan was a quintessential outsider in Weimar Berlin. His marginal status also remained a constant during his forced emigration to Britain, as a precarious refugee in pre-war London, as a long-time internee during World War II, as well as a schoolteacher in the Midlands and author and journalist in post-war Britain and West Germany. This lecture will demonstrate how an unusual German Jew was affected by the ‘age of extremes’, making his life story quite typical of the predicaments of the 20th century.

The Leo Baeck Institute London was pleased to have jointly organized the eleventh biennial meeting of the International Feuchtwanger Society (IFS), which took place from September 12-14, 2024, at Senate House.

The conference focused on Britain, the British Commonwealth, and the British Mandate of Palestine as hubs and transit points for Jews, intellectuals, artists, and political opponents of the National Socialist regime during the interwar and postwar years.

The LBI London hosted a successful one-day workshop in collaboration with the Birkbeck Institute for the Study of Antisemitism (BISA) on July 18, 2024, at Birkbeck, University of London.

Titled Jewish Refugees in the British Empire, 1933–1948, the event, led by Professor Atina Grossmann (The Cooper Union), fostered interdisciplinary dialogue and scholarly exchange on the experiences of Jewish refugees in the British Empire before, during, and after the Holocaust.

The writings of Dutch Auschwitz survivors Eddy de Wind, Elie Cohen and Louis Micheels merit analysis not only because they anticipated what later became known as PTSD and much of the underpinnings of trauma theory. They also advocated a theory of survival that offers a compelling contrast to well-known “self-help” theories put forward by Bruno Bettelheim and, especially, Viktor Frankl. This lecture traces the ways in which this theory of survival challenged these simplistic narratives, explains how their work informed the changing field of psychiatry after the war, and considers its…

To celebrate the International Feuchtwanger Society conference arriving in London in 2024, the Leo Baeck Institute London has established a Feuchtwanger Book Club. This club spotlights the works of the renowned German Jewish novelist Lion Feuchtwanger.

Join us for the final book of our Feuchtwanger Book Club, The Devil in France, Lion Feuchtwanger’s gripping 1941 account of his incarceration in a French internment camp that almost cost him his life. The book club is open to everyone.

We will meet on Zoom on Wednesdays…

A Review Session with the Library of Lost Books Team and our British Book Detectives

The Library of Lost Books team from the Leo Baeck Institutes in London and Jerusalem will host a roundtable discussion with students, teachers, and educators who have participated in the international citizen science project Library of Lost Books (www.libraryoflostbooks.com) that seeks to gather information about the current whereabouts of a Nazi looted library.

Can women hold rabbinical office? This was one of the questions discussed at the Higher Institute for Jewish Studies, Berlin, in the 1920s and 1930s. And no one was better suited to provide an answer to this than Regina Jonas, a student at the Higher Institute who became the first female rabbi in the world in 1935. Prior to her ordination, Jonas answered the question about women’s access to the rabbinate in a halachic treatise that she submitted in 1930 as her final halachic project. Her biographer, Rabbi Prof Dr Elisa Klapheck, will share insights into a life that…

Germany is home to Europe’s third largest Jewish community. Yet surprisingly little is known about them. After the Shoah, about 15,000 German Jews returned to Germany or emerged from hiding. The growth of the Jewish population in Germany after 1945 was due entirely to immigration, which is somewhat counter intuitive. Who are the Jews who live in contemporary Germany? How do they live out their Jewishness? What Jewish cultures did they bring with them, and what kind of Jewish culture is forming in Germany? 

The Leo Baeck Institute London would like to welcome you to another free online screening at the LBI Film Club. We hope that all the film lovers among you will continue to enjoy our selection of interesting and thought-provoking films linked to the immensely rich, diverse and multi-faceted Jewish experience and will relish this latest offering in our LBI Film Club programme: 

Our latest exhibition brings the story of the Higher Institute for Jewish Studies in Berlin (1872–1942) and its library into the heart of London.

The Library of Lost Books is an international project which aims to commemorate and educate about the Higher Institute for Jewish Studies in Berlin (Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums, 1872–1942). This institute, operating from 1872 until it was closed down by the Nazis in 1942, was dedicated to the study of Jewish history and culture, as well as rabbinical studies…

To celebrate the conference of the International Feuchtwanger Society coming to London in 2024, the Leo Baeck Institute London has organised a Feuchtwanger Book Club, focusing on the work of the acclaimed – but now somewhat forgotten – German Jewish novelist Lion Feuchtwanger. 

Our Feuchtwanger Book Club is starting a new book in next week’s session: Lion Feuchtwanger’s 1932 novel ‘The War of the Jews’ (Der jüdische Krieg). It is open to everyone. 

Join us online on Zoom every Wednesday at 4pm (BST). For details contact…

This talk examines the grey zones that exist between the established paradigms of persecution and exile in the ‘Third Reich’, as demonstrated by the trajectory of the Indologist Heinrich Zimmer (1890–1943). Zimmer, who taught at the University of Heidelberg, lost his teaching license in 1938 since his wife Christiane was classified as a Mischling (mixed race) by the Nazi regime. He tried to battle his fate by offering diverse political capital to the Nazi political establishment and by counting on some sympathetic colleagues. Zimmer was able to flee Germany with his family in…

To celebrate the conference of the International Feuchtwanger Society coming to London in 2024, the Leo Baeck Institute London is organising a Feuchtwanger Book Club, focusing on the work of the acclaimed – but now somewhat forgotten – German Jewish novelist Lion Feuchtwanger. 

This book club, which will be held online between March and June 2024, will focus initially on a reading of Feuchtwanger’s 1933 novel The Oppermanns, a chronicle of the collapse of Weimar Germany and the rise of the Nazis, seen through the eyes of one German Jewish family. 

In the winter of 1939–40, exiled in the Dutch city of Hilversum, Georg Hermann was working on a novel that he regarded as one of his most important. Entitled Die daheim blieben (Those that Stayed Behind), it was to be composed of four parts and tell the story of a large, diverse German-Jewish family in Berlin from March 1933 to November 1938. He was unable to complete the novel or see it published, and it was long thought to have been lost. Recently, however, the manuscripts of the first two parts were discovered among papers held by Hermann’s grandson, George Rothschild. After…

To mark International Women’s Day 2024, LBI London Director Joseph Cronin interviews Pauline Paucker at her home. She talks about her memories of the Institute, her work editing the Year Book, and her husband Arno Paucker, former Director of the Institute.

From the Director’s introduction:

In 2023, Esther Dischereit created an exhibition in cooperation with Deutsche Bahn to honour the railroad worker Fritz Kittel. In 1944 and 1945, he hid her mother Hella and sister Hannelore, who as Jews were persecuted by the Gestapo and threatened with death in Germany under National Socialism. They were liberated by U.S. troops in 1945. Dischereit began to search for the family of the rescuer and found them in 2019. Fritz Kittel had not told his own family about his courageous act throughout his life.

The Leo Baeck Institute London would like to mark Holocaust Memorial Day on Saturday 27th of January 2024 by inviting you to a special free online screening at the LBI Film Club. We hope that all the film lovers among you will continue to enjoy our selection of interesting and thought-provoking films linked to the immensely rich, diverse and multi-faceted Jewish experience and will relish this latest, gentle, funny and profoundly moving offering in our LBI Film Club programme:

With our hearts and thoughts with those less fortunate than us and grateful for the safety and peace we ourselves enjoy at this special time of the year, we wish you all a very happy and joyous Passover!  Chag Sameach!

Art can be a powerful force in shaping the way we see and think about the world: pictures craft our ideas of beauty and ugliness, good and bad, power and weakness. This lecture traces how medieval Christian images of Jews, originally designed to aid religious devotions, made Christians look at Jews with new curiosity and interest, and drew their attention to previously unnoticed aspects of Jewish life and looks. As images of Jews evolved from benign but outdated Hebrews to caricatured usurers and demonic sorcerers, Christian society developed new – and increasingly hostile – ideas about…

Jewish women have been at the forefront of feminist autobiographical comics since the 1970’s as they challenged sexism in popular culture. But how have they revised misogynistic images and stories closer to home? Sarah Lightman will illustrate how Sharon Rudahl in her bildungsroman ‘The Star Sapphire’, Miriam Katin in her Holocaust memoir, We Are on Our Own, and her own graphic novel, The Book of Sarah, transform biblical narratives and images to reflect their own, lived, experiences.

The exhibition ties into a wider project (Library of Lost Books) that is co-led by the Leo Baeck Institutes in Jerusalem and London. This international collaboration seeks to trace surviving items from the library of Berlin’s Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums [Higher Institute of Jewish Studies], that fell victim to systematic theft by the Nazis who, alongside their assault on the Jewish people of Europe, aspired to gain power of interpretation over Jewish history and culture.

Between 1933 and 1941, Simon May’s mother and her two sisters pushed the boundaries of assimilation among German Jews to their limits. They resorted to conversion, aristocratic marriages, and ‘Aryan’ certificates, which likely saved them from the death camps. However, this marked the defeat of the hope that such strategies would secure acceptance for Jews in German and European society. It led to a unique vulnerability, as these three women – and many others like them – distanced themselves from their cultural roots, leaving them emotionally defenceless when disaster struck. This self…

Jüdische Kinder in Erez Israel, a collection of twenty-one photographs of adorable Jewish children in Mandatory Palestine, was the last overtly Jewish-themed photobook published in Germany before the Holocaust. Yet its propaganda mission transcended its diminutive size and surface superficiality. This talk examines how this photobook creates an allegory of Jewish vulnerability by eliciting responses associated with the minor aesthetic category of ‘cuteness.’ In so doing, it broadens our understanding of how photobooks helped expand the visual lexicon and aesthetic strategies…

The conspicuous set of German-Jewish financiers who made their homes in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain brought with them a rich cultural inheritance that reflected the historical journey of German Jewry towards emancipation. As they established themselves in their new environment, they faced the challenge of being at one and the same time German, Jewish, British and English, and the crisis of having to choose between allegiances in the dark days of the First World War.

Monday, 12 June 2023

Programme

Session 1
16.00-18.30 Berlin time

16.00-16.15 Opening Remarks

One slot takes 35 minutes: the 5 minute presentation is followed by a 2 minute commentary delivered by one of the other fellows attending, 15 minutes of general discussion, max. 5 minutes of commentary by Elisabeth Gallas, Caroline Jessen or Miriam Rürup and finally a response to this last commentary by the original speaker.

16.15-16.50

16.50-17.25

(Noam Sobovitz, Israel / Germany, 2021)

British culture has always been fascinated by the figure of the Jewess. This lecture will explore its roots in nineteenth-century theology, and its popularisation through literature. In contrast to the more well- known stereotypes of Fagin and Shylock, the virtuous Jewess was an emblem of the privileged status accorded to both women and Jews in Victorian Protestant culture and demonstrates that Jews could function not simply as an ‘other’ within modern cultures, but also, simultaneously, an ideal self.

Welcome to another screening at the LBI Film Club! This time our film is linked to our recent LBI Lecture Series talk with Prof Cathy Gelbin on Weimar Cinema’s monsters. We hope that all those film lovers among you will continue to enjoy our selection of interesting and thought-provoking films linked to the immensely diverse, rich and multi-faceted Jewish experience.

The LBI film club’s eleventh offering is: 

The Golem: How He Came Into This World  
(Paul Wegener, Germany, 1920)

The monstrous Jew of popular imagination found perhaps his most salient expression in Weimar cinema’s love of the uncanny. These films derive their lasting fascination from the often-ironic interplay of their separate and yet related gendered, sexualised and racialised portrayals. The talk explores how spectatorial pleasure can arise from the emerging gaps where the incoherence of these categories, presumed to be absolute in the biologized discourses of modernity, is playfully made visible and ridiculed.

