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.
Sharon Gillerman is Associate Professor of Jewish History at Hebrew Union College in Los Angeles. Her book, Germans into Jews: Remaking the Jewish Social Body in the Weimar Republic, will appear shortly with Stanford University Press. She is currently working on a book on Breitbart entitled, A Muscular Macher: The Career of Central Europe’s Jewish Strongman, and is co-editing a volume Jewish Masculinities: German Jews, Gender and History with Benjamin Baader and Paul Lerner.