A Jewish Girl in Shanghai (2010) is set in Shanghai’s “Little Vienna” Ghetto, where some 30,000 Jewish refugees sought shelter from Nazi persecution during WWII. Without their parents and cared for by a local family, Jewish siblings Rina and her brother Mishalli form a strong friendship with A-Gen, an orphaned Chinese boy. Together they encounter many adventures and teach each other about their distant worlds.  As Shanghai struggles beneath its own cruelly portrayed Japanese occupation, the children must also face the uncertainty concerning the fate of Rina and Mishalli’s…

The Leo Baeck Institute London warmly invites you to join an online discussion of the book

German-Jewish Studies: Next Generations

edited by Kerry Wallach & Aya Elyada

23 January 2023 at 18:00 (U.K) |13:00 (N.Y) | 19:00 (Berlin) | 20:00 (Israel)

Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story (2017) explores the multifaceted life of the Austrian-Jewish actress Hedy Lamarr, once known as the ‘the most beautiful woman in the world’. The star, who is said to have inspired the appearance of iconic characters such as Disney’s Snow White and Batwoman, described herself as an enfant terrible and was a woman of many talents.

In recent years, streaming networks have offered new encounters with the lives and traditions of ultraorthodox Judaism through means of pop cultural representations. While some praised the accuracy with which series such as Shtisel (2013-2021) or Unorthodox (2020) presented ultraorthodox customs, others identified problematic anti-Semitic stereotypes in those depictions. This lecture examines how far the representations in either series serve as a distancing mirror of our own societies and looks at them in comparison to modes of classical serial storytelling in television…

Monday, 14th November 2022

Programme

Session 1

4.00-5.50 Berlin time

4.00-4.30 Opening Remarks

One slot takes 35 minutes: the 6 minute presentation is followed by a 2 minute commentary

delivered by one of the other fellows attending, 15 minutes of general discussion, max. 5

minutes of commentary by Stefanie Fisher or Caroline Jessen and finally a response to this

last commentary by the original speaker.

4.30-5.05 Curry, Savoy: …

The conference A New Look at German-Jewish History through Photography focuses on the pre-digital age and approaches photography as a means for the historian to explore German-Jewish visual narratives of belonging in the context of both public and private visual language. The event is organised in collaboration with the German Historical Institute London and the Koebner-Minerva Center for German History (Israel). It is part of the Leo Baeck Institute London’s emerging research field Jewish Visual History…

The bon mot ‘A German joke is no laughing matter’ is attributed to Mark Twain. Improvising on Adorno’s dictum ‘writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric’ one might consider writing humour in the German language after Auschwitz a contradiction in terms. Yet, this was the gap into which the Israeli Author Ephraim Kishon, a Holocaust survivor from Hungary, stepped.

Over 100 completely unknown drawings by Franz Kafka of fascinating figures, shifting from the realistic to the fantastic, the grotesque, the uncanny and the carnivalesque have been made accessible in Prof Andreas Kilcher’s highly acclaimed book Franz Kafka: The Drawings.

The drawings illuminate a previously unknown side of the quintessential modernist author. Three fascinating stories can be told about Kafka’s drawings: the story of their transmission, the story of Kafka as a draftsman, and the story of his drawing in relation to his writing. 

Wednesday, 15th June 2022

Programme

Session 1
15.00-17.00 Berlin time

15.00-15.15 Opening Remarks

One slot takes 35 minutes: the 6 minute presentation is followed by a 2 minute commentary delivered by one of the other fellows attending, 15 minutes of general discussion, max. 5 minutes of commentary by Daniel Wildmann or Elisabeth Gallas and finally a response to this last commentary by the original speaker.

15.15-15.40 Presentation: Commentary:

15.40-16.15…

During the 1920s, Café Nagler was the hottest place in Berlin. Mor, the film’s directorembarks on a journey to find out what’s left of her family’s legendary café.Her grandmother follows the filming with great anticipation. When Mordiscovers the true story behind the café, she is unable to break her grandmother’s heartand looks for a creative solution. Café Nagler is a film about memory, about our need for family myths, about our longing for a different past.

Please join us for an online discussion of the book

In Hitler’s Munich: Jews, the Revolution, and the Rise of Nazism

with the author, Prof Michael Brenner, and Prof Steve Aschheim. 

6pm (UK time), May 18th 2022 

The event, chaired by Dr Irene Aue-Ben-David (Director, Leo Baeck Institute Jerusalem), is a collaboration between the Leo Baeck Institute Jerusalem, the Leo Baeck Institute London and the Leo Baeck Institute New York.  

In general, East German television attempted to combine so-called ‘political-operational cultural work’ with attractive programming. The same balancing act can also be observed in the presentation of Jewish topics and characters on TV. This talk covers so-called anti-fascist films about the Nazi era; campaign films against the West, e.g. courtroom dramas and crime movies; the aspect of ‘Jewish heritage’; Yiddish music; and Jewish contributions to entertainment shows. 

The history of ‘Pop’ is a history of music, migration and transcultural exchange. Following the invention of recording technologies and the worldwide production and distribution of records at the end of the 19th century, the new music industry created a new global culture. Jews were prominently involved in that process on all planes, from the creation of the Shellac record and the Gramophone by Emil Berliner, to the pioneers of the music industry and Tin Pan Alley. They were composers of musicals and popular songs and popularized ‘Jewish culture’ through cantorial music, Yiddish theatre or…

Contemporary popular culture often portrays Jewish mixed-sex dancing as either absolutely forbidden or as the punchline of a dirty joke. Fictional portrayals of women who leave Orthodoxy sometimes use transgressive dancing to underscore the temptation of secular society – and gentile men. Yet long before the Netflix miniseries Unorthodox, Jewish writers used partner dance as a powerful metaphor for social changes that transformed Jewish communities between the Enlightenment and the Holocaust. Scandalous dance scenes in German and other literatures are part of a…

When the body of an old man (Oded Toemi) with a mysterious tattoo and three stab wounds to his chest is found floating in Tel Aviv’s Yarkon River, Amnon (Amnon Wolf), a reluctant young police detective, is put in charge of the investigation – his first following a previous lengthy suspension from the job. 

The trail leads him to a tattoo artist’s parlour and a club of Holocaust survivors with a zest for life, who find solace in romantic recollections of their pre-war world. Cleverly weaving between past and present a story of deadly dalliances, desire, loneliness and…

Founded as an arts society in 1915 in London’s East End, Ben Uri’s collection, exhibition history and programming were significantly impacted from the 1930s onwards by the artistic influx of the so-called ‘Hitler émigrés’. This lecture examines the conception of Heimat in relation to the lives and work of German-Jewish artists from this cohort, among them Frank Auerbach and Eva Frankfurther, as they navigated their new host culture, touching on notions of national cultural heritage and belonging.

Wednesday, 10th November 2021

Programme 

Session 1
16.00-17.50 Berlin time

16.00-16.30 Opening Remarks

One slot takes 35 minutes: the 6 minute presentation is followed by a 2 minute commentary delivered by one of the other fellows attending, 15 minutes of general discussion, max. 5 minutes of commentary by Daniel Wildmann or Elisabeth Gallas and finally a response to this last commentary by the original speaker.

16.30-17.05 Weigand, Susanne Katharina: Teil der Stadtgesellschaft?…

In the past decade post-Soviet Jewish writers, poets and artists who live and work in Germany have played a crucial role in the ongoing debate on the various forms of migrant belonging in contemporary German culture. This lecture seeks to grasp the poetics of (non) belonging. Natasha Gordinsky will explore how different artists represent and de-stabilize performatively the meaning of Heimat, and reflect on this highly charged concept, both in German and Soviet contexts, in a dialogue with Kiev born German writer Katja Petrowskaja. 

Dr Natasha Gordinsky is Senior…

Online Workshop, 22nd, 29th, 30th of June 2021 

Chaired by Dr Elisabeth Gallas and Dr Daniel Wildmann   

Programme   

Session 1 

Opening Remarks Annika Funke: Organisationsformen ländlicher Judensiedlungen zwischen Zentralität und Dispersion. Ein Vergleich regionaler Netzwerke im Elsass und in der Wetterau im ausgehenden Mittelalter 

Moshe David Chechik: An Intellectual Biography of Meir of Rothenburg Zwi Kunshtat: Yeshivot and their Students in…

Online Panel: Philanthropist, Rescuer, Collector: Remembering Wilfrid Israel 

To celebrate the 70th anniversary of the Wilfrid Israel Museum in the Kibbuz HaZorea, we would like to warmly invite you to an online panel discussion commemorating the enigmatic philanthropist Wilfrid Israel, an internationally renowned and well-connected Jewish businessman who was significantly involved in the rescue of Jews from Nazi Germany after the Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass): 

Philanthropist, Rescuer,…

The film tells the remarkable story of Wilfrid Israel – a wealthy Jewish businessman and owner of Berlin’s largest department store in the 1930’s who was involved in the saving of tens of thousands of Jews, and played a key role in the Kindertransport operation. Israel was a member of one of Germany’s most prominent Jewish families and acquainted with some of the most influential figures of the 20th century, yet little is known about his personal life and heroic endeavours. Why did his story remain untold? What was there to hide?

International Digital Workshop | Lichtenberg-Kolleg Göttingen & Leo Baeck Institute London

ABSTRACT

Shalom Bollywood reveals the unlikely story of the 2000-year-old Indian-Jewish community and its formative place in shaping the world’s largest film industry. When Indian cinema began 100 years ago it was taboo for Hindu and Islamic women to perform on screen, so Indian Jewish women took on female lead roles, which they dominated for decades. The film focuses on the lives of five of the great Jewish actors. Infused with music and dancing, the vibrant and spirited documentary unabashedly oozes Bollywood as it uses film motifs to drive the narrative.

This talk analyses the presence of generic Heimat imagery in German-Jewish family albums from the 1930s and highlights two major tendencies: the appropriation of Heimat iconography in photographs of the Jewish home, and the endeavour to situate Jewish family members within generic Heimat scenes. In both cases, Heimat iconography alluded to an alternative notion of German identity – and of belonging in the German landscape – which allowed and encouraged the integration of Jews within it. Consequently, in Jewish family albums, Heimat imagery provided an imagined landscape that sheltered…

The nomadic photographer and filmmaker Helmar Lerski was born in Alsace, raised in Switzerland, began his professional career in Milwaukee, moved to Germany, travelled to Erez Israel and ultimately retired in Switzerland. Aesthetically, Lerski sought to communicate timeless values through the manipulation of light and the physiognomy of the human face in extreme close-ups. His photo project ‘Jewish Heads’ started his search for a distinct Jewish identity. While advocating a Jewish homeland as a Zionist filmmaker, Lerski remained loyal to his artistic vision.

Among the pioneers turning the Alps into the playground of Europe, the urban Jewish middle class played a crucial role. While cities like Vienna, Berlin or Prague offered Jews access to secular culture, industry or higher education, the domesticated ‘wilderness’ of the mountains provided ‘innocence’ of togetherness and belonging beyond confines of class, religion and ethnicity. Jewish climbers, environmentalists and pioneers of tourism were among the first to organize Alpine clubs, while others reinvented folklore dressing. All of them lost faith in the Alpine pastorale after 1933.…

Ambitious Berliner Hanna (Karoline Schuch) decides that if she is going to succeed in business, she will need some volunteer service on her CV. So she heads to Israel to work with the disabled. Itay (Doron Amit), the Israeli social worker supervising her volunteer work, picks on her with cynical comments on German history, whilst obviously flirting with her. 

Hanna initially reacts with rejection, but as her interest in her own family history grows, so does her attraction to Itay. Probing the effects of the Holocaust’s looming shadow on third generation Israelis and…

Online Workshop, 8th – 9th December 2020
(originally scheduled for Leipzig in June 2020, postponed due to the Covid-19 pandemic and staged as a Zoom conference)
Chaired by Dr Peter Antres and Dr Daniel Wildmann

Programme

Session 1

Opening Remarks

Alisha Meininghaus: Jewish birth-amulets as an indicator for changing concepts of ‘religion’, ‘magic’ and gender roles in past and present

Aviya Doron: Economic interactions between Jews and Christians – Trust and Risk in Medieval…

The identities of many Eastern European and German Jews who immigrated to Eretz Israel between the 1880s and the foundation of the Israeli state in 1948 oscillated between their roots and identification with the new Zionist project. This lecture explores how immigrants expressed social, cultural and political belonging through clothing and, focusing on gender and visual materials, offers fresh perspectives on how clothing became fashion, or ‘anti-fashion’, and to what extent a consensual mode of dress emerged. It also explores how clothing habits of Arab people and changing Ottoman and…

Online Workshop, 10th, 11th, 18th and 19th November 2020 

Chaired by Dr Elisabeth Gallas and Dr Daniel Wildmann   

Programme   

Session 1 

Opening Remarks 

Annika Funke: Organisationsformen ländlicher Judensiedlungen zwischen Zentralität und Dispersion. Ein Vergleich regionaler Netzwerke im Elsass und in der Wetterau im ausgehenden Mittelalter 

Moshe David Chechnik: An Intellectual Biography of Meir of Rothenburg   

…

Paul Herzberg is an actor and writer. His most recent appearances as an actor were as John Vorster in Antony Sher’s ID at the Almeida; Shylock in The Merchant of Venice at The Arcola, at the RSC as Vincentio in The Taming of The Shrew; in 2017 Shimon Peres in the award-winning play, Oslo. Recent television includes Daniel Borgoraz in the award-winning serial The Honourable Woman. His screenplay Almost Heaven won the Nashville International Best Feature Award, and his stage play, The Dead Wait, was shortlisted for The Verity Bargate Award, nominated in three categories for the MEN theatre…

The flat on the third floor of a Bauhaus building in Tel Aviv was where Arnon Goldfinger’s grandparents lived since they immigrated to Palestine in the 1930’s. Were it not for the view from the windows, one might have thought that the flat was in Berlin. When his grandmother passed away at the age of 98, the family were called to the flat to clear out what was left. Objects, pictures, letters and documents awaited them, revealing traces of a troubled and unknown past.

In his highly acclaimed film debut, film director Ofir Raul Graizer delicately explores the connection between desire and shared grief. When the Israeli businessman Oren dies in a car accident, German baker Thomas travels from Berlin to Jerusalem in search of his lover’s widow and the life Oren left behind. As the lines between longing and loneliness during Thomas’ time in Israel blur, Graizer explores the challenges, which the triangular relationship poses to family and faith. As food may be a way cultures can bridge such divides, so too can it be a way to mark…

Israel is small, but its desert, the Negev, is large – especially far south from Tel Aviv. The film tells the story of Jewish immigrants from India and Morocco wrestling there with the heat, cultural differences and problems at the workplace. Couscous or Curry, Cricket or Football – parallel worlds or integration … comedy or drama? 

This immensely creative director’s motto is: ‘the stranger is always the latest arrival’. What does integration really mean? Are prejudices between Jews and Jews even possible? And above all, how does love between a man and a woman fare in such…

This event has been cancelled as a precautionary measure due to the Coronavirus outbreak. 

Jew Süss and Jud Süss - Film Screening and Panel Discussion 

This event is organised by the Pears Institute for the study of Antisemitism, the Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image and The Wiener Library, in association with the Insiders/Outsiders Festival and the German Screen Studies Network. 

What started out as religious niche has matured into a 250 billion-dollar industry largely pioneered by a group of diverse women embracing unique identities on social media. Fashion stylist turned blogger, Adi Heyman’s inspiration behind launching a Jewish fashion and lifestyle blog in 2010 stemmed from her personal and professional experience as an Orthodox Jew working in the fashion industry.

In the 1920s and early 1930s – as today – Jews in Germany were concerned about growing anti-Semitism, and many took precautions to conceal their Jewishness by dressing and behaving in certain ‘assimilated’ ways. Yet there were still occasions when it was beneficial to be openly Jewish. This lecture explores the tensions that came with being visible as a Jew – an identity play that often involved appearing simultaneously non-Jewish and Jewish. Drawing on a wide range of images and films, this presentation explores controversial aspects of German Jewish visibility and invisibility, as well…

Classic Jewish film and television, from The Jazz Singer to Seinfeld, was shaped by the economic need to reach the broadest possible audience, leading to creative strategies that minimized or downplayed the difference between Jews and the rest of society. As Netflix and other streaming services have made more specialized entertainment commercially viable, new ways of acting Jewish on screen have emerged that highlight the quirkier and more contested aspects of Jewish identity.

Book Launch

On the occasion of the launch of Jüdischer Almanach 2019 we are delighted to invite you to a presentation of ‘Sex and Crime: Geschichten aus der Jüdischen Unterwelt’ in the presence of the editor, Dr Gisela Dachs (Leo Baeck Institute Jerusalem) and the two authors Rabbi Andy Steiman and Dr Daniel Wildmann (Leo Baeck Institute London).

This event will take place on Monday 28th of November 2019 at 19.30hrs in the Rosi-und-Paul-Ansberg-Saal at the Henry-and-Emma-Budge…

Art History as an academic discipline in Britain is commonly regarded as a German import. Before the 1930s, British art writing was the domain of the amateur and connoisseur. This only changed radically with the influx of émigré scholars – most of them of German-Jewish descent – to Britain after 1933. These highly skilled professional art historians played a pivotal role in developing the research and teaching programmes of both the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes.

Workshop in Brighton, 3rd – 6th November 2019
Chaired by Dr Peter Antres and Dr Daniel Wildmann

Programme

Guided Tour at Brighton Pavilion

Session 1

Opening Remarks

Aviya Doron: Economic interactions between Jews and Christians – Trust and Risk in Medieval Urban Environment. (response: Zarin Aschrafi)

Alisha Meininghaus: Jewish birth-amulets as an indicator for changing concepts of ‘religion’, ‘magic’ and gender roles in past and present …

The Leo Baeck Institute is happy to announce the second workshop of the Leo Baeck Fellowship Programme 2018/19 from 23rd - 26th June 2019 in Leipzig. 

The Leo Baeck Fellowship is an international fellowship programme aimed at PhD candidates researching the history and culture of German-speaking Jewry. Every year, in cooperation with the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes, the Leo Baeck Institute London offers to up to twelve doctoral candidates the opportunity to spend a year working on research at the location of their choice. In addition to financial support,…

The Leo Baeck Institute is happy to announce the second workshop of the Leo Baeck Fellowship Programme 2018/19 from 23rd - 26th June 2019 in Leipzig. 

The Leo Baeck Fellowship is an international fellowship programme aimed at PhD candidates researching the history and culture of German-speaking Jewry. Every year, in cooperation with the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes, the Leo Baeck Institute London offers to up to twelve doctoral candidates the opportunity to spend a year working on research at the location of their choice. In addition to financial support,…

New Perspectives in the History of German Judaism, Fascism, and Sexuality

Conference Berlin, 6 to 9 June 2019

On the occasion of the 100th birthday of Professor George L. Mosse three generations of historians will gather to commemorate and analyze his ongoing influence in European, Jewish, and Gender history, as well as the continued resonance of the Mosse family legacy in Berlin. 

International Conference in partnership with the Lichtenberg-Kolleg, Georg August Universität Göttingen and  the  Institut für die Geschichte der deutschen Juden (IGdJ).

The exhibition “Networks of Knowledge” puts the spotlight on the institute’s Library and Pamphlet collection and presents for the first time some highlights from this resource to the public.

In this illustrated lecture, professor Nathan Abrams will explore recent British representations of Jews on television focussing on the role of the Jewish gangster in McMafia and Peaky Blinders in particular.

Nathan Abrams is Professor in Film at Bangor University of Wales where he directs the Film Studies programme and the Centre for Film, Television and Screen Studies. He is the author of Stanley Kubrick: New York Jewish Intellectual (2018) and Eyes Wide Shut: Stanley Kubrick and the Making of His Final Film…

We are delighted to welcome Kathrin Hoffmann-Curtius to present her book Judenmord. Art and the Holocaust in Post-war Germany. First published in German in 2014, this is the first comprehensive study of representations of the Holocaust in Post-war German art. The book presents an innovative and multi-layered perspective on Post-war Holocaust memory by taking into account works by both supporters and opponents of Nazism, and by artists working in both East and West Germany. While discussing how artists…

Moses Mendelssohn has engaged artists of Jewish and non-Jewish origin from his lifetime until today. The lecture will show how, over this long period, Mendelssohn has been turned into the icon of German-Jewish modernity by being represented in a myriad of ways and techniques.

In the 19th century Jews gradually began to free themselves from their ambivalence towards the fine arts. rabbis repeatedly placed the depiction of people in pictures and sculptures close to idolatry and viewed it with reservations. The discovery of a visual culture in Judaism by the Haskala, the Jewish Enlightenment, fulfilled a double function: it was intended to strengthen a new Jewish self-confidence internally and at the same time to ward off the anti-Semitic prejudice that Jews were incapable of artistic expression. This process will be illustrated by the example of the emergence and…

Venue: Leibniz Institute for Jewish History and Culture – Simon Dubnow 

Chaired by Dr Peter Antres and Dr Daniel Wildmann 

23. – 26. June 2019 

Programme 

Guided tour through the permanent exhibition on “Dictatorship and Democracy after 1945” in the “Zeitgeschichtliches Forum”. 

Session 1 

Greetings by Jörg Deventer Josef Nothmann: Futures’ Past: Commerce, Capital and the Rise and Fall of the Commodity Exchange in German…

The Leo Baeck Institute London is delighted to announce its support of the Pascal Theatre Company’s latest research and workshop programme. Over the next eighteen months, this project will be exploring and documenting, the often hidden history of Sephardi Jews who came to England during the seventeenth century and stayed to enrich our culture and communities. On the 20th, 27th January and 3rd February the company will be running free morning drama workshops at Bevis Marks synagogue, London, exploring three different aspects of Sephardi history and culture…

The visual presentation about Zionist landscape photography in Palestine (Eretz-Israel), from its beginning in 1898 until 1961, explores the ‘returning’ of the Jews to modern history and geography and the formation of the ‘mental landscape’ of Israel as it was created in the Zionist photographic narrative. Landscape photography, produced and consumed within the National Zionist Institutions, created a utopian image of the Jewish environment by developing a coherent iconography rooted in the hegemonic ideology of cultivating and ‘building’ a country for the Jewish nation.

 …

The workshop sought to analyse the role of private German-Jewish photography between 1933 and 1945. By using visual sources and focussing on the subjective emotional responses of German Jews to political developments during this period, it offered a completely new perspective on Jewish reactions to the Nazi Regime.

Private photographs in particular, frequently collected and arranged in family albums, are a prime medium for documenting a domestic perspective of how individuals situate themselves and their emotions in larger political frameworks and family dynamics. …

Workshop at the University of Sussex, England 

Chaired by Dr Elisabeth Gallas and Dr Daniel Wildmann 

Programme

Session 1 

Josef Northmann: Futures’ Past: Commerce, Capital and the Rise and Fall of the Commodity Exchange in German Economic Life, 1870 – 1935 (response: Felix Hempe) 

Sebastian Kunze: Gustav Landauer als jüdischer Intellektueller (response: Yonatan Shiloh-Dayan) 

Session 2 

Netta…

The richly illustrated Catalan Mappamundi is among the most celebrated medieval maps surviving to this day. Commissioned by Peter IV of Aragon as a gift to Charles V of France it was put to parchment by Elisha Cresques, a Jewish scribe, illuminator, and cartographer in the City of Majorca. The talk explores how Elisha, from his delicate position as a Sefardi intellectual in the service of the Court coped with his patron’s agendas while, at the same time, voiced his own views of the politics of his time.   

Chaired by Dr Miriam Rürup and Dr Daniel Wildmann 

Guest speaker: Baroness Julia Neuberger 

Programme

Session 1 

Film ‘Jud Süß’, with an introduction by Daniel Wildmann 

Session 2 

Ahuva Liberles Noiman: Das Leben von Konvertiten im Spätmittelalter (response: Sara Halpern) 

Sophia Schmitt: Konflikt in der Stadt: Eine verflechtungsgeschichtliche Perspektive der Regensburger Ritualmordbeschuldigung…

East West Street: A Personal History of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity

In his short lecture and subsequent conversation with Katrin Himmler, Philippe Sands explores how personal lives and history are interwoven. Drawing from his prize-winning book East West Street – part historical detective story, part family history, part legal thriller – he connect his work on ‘crimes against humanity’ and ‘genocide’, the events that overwhelmed his family during the Second World War, and an untold story at the heart of the Nuremberg Trial that pits…

After the death of German politician Gerhard Jahn in 1998, his four sisters found hundreds of letters in his house, which they had written during the war to their Jewish mother Lilli, who had been detained in a labour camp and, finally, killed in Auschwitz in 1944. Fifty years of silence had followed but now, for the first time, the family was able to talk about Lilli once again. But should the letters be published? Lilli’s grandson Martin Doerry undertook the tasks of both convincing his family that they should and conducting the necessary research, thus finding himself in the dual role…

The talk examines, through the intimate – yet also distant – lens of family history, the ambivalent and paradoxical experiences, sensibilities, and emotions of bourgeois Berlin Jews who found refuge and romance in the ‘Orient’ of Iran and India after 1933. Drawing on an extensive collection of family correspondence and memorabilia from Iran and India (1935-1947), Grossmann probes her own parents’ understanding of their unstable position as well as the perils and pleasures of writing a ‘hybrid’ border-crossing family story folded into a larger historical drama of war, Holocaust, and…

In 2013, Thomas Harding visited his Jewish family’s old weekend house outside of Berlin. He found it shrouded in a jungle of bushes and trees, its windows broken, graffiti painted across its walls and that it was destined for demolition. When he told his family that he wanted to work with the locals to save the house they reacted with intense emotion, triggering a debate about memories, the value of history and the possibility of reconciliation.  

Lisa Appignanesi teases out some of the hurdles she encountered researching her critically acclaimed family memoir, Losing the Dead. These extended post publication: memoir writing elicits the kinds of responses historical texts rarely do.

Please note: A short 15 minute film called: Ex Memoria, directed by Josh Appignanesi and starring Sarah Kestleman, will also be shown.

The Leo Baeck Institute is happy to announce the first workshop of the Leo Baeck Fellowship Programme 2017/18 from 15th – 18th October 2017 in Brighton

The Leo Baeck Fellowship is an international fellowship programme aimed at PhD candidates researching the history and culture of German-speaking Jewry. Every year, in cooperation with the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes, the Leo Baeck Institute London offers to up to twelve doctoral candidates the opportunity to spend a year working on research at the location of their choice. In addition to…

Workshop at the University of Sussex, England 

Chaired by Prof Dr David Rechter, Dr Andrea Schatz and Dr Daniel Wildmann 

Programme

Session 1 

Miriam Fenton: Everyday Life, Identity, and Communal Relations: A Comparison of Khehilot Shum and Aragon, c. 1200-1347 (response: Alexander Walther) 

Ahuva Liberles Noiman: Das Leben der Konvertiten im Spätmittelalter (response: Sara Halpern) 

Session 2 …

The LBI London, in cooperation with LBI New York and with the Institute of Contemporary History, Czech Academy of Sciences, is holding a workshop at the Center for Jewish History, New York, 24 August 2017.  

Chaired by Prof Dr Sharon Gillerman, Prof Dr David Rechter, and Dr Daniel Wildmann 

Programme

Session 1 

Agnes Kelemen: The Migration of the Numerus Clausus Exiles. Hungarian Jewish Students in Interwar Europe (response: Lucia Linares) 

Felix Schölch: Zuhause zwischen Isar und Jordan. Leben und Werk Schalom Ben-Chorins (response: Omer Michaelis) 

Ayana Halpem: Female Pioneers in Social Work in Palestine: The Impact of the Jewish German…

A memorial event in honour of the Leo Baeck Institute’s esteemed, longstanding former director Dr Arnold Paucker OBE

Opening Words by Pauline Paucker

Lecture by Peter Pulzer (Oxford):

‘Arno Paucker, A Scholar Who Reached Out’

Panel: ‘Arno Paucker and German-Jewish History’

Peter Alter (Cologne)
Simone Erpel (Berlin)
Raphael Gross (Leipzig)
Chair: Daniel…

On the Eve of Departure: Art and Exile 

During the talk Edmund de Waal discussed the telling of family stories through words and sculpture, touching on his writing of The Hare with Amber Eyes and works by Paul Celan and Walter Benjamin.  

Edmund de Waal is an artist and author of The Hare with Amber Eyes

Organised by the Leo Baeck Institute London in collaboration with Queen Mary University of London, School of History. The lecture took place at Queen Mary University of London, Arts Two Lecture Theatre on…

Panel discussion as a part of the Leo Baeck Institute Lecture Series 2016-17

The panel discuss the complicated and multi-layered relationship of the European left with Zionism and the State of Israel, examining this broad subject from a historical perspective and shedding light on the different debates on various European countries.  

‘If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere.’ Prime Minister Theresa May, November 2016

Cancelled due to sickness

In November 1952, fourteen leading officials of the Czechoslovak Communist Party (CCP), eleven of them Jews, were accused of participating in an alleged bourgeois, nationalist, Zionist conspiracy against the people’s democracy. 

The Balfour Declaration (1917) boosted Zionism in France. Although the movement enjoyed the support of the Socialists in the inter-war period, it was denounced by the Communist Party (CP) and the ultra-left. The creation of the State of Israel marked the beginning of a new era. While support for Israel grew strongly among French socialists from 1954 due to their opposition to Nasser’s politics in Algeria, the CP took a more critical stance. Post 1967 changes in the French-Israeli relationship left the left sharply divided: While the Socialists continue to support Israel unconditionally,…

In Germany, until this year, it was illegal to print copies of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf. The State of Bavaria held the copyright and banned publication of the book. In January 2016 the copyright expired and the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich published a scholarly edition which runs to two enormous volumes, complete with a lengthy introduction and copious annotation. The first print run was sold out before the publication date. In the UK, by contrast, Nazi literature is freely available and, unlike in Germany and Austria, there is no law against Holocaust denial.…

A significant part of the British left, especially since the June 1967 war, tends to denounce Israel as a state and Zionism as an idea. Ostensibly, these attitudes are grounded in the anti-colonialism and anti-racism which have been staple causes for the British left since the sun began to set on the Empire. These grounds, however, are called into question by those who detect the hidden hand of antisemitism at work. The lecture will examine key concepts and arguments in this controversy, seeking to bring the issues into sharper focus.   

The LBI PhD Colloquium took place in the library of the Leo Baeck Institute on the 16th of November at 1:30pm. Our PhD students presented their work in the presence of Prof Steven Aschheim (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) whose insightful comments led to many very interesting discussions. To view the program and participants click here. 

Workshop at the University of Sussex, England 

Chaired by Prof Dr Sharon Gillerman, Prof Dr David Rechter, and Dr Daniel Wildmann

Programme

Session 1

Tuvia Singer – Nationalism, Regionalism and Cosmology: Minorities and Foreigners in German Folk-Narratives in the Nineteenth Century (response: Lotte Houwink ten Cate)

Omer Michaelis – Critical Times and the Reconfiguration of Torah: Reading Hermann Co-hen in light of Moses Maimondies’ Guide of the Perplexed…

 Workshop at the University of Sussex, England

Chaired by Prof Dr Sharon Gillerman, Prof Dr David Rechter, and Dr Daniel Wildmann

Programme

Session 1

Tuvia Singer - Nationalism, Regionalism and Cosmology: Minorities and Foreigners in German Folk-Narratives in the Nineteenth Century (response: Lotte Houwink ten Cate)

Omer Michaelis - Critical Times and the Reconfiguration of Torah: Reading Hermann Co-hen in light of Moses Maimondies’ Guide of the Perplexed…

The Leo Baeck Institute is happy to announce its second workshop of the Leo Baeck Fellowship Programme 2015/16 from 10th - 13th July 2016 in Freudental, Germany. 

The Leo Baeck Fellowship is an international fellowship programme aimed at PhD candidates researching the history and culture of German-speaking Jewry. Every year, in cooperation with the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes, the Leo Baeck Institute London offers to up to twelve doctoral candidates the opportunity to spend a year working on research at the location of their…

Chaired by Prof Dr Sara Lipton, and Prof Dr Christhard Hoffmann   

Programme 

Session 1 

Miriam Szamet - Immigration and Education: Pedagogues and the Pedagogical Discourse in the Modern Jewish community in Palestine, 1900 - 1930 (response: Ido Harari) 

Nisrine Rahal - A Garden of Children and the Education of Citizens: The German Kinder-garten Movement from 1837-1880 (response: Julia Lange) 

Tally Gur - “Chronicle of a death Foretold”: Jewish Studies…

n Jerusalem, the separation barrier has galvanized public opinion, both in its role as a hard barrier inside a divided city and as the visible ‘tip of the iceberg’ that reflects only a fraction of the political and military regime supporting the occupation. This lecture will acknowledge the wall’s political status but focus on issues to do with the iconicity of such a structure, including its power in situ in the human landscape, in the media and in its existential meanings.

International conference at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development (MPIB), Center for the History of Emotions in Berlin organized by MPIB, Center for Research on Antisemitism in Berlin and the Leo Baeck Institute London.

Berlin, 16-18 April 2012

Dr Daniel Wildmann (Director, Leo Baeck Institute London and Senior Lecturer in History, Queen Mary University of London)

Spring Term 2016 at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel

Dr Wildmann is a Lady Davis Visiting Professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem

A lecture series organised by the Franz Rosenzweig Minerva Research Center for German-Jewish Literature and Cultural History, the Avraham Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry, the Richard Koebner Minerva Center for German History and the Leo Baeck Institute…

The UN Partition Plan for Palestine known as UN Resolution 181 envisioned Jerusalem as a Corpus Separatum, an international city open and accessible to believers of the three monotheistic religions. This did not materialize. While the city was divided as a result of the 1948 War, Mount Scopus in its northern part acquired an exceptional status. Until 1967 it existed as an enclave amid Jordanian territory, divided into a Jordanian and an Israeli part under UN control. This lecture will shed light on the fate of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, a contested space encapsulated and frozen in…

Chaired by Prof Dr Sara Lipton, and Prof Dr Christhard Hoffmann

Programme

Session 1

Miriam Szamet – Immigration and Education: Pedagogues and the Pedagogical Discourse in the Modern Jewish community in Palestine, 1900 – 1930 (response: Ido Harari)

Nisrine Rahal – A Garden of Children and the Education of Citizens: The German Kinder-garten Movement from 1837-1880 (response: Julia Lange)

Tally Gur – “Chronicle of a death Foretold”: Jewish Studies and Identity Politics – The case…

In this lecture the state policies toward tens of thousands of the indigenous inhabitants of the Negev region in Israel who live in ‘unrecognized villages’, will be highlighted. Militarizing space to secure land has always been one of the means tocontrol land. The Prawer Plan is the current attempt of displacing the Bedouins to finalize their land claims and urbanize them against their will. The landowners have tried all means of resistance including the legal and political ones, however, they didn’t succeed. Therefore, they returned to their tribal roots in a last, butincredibly effective…

The different concepts of the past are an integral part of Israeli politics today. Jewish politics in Israel often seek legitimation through a connection with the physicalremains of the past. As stones do not speak, their presence and their past meanings are explained within the present political discourse of the Israeli society. In some sense, every generation creates its own past. While the national religious and right wing secular sections of the Jewish society have a deep interest in connecting their identities with assumed past collective meanings, other sectors of the society express…

The personal documentary accompanies film maker Arnon Goldfinger’s family during the process of sorting out the old apartment of their deceased grandmother in Tel Aviv. They discover old letters documenting the grandparents’ friendship to a German couple of high-ranked Nazis. Connecting personal and public history, “The Flat” highlights the importance of a continuous and collective reflection of the past. 

Following the screening there was a special Q&A session with filmmaker Arnon Goldfinger, chaired by Dr Daniel Wildmann, Leo Baeck Institute London/ Queen Mary,…

Historians read the sixties as the age of student revolts, youth subcultures and generational conflict. But this is only half the story. For there were old people, too, and they responded in their own ways to protests and new values. In West Germany, a country deeply affected by the aftermath of war and Nazism, acrimonious generational conflict allegedly pitted rebellious young men and their Nazi fathers against each other. A closer look at elderly Germans will reveal a different picture. Professor von Hodenberg will be launching her new book ‘Television’s Moment: Sitcom Audiences and the…

Chaired by Prof Dr Sara Lipton, Prof Dr David Rechter, and Dr Daniel Wildmann   

Programme 

Session 1 

Annegret Oehme - Adapting Arthur The Transformations and Adaptations of Wirnt of Grafenberg’s Wigalois (response: Tally Gur) 

Yakov Mayer - The Reception of the Jerusalem Talmud in the Early Modern Period (response: Marie Sophie Graf)   

Session 2 

Tamara Morsel-Eisenberg - The Organization of Halakhic…

Prof Dan Diner (Hebrew University of Jerusalem)

Dr Daniel Wildmann (Acting Director Leo Baeck Institute London) and Prof Elizabeth Harvey (Chair German History Society) are delighted to invite you to a lecture by Prof Dan Diner (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) as part of the German History Society Annual Conference.

Rites of Reserve: The German-Israeli Encounter in Luxemburg 1952 

Chaired by Prof Dr Elisabeth Hollender and Dr Daniel Wildmann   

Programme 

Session 1 

Lina Nikou - Vergangenheitstouristen - Tourists of the Past. The Influence of Official Invitations for Jewish Refugees of the Nazi Regime by the Senate of Hamburg on the City’s Historiography (response: David Pruwer) 

Olga Zitová - The Weekly Paper Selbstwehr (Self-Defence) (1907-1938) in the Czech Cultural Context (response: Amir Heinitz) 

Adam Stern - Rosenzweig’s…

Doctoral Network in Jewish History: Basel, Manchester and QMUL 

At the School of History, QMUL, 23 April 2015 

Venue: The Leo Baeck Institute Library, Arts Two, Second Floor 

Hosted by Professor Miri Rubin (QMUL), with Distinguished Guest Professor Erik Petry (Basel) Programme 

10.00 Coffee and Welcome 

On 22 January 2015, Peter G.J. Pulzer was awarded the Leo Baeck Institute London Medal of Recognition in acknowledgement of his academic lifetime achievement as an internationally renowned political historian. The festive ceremony and reception was hosted by the newly arrived Austrian Ambassador Martin Eichtinger at the Austrian Embassy in London.

We are happy to announce the upcoming public lecture

‘To Remember and never Forget’: The Story of Holocaust Survivor Hannah Lewis

Chair: Prof Wayne Morrison (School of Law, QMUL)

This event is organised by the Human Rights Collegium, School of Law, Queen Mary University of London, in co-operation with the Leo Baeck Institute London and the Holocaust Educational Trust.

Thursday 4 December 2014, 6:30pm

Workshop at the University of Sussex, England 

Chaired by Prof Dr Raphael Gross, Dr Claudia Prestel, and Dr Daniel Wildmann   

Programme 

Session 1 

Dorothea Kies - History and Knowledge: Jews in the Christian Historiography of the 13th Century (response: Lina NIkou) 

Andreas Lehnertz - Jewish Seals in Late Medieval Ashkenaz (response: Adam Stern)   

Session 2 Amir Heinitz - Friedrich Rosen and German Relations…

An International Conference

14-15 September 2014

Undisciplined: German Jewish Studies Today

The Leo Baeck Institute London

Flyer-Undisciplined-German-Jewish-Studies-Today

ONE-DAY WORKSHOP

The Rescue of Jews in Western Europe during the Holocaust: The Local, the National and the Transnational

Monday 7th July 2014

Queen Mary, University of London (Arts Two, Room 3.20)

Programme 

Session 1 

Yael Almog - Hebrew Reminiscences – the Secular Readership of Modern Hermeneutics (response: Anna Koch) 

Alexandra Zirkle - “Was ist nun ein Gotteshaus“: The Temple Cultus in Nineteenth-Century German Jewish Scriptural Hermeneutics (response: Kevin McNamara) 

David Hamann - “Die Hilfe muss von außen kommen” Paul Nathan – Zivilgesellschaftliches Engagement als Lebenswerk (response: Carl-Eric Linsler)   

…

The Great War shattered Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi’s celebrated distinction between history and memory in Jewish cultural life.  Jay Winter argues that Jewish history and Jewish memory collided between 1914 and 1918 in ways which transformed both and created a new category he terms ‘historical remembrance’.

The war unleashed both, centripetal forces, moving Jews to the core of their societies and centrifugal forces, dispersing huge populations of Jews in Eastern Europe and Russia, creating terrifying violence, the appearance of which was a precondition for the…

The lecture explores the German patriotism of the eminentJewish philosophers Hermann Cohen and Franz Rosenzweig. While Cohen thought that his messianic ideas found their realization in the Kaiser’s German Reich, Rosenzweig was more sober and modern. He equally did not see any contradiction between his Jewishness and his Germanness, however, less naive than Cohen, he supported Friedrich Naumann’s idea of a German hegemony in Central Europe. Afterthe Holocaust, this seems almost incredible! However, were theirideas really that wrong and do we not owe justice to them? Was there a Jewish cause…

In this lecture Glenda Abramson will describe life in the Jewish settlement in Palestine under the autocratic rule ofJemal Pasha. Once the wartook hold, Palestine was in a parlous condition, almost entirely cut off from the rest of the world, short of essential goods, medical supplies and funds to support those in the Jewish settlement who depended on international charity. The lack of supplies led to large-scale starvation and disease. How did the Jewish settlement in Palestine cope with these dramatic political, economic and cultural challenges? 

We are happy to announce the upcoming conference under the title Jews on the Move: Particularist Universality in Modern Cosmopolitanist Thought

This conference is organized by Prof Sander Gilman (Emory University) and Dr Cathy Gelbin (University of Manchester) in cooperation with the LBI London and will be held at Lecture Room 217, 2nd Floor, Arts Two Building, Queen Mary, University of London, on 11th and 12th May 2014. Please see below for further details of this event. 

Jews on the Move: Particularist Universality in Modern…

The First World War was a pivotal time of change forthe Jewish community in Britain and indeed throughout Europe and the Middle East. Roz Currie has curated the Jewish Military Museum and Jewish Museum London joint exhibition on this subject. This lecture will discuss the challenges behind telling this story, it will touch on newly uncovered narratives of those at war and also question what it meant to be a British Jew at the outbreak of war. 

In his recent book “Anti-Judaism: The History of a Way of Thinking,” David Nirenberg argued that Anti-Judaism should not be thought of as some archaic or irrational closet in the vast edifices of Western thought.  Instead, he suggested, it was a powerful conceptual tool, one that played an important role in helping many people make sense of the complex world they lived in.  In this lecture he will explain how Anti-Judaism became so central, and describe some of the work it has done in shaping the ways in which past peoples interpreted the worlds they lived in.

21-23 February 2014  

As part of the international collaborative Project ESTHER (funded by the Culture Programme of the European Union) and in cooperation with the Leo Baeck Institute, the Royal College of Music is holding a three-day symposium and celebration, exploring the work of émigré musicians in Great Britain and other countries during and after the Second World War. 

We are pleased to announce the following event organised by Prof Sander Gilman (Chairman of the LBI London) and Dr Cathy Gelbin (Executive Board Member of the LBI London):

20 January 2014, 6.30-9.30 pm at Rich Mix Cinema and Arts Centre, London

This ‘town-meeting’ type event explores the complex stories of migration to London’s East End from the 1800s to the present. The event is co-organized by Cathy Gelbin (Universityof Manchester) and Sander Gilman (EmoryUniversity) as part of their AHRC-funded research project Cosmopolitanism and the Jews. 

Dr Rachel Garfield (University of Reading) 

A lecture series organized by the Leo Baeck Institute and the Wiener Library.

Workshop at the University of Sussex, England 

Chaired by Miriam Rürup, and Daniel Wildmann   

Programme 

Session 1 

Yael Almog – Hebrew Reminiscences – the Secular Readership of Modern Hermeneutics (response: Anna Koch) 

Ethan Zadoff – Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife: Medieval Jewish Marriage law in Ashkenaz in Comparative Perspective: 1100-1300 (response: Elisabeth Pönisch)   

…

Opening words by Sir Nicholas Montagu KCB

Raphael Gross’s talk focuses on Herschel Grynszpan and the diverse reactions to his assassination of the German diplomat Ernst vom Rath. It tells the story of Grynszpan’s background and examine the various responses to and consequences of his action which was used by the Nazis as an excuse for the most significant pogrom against German Jews in history. 

A one-off special lecture organized by the Leo Baeck Institute. 

The newest buzzword for globalization is cosmopolitanism. As with many such reuses of older concepts, cosmopolitanism has a complex history, specifically in the German-speaking lands. It is this history and its relationship to the history of German Jewry from the Enlightenment to the Holocaust that will be examined – in a global and perhaps even cosmopolitan manner.

Prof. Sander L Gilman; Former Chairman of the LBI London; Distinguished Professor of the Liberal Arts and Sciences;…

Sir Christopher Frayling (Royal College of Art, London; Churchill College Cambridge)

Sergio Leone’s massive gangster epic ‘Once Upon a Time in America’ (1984) was the result of fifteen years of preparation. It told of the rise and fall of a gang of Jewish hoodlums from the Lower East Side in New York, over a forty year time span. Leone was determined not to make a film about the usual Italian or Irish gangsters - but instead to focus ona community which had more rarely been featured inHollywoodthrillers. When the film opened inAmericait was severely cut and…

Chaired by Marion Kaplan, Raphael Gross, and Daniel Wildmann  

Programme 

Lecture Prof. Marion Kaplan - Lisbon is Sold Out! The Daily Lives of Jewish Refugees in Portugal during World War II   

Session 1 

Nicholas Baer – Dialectics of Jewish Renewal: The Promised Land in Early Zionist Cinema (response: Daniela Bartáková) 

Adam Sacks – Rethinking the Jüdischer Kulturbund (response: Katarzyna Czerwonogóra) 

The Leo Baeck Institute London is happy to announce a symposium under the title ‘Forward from the Past’ The Kindertransport from a Contemporary Perspective to be held on the occasion of the 75 anniversary of the Kindertransport, to commemorate this historical event and to explore its fascinating aftermath.   

This lecture will explore the relative position of Jews and Muslims in British society. Is Islamophobia, for example, the ‘new antisemitism’? Have Muslims replaced Jews as a marginal minority? And how do Jews and Muslims view one-another? By exploring politics, the media and the responses of ordinary people, the lecture will analyze a growing and important issue: how, in multi-cultural and multi-religiousBritain, do large ethno-religious minorities get on?

Tony Kushner is Professor of History and Director of the Parkes Institute for the study of Jewish/non…

Dr Jonathan Munby (Lancaster University and Du Bois Institute, Harvard University)   

How can one explain the fact that Walter Benjamin’s youthful essay on political violence, “The Critique of Violence” (1921), has, among representatives of the post-political “academic left” (Derrida, Zizek, Agamben), acquired canonical status? What did Benjamin mean when, referring to the Old Testament (Numbers 16, 1-32), he praised the expiatory powers of “divine violence,” which, as he puts it, “strikes privileged Levites, strikes them without warning … and does not stop short of annihilation”? Lastly, how might one explain the uncanny fact that, some fifty years later, Benjamin’s…

Generally speaking, the British left has been on the side of the disadvantaged and the oppressed. Forthis reason, socialists,radicals and liberals have instinctively rallied to the cause of newcomers in an increasingly multicultural society. But circumstances have changed and the waters now are muddied. 

This lecture will explore the reasons why it is difficult forthe left today, given its origins and orientations, to deal with Muslim and Jewish difference when that difference is asserted by Jews and Muslims themselves. 

This lecture examines attitudes towards Jews and Muslims in the UK in the past as a basis for discussing racism in the present. It argues that a distinct European model of persecution racializes Jews and Muslims in similar ways. One way to break out of the pattern is to recognize the similarities between prejudice againstJews and Muslims and for both groups, as well as others, to join together in challenging contemporary racism. 

Maleiha Malik is Professor of Law at King’s College, University of London. Herrelevant publications include Discrimination…

Dr Charles Drazin (Queen Mary, University of London) 

David Lean’s 1948 adaptation of ‘Oliver Twist’ provoked so many protests against perceived antisemitism in Alec Guinness’s portrayal of Fagin that the film was with held from release in Americauntil cuts had been made.Yet twenty years later, in Carol Reed’s musical version of the film, the character had been sufficiently rehabilitated to win Ron Moody an Oscar nomination. This talk will explore the challenges of playing Fagin from the Lean film of 1948 to the Roman Polanski adaptation of 2005.

From 1940 to 1945 the Channel Islands were the only part of Britain to fall under Nazi occupation. German anti-Jewish decrees became part of the Islands’ legal structures. Local police and government officials identified and registered the few remaining Jews.Jewish property was Aryanized and Jews were deported, all with the knowing involvement of government officials who remained officially loyal to the British Crown. This lecture examines both the legal and moral failures and the ambiguities which surrounded this little known part of British Jewish history. 

Dr Josef Ackermann was the second recipient of the Leo Baeck Medal of Recognition, awarded by the Leo Baeck Institute London. The prestigious award was presented to Dr Ackermann for his devoted support of Jewish cultural and academic institutions. Dr Ackermann has brought an invaluable amount of goodwill and generosity to the causes at the heart of the Leo Baeck Institute as well as the Jewish Museum in Frankfurt.

Chaired by Marion Kaplan, Raphael Gross, and Daniel Wildmann   

Report by Nicholas Baer 

The 2012–2013 Leo Baeck Fellows, who are based at academic institutions in Canada, the Czech Republic, Germany, Great Britain, Poland, and the United States, convened in Brighton,England, for an introductory workshop from 5–7 November 2012. The workshop was organized and led by Matthias Frenz (Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes), Raphael Gross (LBI London), and Daniel Wildmann (LBI London). The special guest was Marion Kaplan,…

As the Olympics come to London in 2012, the Wiener Library’s temporary exhibition ‘The Nazi Games: Politics, the Media and the Body’ looks back to 1930s Berlin. Open from 14 June until 3 October 2012, the exhibition showcases fascinating items form the Wiener Library’s unique collection of material relating to the Berlin Games of 1936. One of the themes highlighted in the exhibition is the Nazi appropriation of images of sporting bodies as a tool of propaganda, most particularly in the film and photography work of Leni Riefenstahl. 

Chaired by Elisabeth Hollender, Raphael Gross, and Daniel Wildmann   

Report by Lisa Schoß 

The second Leo Baeck Fellowship Workshop 2012 took place in the baroque city of Rastatt, a small town near Karlsruhe, on 8-10th July 2012. The workshop was led by Professor Raphael Gross (LBI London), Dr Daniel Wildmann (LBI London), Professor Elisabeth Hollender (Universität Frankfurt), and Dr Matthias Frenz (Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes). 

Professor Sander L Gilman (Emory University) 

4 July 2012, 7.00pm, Freud Museum London

Douglas G. Morris, PhD, J.D. (Federal Defenders of New York)

In 1941 the German Jewish lawyer Ernst Fraenkel published his classic account  of Nazism, The Dual State: A Contribution to the Theory of Dictatorship. It is the only scholarly critique of Nazism written from within Nazi Germany. Fraenkel’s activities from 1933 through 1938 raise questions about the possibilities of scholarly inquiry under Nazi rule and more. While many Jewish lawyers lost their law licences, Fraenkel continued to represent clients in political trials until 1938…

International conference jointly organised by Austrian Cultural Forum, London; Centre for Anglo-German Cultural Relations Queen Mary, University of London; Ingeborg Bachmann Centre for Austrian Literature, School of Advanced Study, University of London; Internationales Stefan Zweig…

Dr Nir Cohen (SOAS, London) 

This lecture series is organised by the LBI London in cooperation with the Wiener Library. 

Prof Vivian Liska (University of Antwerp) ‘Before the Law stands a doorkeeper. To this doorkeeper comes a man…’: Kafka, Narrative and the Law This lecture is organised in cooperation with the German Historical Institute and the Austrian Cultural Forum.

Wednesday 23 May, 6.30pm at the German Historical Institute 

Prof Michael Brenner, member of the LBI Year Book Advisory Board, gave a lecture in the Jewish Studies Public Lecture Series. His mother Henny, born in 1924 in Dresden, spoke about her childhood in Weimar Germany, her adolescence under the Nazis and the subsequent period of Soviet domination. 

University College London, Institute of Jewish Studies: Public Lecture Series

Monday, 21 May 2012, 6.45pm in the Gustave Tuck lecture theatre

Please find more information here.…

Prof Carrie Tarr (Kingston University, London) 

This lecture series is organised by the LBI London in cooperation with the Wiener Library.   

Prof. Gareth Stedman-Jones (Queen Mary, University of London)

In his lecture Gareth Stedman Jones will discuss the biography of Heinrich Marx, Karl Marx’s father. He will examine his relation with the French Revolution, Napoleon and the Prussian takeover of the Rhineland and then contrast his experience at the end with that of his son. He suggests that father and son represent a contrast between two different views of the French Revolution, that of 1789 (emancipation in a liberal sense) and 1792 (Rousseau, the Republic and the disappearance of all…

29 March 2012, 7.00pm, Austrian Ambassador’s Residence

Professor Raphael Gross (LBI London) Hans Kelsen - 20th Century Lawyer: Comeback not desired 

March 9th marked the occasion of HRH Princess Anne’s visit to the LBI. 

It was a great honour to welcome the Princess to the Institute’s new premises as a part of the official opening ceremony for the ArtsTwo building of Queen Mary, University of London. 

The Princess was introduced to the work of the LBI by Prof Dr Peter Pulzer, Chairman of the LBI. 

Through the person of David Nassy, Jerusalem Regained explores the adventures of a former Portuguese converso in the seventeenth century, from his arrival in Amsterdam and his participation in the Dutch world of geographical learning, his stay in Dutch Brazil, to his support for the return of the Jews to England, and his leadership in projects for Dutch colonization, especially in Suriname.  

What were the sources for his urge for Jewish colonization? What hopes were fulfilled? What contradictions were faced for Jews in establishing an ideal village based on the labor…

Prof Yosefa Loshitzky (University of East London) 

This lecture series is organised by the LBI London in cooperation with the Wiener Library.  

Prof Konstanze Fliedl (University of Vienna) 

Zeitgeist and Testimony: Arthur Schnitzler ‘ The complexity of my condition: an Austrian, a Jew’. 

15 February 2012, 7pm at the Austrian Cultural Forum London

Prof. Susan James (Birkbeck College, London)

Drawing on the work of his contemporary, Thomas Hobbes, Spinoza argues that law and the norms of justice around which it is organised are an entirely human creation.  Communities make laws, and in doing so make justice.  But how do they develop understandings of justice that do more than reflect the interests of the powerful, and provide standards for assessing and criticizing social arrangements?  This lecture explores Spinoza’s account of the philosophical, theological and…

Prof Sue Harper (University of Portsmouth) 

The FilmTalk series 2011/2012 will open with Sue Harper’s lecture on Samson and Delilah (1949). This lecture series is organised by the LBI London in cooperation with the Wiener Library.

Book Launch with the Leo Baeck Institute

Workshop at the University of Sussex, England 

Chaired by Vivian Liska, Raphael Gross, and Daniel Wildmann   

Report by Joshua Teplitsky 

Dr Anthony Kauders

Recent treatments of philosemitism (in Germany) have dismissed the phenomenon either as non-existent, or as the tendency to reify the Jews, or else as a projection of Gentile fantasies. The lecture will attempt to redress the balance by arguing that the study of philosemitism may enable the historian to understand better the nature of Gentile-Jewish relations, thereby allowing for an alternative approach to the widespread scholarly focus on antisemitism.

Chaired by Cathy Gelbin, Raphael Gross, and Daniel Wildmann  

Report by Oren Roman 

The second Leo Baeck Fellows workshop was held in the Freudental, a village near Stuttgart, on 10-14 July 2011. The core of the workshop was naturally the papers given each fellow, presenting the progress they had made on their research project (or the challenges they encountered) since the first workshop in Brighton. I found the discussions following the papers interesting and constructive. We were also pleased to hear Prof. Atina Grossmann’s lecture “She…

Dr Nadia Valman (Queen Mary, University of London) 

From the medieval ballad of the Jew’s daughter who seduces a young Christian boy in order to murder him, to Shakespeare’s uncertain apostate Jessica, the Jewess held a marginal place in English literary history. In the nineteenth century, however, she became a literary preoccupation. In this lecture, Nadia Valman traces the story of the Jewess, from its birth in Romantic and Evangelical writing through myriad rewritings in both popular and high literature. The literary Jewess - invariably beautiful,…

University of Fribourg, 16 –18 May 2011

An international conference organised by the Department of Historical Sciences, University of Fribourg and the Leo Baeck Institute London.

You can download the leaflet here. 

Sander L. Gilman, Emory University

24 May 2011, 7pm at the German Historical Institute

Claims about Jewish intellectual superiority surface regularly even in the 21st century. Modern genetics, it is claimed, prove that being smart is a singular component of “being Jewish”. Can it be a bad thing to be thought to be smart? The claim reveals itself to be a form of insidious philosemitism, a form of antisemitism, which has traditionally masked itself as being supportive of the Jews. Often it is your supposed friends that you have to worry about…

Dr Adam Sutcliffe

Philosemitism is often misunderstood as simply antisemitism in sheep’s clothing. This lecture will argue that it is, on the contrary, a real and important phenomenon, with deep roots in both secular and Christian attitudes to Jews. The lecture will survey the history of philosemitism, from its emergence in the ancient world and in the early theology of Christianity, through its medieval, early modern and nineteenth-century role in politics, literature and culture, to its major manifestations in recent decades, from evangelical Christian…

Prof Mandy Merck

Dr Nathan Abrams

In this illustrated lecture, Nathan Abrams will explore possibly the greatest rom-com ever made, When Harry Met Sally. He will ask such important questions as: can men and women be friends, or does the sex part always get in the way? What makes Jews and gentiles so attractive to each other? 

Prof Ginette Vincendeau

At the heart of Louis Malle’s groundbreaking and controversial film is the liaison between Lucien, a young, uneducated peasant in Figeac, South-West France, and France Horn, the sophisticated daughter of a wealthy Jewish tailor in hiding. Lucien and France’s budding relationship is played out against the background of the local Gestapo headquarters and the larger historical context in which normal power relations are inverted and moral boundaries blurred. 

A Conference organised by the Leo Baeck Institute London. This conference will discuss ideas of German-Jewish scholars and scientists who were forced to leave Germany in the 1930s and settled in the UK. The central questions are What was the impact of the British context on these individuals? What impact did these thinkers have on British intellectual life? What impact did they have on German academia after World War II? 

The conference is held at the Woburn House Conference Centre, 20 Tavistock Square…

Dr Heinz-Horst Deichmann was the first recipient of the Leo Baeck Medal of Recognition, awarded by the Leo Baeck Institute London.

The prestigious award recognised his long-term and consistent support for the London Institute, which - over a very long period - has made possible the foundation of two research chairs concerned with one of the central themes of German-Jewish history: the role of Jewish academics in the humanities and the sciences. 

This international conference aims to make a major contribution to the study of nationalism and anti-Semitism in an English-language and German context between 1871 and 1945. The event will be a major step forward in encouraging interdisciplinary exchange between scholars working in the fields of discourse analysis, political science and historiography. The conference will also provide an opportunity to found an international Historical Discourse Working Group. This interdisciplinary study network will continue to meet regularly after the conference. 

Keynote Speakers:…

Dr Cathy Gelbin 

This talk looks at the eroticized portrayal of Jewish-Christian relations in Paul Wegener’s classic The Golem, one of the iconic films of the silent era. Set in late Renaissance Prague, Wegener’s film shows the creation of a golem, an artificial human being from clay, according to medieval Jewish mysticism. As the being assumes a life of its own and stalks the ghetto, we witness the unfolding of forbidden desires between Christian and Jew, monster and human. The talk will trace how Wegener, by invoking Shelley’s Frankenstein,…

Workshop at the University of Sussex, England 

Chaired by Cathy Gelbin, Raphael Gross, and Daniel Wildmann   

Report by Roy Ben-Shai 

26-27 July 2010 at the German Historical Institute London

International Conference organised by the German Historical Institute London and the Leo Baeck Institute London

4 June 2010, 13.30-16.30 UCL Department of German

Centre for the Study of Jewish-Christian Relations

Workshop at Kleineich 

Chaired by Cathy Gelbin, Raphael Gross, and Daniel Wildmann   

Report by Sophie Zimmer 

The second Leo Baeck Fellows workshop, held in Kleinich in the country house «Arnoth» (30 May – 2 June 2010), was characterized by the diversity not only of the research topics, but of the extra-curricular activities and evening discussions. 

Professor Shulamit Volkov

To mark the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa, Dr Daniel Wildmann and Ben Barkow have pleasure in inviting you to a special lecture organized by the Leo Baeck Institute and the Wiener Library

Drawing on her magisterial new biography, Green revisits Montefiore’s career as a campaigner for Jewish rights at home and abroad. She shows how he leveraged business contacts with men like the anti-slavery campaigner Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton and the Irish nationalist Daniel O’Connell to bring Jews into the mainstream of British politics during the era of slave emancipation and the Great Reform Act. The alliance Montefiore forged with the evangelical and dissenting middle classes in the name of ‘civil and religious liberty’ would enable Montefiore to engage a broad political coalition in…

Vernon Bogdanor

Professor Pulzer asks what lay behind the often-repeated denunciation of the Weimar Republic as a ‘Jewish Republic’ (‘Judenrepublik’). He will discuss the association of Germany’s Jews with ideas of liberalism and democracy and above all the role of Jewish constitutional lawyers in elaborating and defending the constitution of Germany’s first experiment with democracy, with special reference to Hugo Preuss, Hermann Heller and Hans Kelsen. 

Prof Etienne Balibar

Workshop at the University of Sussex, England 

Chaired by Cathy Gelbin, Raphael Gross, and Daniel Wildmann   

Report by Iris Idelsohn Shein 

The Workshop was held at the Centre canadien d’études allemandes et européennes, Université de Mon- tréal, December 7/8, 2009.

Funded by the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service), the Chaire de recherche du Canada en études allemandes et européennes, the Centre canadien d’études allemandes et européennes, the Leo Baeck Institute London, the Centre d’Excellence sur l’Union européenne (Université de Montréal/McGill Univer- sity), the Joint Initiative in German and European Studies (University of Toronto), the Département de lit- tératures et de langues…

Berlin, 17–19 May 2009

The conference is a joint project of the Foundation «Remembrance, Responsibility and Future» (Stif- tung «Verantwortung, Erinnerung und Zukunft»), the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes, the Jewish Museum Berlin and the Leo Baeck Institute London.

The conference is part of the Leo Baeck Fellowship Programme. The former fellows Dr Nitzan Lebovic (Tel Aviv University) and Dr Mirjam Wenzel (Jewish Museum Berlin) initiated this conference. We are very grateful to The Foundation «Remembrance, Responsibility and…

Chaired by Liliane Weissberg and Raphael Gross   

Report by Daniel Jütte 

Prof. Atina Grossmann
Cooper Union, New York

Toleration, liberty of conscience and freedom of religion belonged to the key and most controversial values of the Dutch Golden Age. Dutch debates on these values go back to the Dutch Revolt, the fight for independence against Philip II and his government in the second half of the 16th century. Initially the focus was on how different Christian groups and communities, including most notably Calvinists, Catholics and Mennonites should live and tolerate each other. The settlement of Jewish refugees in the beginning of the seventeenth century added a new dimension. The central aim of the…

The conference was organized by the Franz Rosenzweig Minerva Research Center at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem in cooperation with the School of History at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Centre for German-Jewish Studies at the University of Sussex, the Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung and the Leo Baeck Institute London.

Welcome and refreshments Opening and Greetings 

Chair: Steven Aschheim (Director, The Franz Rosenzweig Minerva Research Center, The…

With Israel, a nation renewed itself from the ashes of Holocaust in Europe and from uprooted Jewish communities. Zionism was not a revolt against this or that system but an uprising against the fate that has characterized Jewish history until now. Today, the memory of rural pioneers and the new Hebrews during the Jischuv years might enjoy local appreciation. New structures, big cities, and a digital pulse from the Internet, marked by a molecularization of concerns and processes, now determine the trends between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. We learn about different jewish “tribes” in an Israeli…

In her lecture, Professor Schüler-Springorum will present the findings of her forthcoming book on the history of the Condor Legion, the National Socialist elite force which contributed significantly to Franco’s victory in 1939. Based on rich archival and autobiographical material, she will focus on the day-to-day history of the war, as experienced by the pilots themselves. By examinig their expectations, perceptions and ways of remembering, she presents insights into the minds of this generation of young German men, who enthusiastically followed Hitler into World War II and who later on…

Workshop at the University of Sussex, England 

Chaired by Liliane Weissenberg and Raphael Gross   

Report by Kerry Wallach 

On November 24 and 25, 2008, the Leo Baeck Fellows met at the University of Sussex for the first workshop of the 2008–2009 academic year. Eleven doctoral fellows and one postdoctoral fellow presented their own projects and responded to another fellow’s presentation. Following each response, other fellows and the workshop leaders Liliane Weissberg, Raphael Gross, Daniel Wildmann, and…

In this lecture, Professor Heschel will present some archival material she uncovered that discloses the existence of an antisemitic propaganda institute, financed by the Protestant church, from 1939 to 1945. She will describe its activities, membership, and publications, and will trace the postwar careers of some of its more renowned professors of theology, who maintained careers of importance after the war and helped shape the course of theology, particularly New Testament scholarship, in West and East Germany. The purpose of the lecture is not only to delineate a little-known aspect of…

International Conference held at the University of Manchester, 2-3 November, 2008

Hosted by the Jewish Studies Centre, Manchester University, with
support from the Leo Baeck Institute, London, and the British
Sociological Association Theory Study Group

Including a public lecture by Moishe Postone, Chicago, ‘History, the
Holocaust and the Left’, on Sunday, November 2, 5pm

Speakers from Canada, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Israel, Poland,
Switzerland, UK and USA include: Robert Fine, Richard H. King, Roland…

How does one write a history of Germany in the Second World War? In this lecture, Richard J. Evans discusses why he came to the project, how he has approached the subject, and what his principal arguments are. “The Third Reich at War” traces the mobilization of an entire “people’s community” in the service of a war of conquest, racial subjugation and genocide. Blending narrative, description and analysis, “The Third Reich at War” creates a picture of a society rushing headlong to self-destruction and taking a large part of Europe with it. Depicting and explaining how this society…

Prof. Niall Ferguson 

Harvard University 

Prof Robin Judd (Ohio State University) 

Chaired by Stefanie Schüler-Springorum­ and Raphael Gross   

Report by Amalia Kedem 

The second workshop of the 2007/8 Leo Baeck Fellowship Programme took place in Prague on 5–8 May 2008. The main purpose of the workshop was to give the fellows an additional opportunity to exchange ideas and learn from each other’s thoughts and projects. 

An international conference organised by the LBI London and the Wiener Library as a contribution to the European Network for Research into Historical and Current Antisemitism

The conference looked at theories of antisemitism and antisemitic legacies in modern cultural and political theories. We assessed the state of the art in modern theories of antisemitism and examined problematic legacies that partly fostered these theories; we also discussed praxis oriented approaches of dealing with antisemitism in a number of European…

Prof. Susannah Heschel 

Dartmouth College, Hanover, USA 

Prof Tilmann Allert (University of Frankfurt am Main) The Führer Gruss. Story of a Gesture

Prof Sharon Gillerman (Hebrew Union College, Los Angeles) 

 In this lecture, Sharon Gillerman will discuss the performances and career of the Jewish performer and strongman Siegmund Breitbart. The lecture focuses on how, at a time of growing racial anti-Semitism, Central Europeans became captivated by a Jew whose body conformed perfectly to the Aryan ideal. 

Workshop at the University of Sussex, England 

Chaired by Yfaat Weiss and Raphael Gross   

Report by Dr Yaacov Deutsch 

Prof  Saul Friedländer (University of California, Los Angeles)

Chaired by John Grenville and Raphael Gross   

Report by Kai Drewes 

From 13 to 16 May 2007 the first group of Leo Baeck fellows had the opportunity to meet again: Our second workshop took place at the Evangelische Akademie Arnoldshain and was part of the History Doctoral Forum of the Studienstiftung with around 50 participants in all (many thanks to Roland Hain for organising this!). With the topic “Jewish history and philosophy” we were one of three groups of the forum, adopting four more PhD students of philosophy and…

Literature opens up a different reality. Here, the two authors were able to survive. We meet Kafka in the US and in Israel, we encounter Schulz, who escaped from the ghetto in Galicia, saved together with the perished manuscript of his novel «The Messiah». In texts, written by Avigdor Dagan, David Grossmann, Cynthia Ozick, and Philipp Roth. 

Barbara Hahn, Distinguished Professor of German at Vanderbilt University, previously Professor of German at Princeton University. Her books include Unter falschem Namen. Von der schwierigen Autorschaft der Frauen (1991); The Jewess…

In the late eighteenth century, a group of Jews in Berlin wrote and published their autobiographies in the German language. For the fi rst time, they chose to write about themselves and tell their life stories, to a non-Jewish audience. Which experiences did they choose to write about? Which literary models could they chose from? And how where their writings received? A study of these texts will sketch a new, and at times surprising history of German-Jewish writing. 

The presentation will deal with the history of private banks with a Jewish tradition in Germany from the 1920s to the present. The examples of the houses of Warburg, Oppenheim and Mendelssohn will point out different developments and fates. 

Gabriele Teichmann has been Director of the archives of Sal. Oppenheim jr. & Cie. since 1990. She studied history, English literature and philosophy. She has published several academic and non-academic books and articles about the Oppenheim Bank.

The lecture explores where the Jewish is located in the life and thinking of Peter Szondi (1929–1971). Szondi’s career and work, especially the studies on Hölderlin, Benjamin and Celan, are interpreted as a concealed debate with Judaism. 

Controversial and provocative, Heine’s critical voice does not only tease and sting, but poses questions we still face today. Defying the categories of romanticism, modernism, and post modernity, his «irreverence» is the sign of a post-contemporary sensibility with a liberating force. 

Willi Goetschel is professor of German and philosophy at the University of Toronto. He is the author of Spinoza’s Modernity: Mendelssohn, Lessing, and Heine (2004) and Constituting Critique: Kant’s Writing as Critical Praxis (1994) and the editor of the collected works of Hermann Levin…

Reszö Kasztner (1906-1957) was a Labour Zionist activist born in Cluj, Transsylvania. He believed that the best way to save Hungarian Jewry was to negotiate with German authorities and, in late June 1944, convinced Eichmann to release nearly 1700 Jews, many of whom were wealthy and prominent individuals and their families. After the war, Kasztner moved to Palestine and in 1954 brought a criminal libel case against Malkiel Grunwald who accused him of collaborating with the Nazis. 

Zurich, Theater Stadelhofen, 23-24 October 2006

International Conference of the LBI London and Jerusalem, and the Hermann Cohen Archive 

18 October 2006, , 7 p.m.,London 

At the heart of the lecture is the hidden current of German Jewish culture in France between 1789 and 1914. This current symbolizes the cultural transfer of ideas from Germany to France. The most prominent example is Salomon Munk, who became Ernest Renan’s successor at the College de France, reaching the peak of his French intellectual career. But is the history of cultural transfer really a success story? 

Chaired by John Grenville and Raphael Gross   

The first workshop of the Leo Baeck Fellowship Programme took place at the University of Sussex in October 2006. It was co-organised by the LBI London and the Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes. Prof John Grenville and Dr Raphael Gross chaired the workshop. Dr Roland Hain from the Studienstiftung des Detuschen Volkes and Daniel Wildmann also attended. The fellows from Germany, Israel, the USA, Ukraine, and the UK met for two days to discuss their projects and build up a network. Everyone gained tremendously from the…

PROF SUSAN NEIMAN (Einstein Forum, Potsdam) 

Prof Susan Neiman is Director of the Einstein Forum in Potsdam, Germany. Born in Atlanta, Georgia, she studied philosophy at Harvard and the Freie Universität Berlin, and taught philosophy at Yale (Assistant and Associate Professor of Philosophy, 1989-1996) and Tel Aviv University (Associate Professor of Philosophy, 1996-2000).

Thursday, 8 June 2006, 7 pm at Wiener Library

Special Screening and Lecture -the evening of Germany’s hosting of the World Cup-

Daniel Wildmann: Desired Bodies:Leni Riefenstahl, the Berlin Olympics 1936 and Aryan Masculinity

PROF SAUL DUBOW (Sussex University)
 

Prof Saul Dubow is Professor of History at Sussex University. His teaching and research concentrate on the history of modern South Africa from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. His work has focussed on the development of racial segregation and apartheid in all their aspects. He is currently the holder of a British Academy Research Readership and is completing a book on The Commonwealth of Knowledge.

BEN BARKOW, DR KLAUS LEIST (Wiener Library, London)

PROF JEAN-FRANCOIS BERGIER (ETH Zurich)

Prof Jean-Francois Bergier was professor of social and economic history at the University of Geneva from 1963-1969 and Professor of History at ETH Zurich since 1969. The main focus of his work is the economic, social and cultural history of Switzerland and alpine countries from medieval times until the present. He is a member of Institut de France and the Académie royale de Belgique and has been Professor emeritus since April 1999.

PROF DENNIS B. KLEIN (Kean University, New Jersey)
 

Prof Dennis B. Klein is Director of the Jewish Studies Program and Professor of History at Kean University in New Jersey. He is the author of four books, including The Jewish Origins of the Psychoanalytic Movement (1985) and Hidden History of the Kovno Ghetto (1997).

This was the fourth workshop held within the framework of the Leo Baeck Institute London programme in the history of German-Jewish contributions to science, and the second held jointly with the Sidney M. Edelstein Center at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. 

Gerhard Riegner Memorial Lecture
DR SYBILLE STEINBACHER (Friedrich Schiller University, Jena) 

Dr Sybille Steinbacher is assistant lecturer/research associate in Modern History at the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena, Germany. From 1999 to 2002, she worked for the Unabhängige Historische Kommission zur Erforschung der Geschichte des Hauses Bertelsmann im Dritten Reich (Independent Historical Commission for Research into the history of the publishing house Bertelsmann in Nazi-Germany). From 2004-2005 she was a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for…

Gerd Koenen was born 1944 in Marburg, Germany and studied history and politics in Tübingen and Frankfurt. During his studies in the 1960s he was involved in the radical left-wing student movement. He was a member of the German Socialist Student Union (SDS), and joined Maoist circles in the 1970s. He worked later as an editor, journalist, freelance writer and academic assistant of Lew Kopelew.

PROF MICHAEL MEYER (Hebrew Union College, Cincinnati)

Professor Michael Meyer was born in Berlin, Germany, and brought to the United States as a small child in 1941. Since 1967 he has been on the faculty of the Hebrew Union College, Cincinnati, where he is currently the Adolph S. Ochs Professor of Jewish History.

DR NICHOLAS STARGARDT (Magdalen College, Oxford) 

Dr Nicholas Stargardt is a Fellow in modern European History at Magdalen College, Oxford. He is the author of Witnesses of War: Children’s Lives under the Nazis (2005) and The German Idea of Militarism: Radical and Socialist Critics (1994). He has written widely about modern German history, ranging from the intellectual history of nationalism to children’s art from the Holocaust.

Prof DAVID CESARANI (University of London)
 

Prof David Cesarani is Research Professor in History, Royal Holloway College, University of London, where he lectures on modern European Jewish History and the Nazi period. He is a former Director of the Wiener Library and has also been a Director of the Parkes Institute at Southampton University. He has published widely, including Eichmann. His Life and Crimes (2004), Justice Delayed and How Britain became a Refuge for Nazi War Criminals (1993).

Zurich, Theater Stadelhofen, 11-12 July 2005

LBI London und LBI Jerusalem 

The conference is supported by: Israelitische Cultusgemeinde Zürich (ICZ), Jüdische Liberale Gemeinde Or Chadasch, Zürich (ILG) Posen Foundation, Luzern Saly Mayer Memorial Stiftung, Zürich Schweizerischer Israelitischer Gemeindebund (SIG) 

To mark the 50th anniversary of the Leo Baeck Institute, the LBI London and the LBI Jersualem organised a joint international conference entitled ‘Switzerland and Jewish history in German-speaking…

Dr Nikolaus Wachsmann (Birkbeck College, London) 

This lecture compares and contrasts the two main sites of confi nement and terror in the Third Reich: the SS concentration camps and the regular prisons controlled by the legal apparatus. Looking at the conditions inside the two institutions, inmate relations, and the behaviour of their respective offi cials, the lecture will highlight differences and similarities between these two parallel institutions of imprisonment. 

LBI Jerusalem 

Opening Session Chair: Michael Meyer (International Chairman LBI) 

Greetings Zwi Bacharach (Chairman LBI Jerusalem) Judge Izhak Englard Michael Heyd (Chairman Israel Historical Society) 

Keynote Steven Aschheim Icons Beyond their Borders: The German-Jewish Intellectual Legacy at the Beginning of the Twenty First Century…

Fiftieth Anniversary Lecture

This event was co-sponsored by the Institute of Jewish Studies at University College London. 

Chair:  Prof Peter Pulzer 

Professor Richard J. Evans, University of Cambridge

Dr Cynthia Hooper  

Dr Avraham Barkai 

The Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens (Central Union of German Citizens of Jewish Faith), known as the C.V., was the most infl uential Jewish representative body before and during the Nazi Era. The lecture, based on the fi rst comprehensive study of the CV includes a signifi cant amount of recent archival fi ndings and will trace how this institution shaped German Jewish identity. 

Dr Jael Geis

The majority of Jews living in Germany in the immediate aftermath of the war expressed very little desire for revenge. Considering the Nazi aggression directed at every single Jew and Judaism on the one hand, and the complete suppression of one’s own aggression as a condition of survival on the other hand, one would have expected a ringing cry for vengeance at the very least. Why was there so little of it? In order to understand this surprising absence, Dr Geis will investigate issues relating to estrangement, isolation, selfpreservation, lack of energy and last…

Hilde and Max Kochmann Memorial Lecture 

Research Professor Edward Timms, University of Sussex. 

Research Professor John Rohl (University of Sussex) 

Holocaust Memorial Day Lecture

Professor Anson Rabinbach (Princeton University) 

European Network for Research into Historical and Current Antisemitism in cooperation with the Centre for German-Jewish Studies at Sussex University Workshop organised by Raphael Gross (Director of the Leo Baeck Institute London and the Centre for German-Jewish Studies at Sussex University) Ben Barkow (Director of the Institute of Contemporary History and Wiener Library, London) No single methodology has been successful in fully accounting for the complex historical phenomenon of antisemitism. 

Leo Baeck Institute London Bucerius Institute Centre for German-Jewish Studies 

Organised by: Yfaat Weiss (Director of the Bucerius Institute for Research of Contemporary German History and Society, Haifa) Raphael Gross (Director of the Leo Baeck Institute, London and the Centre for German-Jewish Studies, University of Sussex) 

Gerhard Riegner Memorial Lecture 

Professor Carlo Ginzburg (University of California, Los Angeles) 

Georges Bataille, the French thinker and novelist, put forward a religious interpretation of Fascism in the framework of the Collège de Sociologie, which he founded in Paris with his friend Roger Caillois in 1937. The lecture will deal with the precedents, ambiguities, and relevance of Bataille’s approach. 

Professor John Grenville 

Professor Robert Liberles (Ben Gurion University, Beersheva) 

Coffee first arrived in Germany from the Middle East in the late seventeenth century and spread across Europe in the early eighteenth century. The lecture will explore German Jewish responses to the introduction of the new beverage. Professor Liberles will examine responses by Jews and the Jewish community to questions of halachah or religious law, social challenges, and the economic opportunities that emerged with the arrival of coffee. The “coffee debates” provide a fascinating insight into some of the…

There is a widely-held belief that most achievements in science and the humanities have little or no relationship to the characteristics of particular social groups. That is, scientific accomplishments are “impersonal.” Thus “Jewishness” does not affect any scientific or scholarly methods or practice. However, some facts appear to challenge this view: for instance above-average representation of Jews in the sciences and the humanities when compared to their numbers in the general population and their exceptionally strong contribution to particular disciplines. To give but one example: in…

The distinguished psychiatrist Dr Hans Keilson will speak about his life’s work in psychiatric trauma. Born in Germany in 1909, he published his first novel Das Leben geht weiter (Life goes on) in 1933, shortly before his emigration to the Netherlands. In 1943 he went underground and worked as a doctor and courier for the resistance group “Vrije Groepen Amsterdam”. In 1948 he received his Dutch approbation as a doctor and subsequently specialised in psychiatry and psychoanalisis. 

Professor Sigrid Weigel (Technical University and Zentrum fuer Literaturforschung, Berlin) 

Dr Nicholas Berg, (Simon Dubnow Institute, Leipzig) 

Professor Alistair Davidson (Swinburne University, Melbourne) 

Cilly Kugelmann (Jewish Museum, Berlin) 

Tutzing, 23-26 February 2004

Leo Baeck Institute Jerusalem 

Organised by Prof Christhard Hoffmann (University of Bergen, Norway) 

Dr Michael Ignatieff (Carr Professor and Director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University) 

Professor Joanna Bourke (Birkbeck College, London) Memory in an age of trauma

Dr Ute Deichmann (Leo Baeck Institute London and University of Cologne) From pre-eminence to decline in German biomedical research, 1900-1950. The impact of politics, anti-Semitism and isolation

Dr Ignacio Klich Commission of Enquiry into the activities of Nazism, Buenos Aires, Argentine

Professor Robert Wistrich (Hebrew University, Jerusalem) Chair: Professor Peter Pulzer 

Professor Steven Aschheim (Hebrew University, Jerusalem) Locating Nazi evil: the contrasting visions of Gershom Scholem, Hannah Arendt and Victor Klemperer

Leo Baeck Institute London Bucerius Center for Research of German Contemporary History and Society (University of Haifa)

In his lecture, Jonathan Hess examined visions of large-scale Jewish economic and cultural domination around 1800, offering a profile of public perceptions of the Berlin Jewish elite in this period. In his lecture, Jonathan Hess examined visions of large-scale Jewish economic and cultural domination around 1800, offering a profile of public perceptions of the Berlin Jewish elite in this period.

His lecture focused on reactions to David Friedländer’s notorious proposals of mass baptism in 1799, showing the connections between Friedländer’s contemporaries’ perception of the…

Prof Shulamit Volkov (Tel Aviv University, Israel) 

Dr Yfaat Weiss (Haifa University) 

Prof Michael Brenner (Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich) 

Prof Norbert Frei (University of Bochum) 

Prof Sander Gilman (University of Chicago) 

Max Kochmann lecture (Jointly organised with the Centre for German-Jewish Studies, Sussex University)

Research Centre for German and Austrian Exile Studies
Institute of Germanic Studies (University of London)
German Historical Institute
Leo Baeck Institute London

Programme

Professor Rüdiger Görner (IGS)
Professor J. M. Ritchie (Research Centre for German and Austrian Exile Studies
Introduction

Deborah Vietor-Engländer (Darmstadt)
Hermynia zur Mühlen and the BBC

Ruth Longdin (New South Wales)
Ilse Barea, Mararet Rink and the BBC

Hamburg, 3-6 July 2002

Leo Baeck Institut London Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung in cooperation with the Evangelisches Studienwerk Villigst 

Programme

Wednesday, 3 July

Prof Jan Philip Reemtsma (Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung) 

Prof Peter Pulzer (All Souls College Oxford - Leo Baeck Institute London) 

Begrüßung Prof Gesine Schwan (Frankfurt/Oder) 

Wussten sie nicht, was sie tun? Die Deutschen in der Zeit des…

A Seminar in Honour of Julius Carlebach

Brighton, 13 May 2002

Sussex Centre for German-Jewish Studies Leo Baeck Institute London 

Professor Peter Pulzer (Oxford) 
Introduction

John A. S. Grenville (Birmingham) 
The Jews in Hamburg in Prosperity and Adversity

Dr Henri Soussan (Sussex) 
The Rabbinical Tradition of Hamburg, Altona and Wandsbek

Professor William Outhwaite (Sussex) 
Introduction

Andreas Braemer…

Prof Richard Overy (King’s College London) 

The Nuremberg Trials: International Law in the Making 

(Introductory Lecture to the Wiener Library - Matrix Chambers Lecture Series from Nuremberg to Hague)

Prof Dan Diner (Hebrew University Jerusalem and Simon Dubnow Institut, Leipzig) Europe and the Jews: A New Perspective. 

Introduction: Prof Peter Pulzer (Oxford University) 

Book Launch LBI Year Book 2001 (Jointly organised with the Centre for German-Jewish Studies, Sussex University)

After two successful conferences at Clare College, Cambridge, which have resulted in the conference volumes Second Chance (1988) and Two Nations (1997), published in our Schriftenreihe in 1991 and 1999, we held a third Cambridge conference from 9-13 September 2001. The conference volume Towards Normality? Acculturation and Modern German Jewry, dedicated to the memory of Werner E. Mosse, has been published in 2003 in the Schriftenreihe. 

The conference was organised by 

Professor Andreas Gotzmann, University of Erfurt …