Schusterman Center for Israel Studies, Brandeis University
Reuben Brainin and The Jewish Polity Roots of Zionism
Did the political culture of fin de siecle diaspora cities shape pre-state visions of settling the Jewish state? A particularly apt entryway into the Jewish political roots of the early Zionist movement is through the social networks, institutional…
Bielefeld University
“Post für die Vergangenheit. Briefe als Reaktion auf antisemitische Gewalt 1945–1990 /Letters to the Past. Citizen Responses to Antisemitic Violence” (working title)
Annika Duin is a doctoral researcher in Contemporary History at Bielefeld University. Her project analyses letters written by non-Jewish West Germans to Jews and Jewish…
University of Oxford
The Role of Politics, Religion and Interpersonal Conflict on the Development of Set Theory (1879-1932)
I research the development of set theory - which serves as the foundation of modern mathematics - with a particular focus on the ‘foundational crisis of mathematics’ from 1921-28. Paying particular attention to the politicisation of the…
University of Munich
Commentary as a Philosophical Form in the Work of Salomon Maimon
Luis Gruhler is a PhD candidate at the Faculty of Philosophy and the Lerhstuhl für jüdische Geschichte und Kultur at LMU Munich. His research focuses on how traditional Jewish exegesis has influenced modern Jewish thought.
His dissertation project draws on recent…
University of Hamburg
Third-Generation Jewish Self-Positioning in Poems and Poetry Films
Anna Hofman’s dissertation examines visualizations of space, spatio-temporal movement, and self-positioning in light of memory in the works of Jewish third-generation poets and filmmakers, focusing on both printed book poetry and poetry film. Her project…
University of Oxford
Regional Variation in Ashkenazi Hebrew Script in the Thirteenth Century
Caleb Klein is a DPhil candidate at the University of Oxford, affiliated with the Asian and Middle Eastern Studies Faculty and Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies. His research assesses the calligraphic typology and regional variation among thirteenth century…
University of Kassel
Erkenntnis und Judenhass. Theodor W. Adornos philosophische Reflexion des Antisemitismus
In his PhD research, Niklas Lämmel explores the relationship between Theodor W. Adorno’s analysis of antisemitism and his reflections on epistemological questions. Situated at the intersection of philosophy, the history of ideas and antisemitism…
Heidelberg University of Jewish Studies
A Jewish Commercial Network in the Early Eighteenth Century? Reassessing the Economic and Social Networks of Joseph Süss Oppenheimer Through Newly Examined Yiddish and Hebrew Sources
David Lüllemann’s dissertation investigates the economic and social networks of the court Jew Joseph Süß Oppenheimer (1698–1738)…
Haifa University
After the Catastrophe: Yekkes in Israel and Their Relationships with Germany, 1945-1995 (working title)
This research project investigates the attitudes of former German Jews living in Israel - commonly referred to as Yekkes - toward Germany in the aftermath of the Shoah, as well as their evolving relationships with post…
University of Cambridge
From Reluctant to Radical Revolutionaries: The Conservative Foundation of the Zionist Revolution
Nathanel Stawski writes his dissertation in the faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies. His research focuses on the history of the Zionist Movement and aims to offer the first reading of early Zionism through the lens of political and…
University of St. Andrews
Writing History in the Face of Fanaticism: Ernst Cassirer and his Reception as a Historian
Brandeis University
The Third Generations: Grandchildren of Holocaust Survivors, Grandchildren of Perpetrators and Holocaust Memory
Tamar Aizenberg is a PhD Candidate in Near Eastern and Judaic Studies at Brandeis University (Waltham, MA). Her dissertation is about grandchildren of Holocaust survivors and grandchildren of Holocaust perpetrators in several…
Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Imparting the Hebrew Language to Adults in Mandatory Palestine and the State of Israel 1936-1955
The central theme of her research lies in the field of Adult Education, approached from a historical perspective. The study explores the history of teaching Hebrew to adults in the Yishuv and in the State of Israel between 1936 and…
Goethe University, Frankfurt
Networks of the Jewish Mission: Missionaries, Jews, and Converts within the Milieu of the Proselyte Institutions of the 18th Century
My dissertation examines the Protestant mission to the Jews in the Holy Roman Empire and England during the 18th century. At this time, several missionary and proselyte institutions were founded…
Stanford University
Redemption and Jewish Modernity: The Case of Hannah Arendt
Ariel Horowitz is a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literature at Stanford University, focusing on modern Jewish literature and working across German, English, and Hebrew. Ariel’s dissertation focuses on twentieth century engagements with the idea of redemption in Jewish literature…
University of Oxford
The Art of the Hebrew Book in Medieval Brabant
Celeste Jingyan Pan is a PhD candidate in Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Oxford, where she has been working under the supervision of Professor Judith Olszowy-Schlanger. Her primary interest is in scribal and visual culture in medieval Ashkenaz (c1250-1350). Her doctoral…
University of Southampton
Shared Worlds and Epistolary Spaces: The Correspondence of German-Jewish Families during the Holocaust, 1933-45
Charles Knight holds a PhD from the Parkes Institute for the Study of Jewish/non-Jewish Relations at the University of Southampton where he remains an Honorary Fellow. He is currently a Visiting Research Fellow at the…
University of Chicago
The German-Jewish Reception of Writings on Jewish Music, 1780-1900
Melanie Shahin’s dissertation charts the intellectual history of Jewish music research during its emergence as a distinct field of study in German-speaking lands in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She is specifically interested in investigating the…
Stuttgart University / King’s College London
Stolen Years – German-Jewish Women’s Life Writing in Exile
Anna Marion Weber is a PhD candidate in German literature at King’s College London and jointly at the University of Stuttgart. Her research focuses on German-Jewish women’s life writing in exile in the English-speaking world, with a special interest…
Yale University
The Ban on Images and the Prohibition of Idolatry in German-Jewish Thought
His dissertation examines the literary variations and afterlives of the prohibition of idolatry and the biblical ban on images (Bilderverbot) in the work of modern German Jewish authors and shows how concerns about idolatry reflect and constitute a central way of…
University of Warsaw
The Mikveh as a Women’s Ritual space in an age of transition, 1870-1939
Anna Berezowska is PhD student at the Taube Department of Jewish Studies at the University of Wrocław. She is currently working on the PhD project, under the supervision of Prof. Joanna Degler (Lisek), with the working title “Mikveh as a women’s space in Jewish…
University of California
German/Jewish Dance in Exile: Valeska Gert Before, During, and After World War II
This thesis offers is a critical account of the avant-garde German/Jewish modern dancer Valeska Gert (1892-1978), her performance spaces both in Germany and the United States, and the forms of sociality (and non-sociality) that she cultivated through her…
Ben Gurion University
Jewish and Christian Aggadic Traditions about Rabbi Yehoshua Ben Levi:From Late Antiquity to the Medieval Period
Amitai Glass Stegmann’s dissertation researched Rabbi Yehoshua Ben Levi᾽s stories that have been documented and preserved in Hebrew sources and independent Latin texts during the medieval period. Through his work, he seeks…
Ben Gurion University
Skepticism and Heterodoxy in Jewish-Italian Thought in the Early Modern Period
Ahuvia Goren completed his M.A. studies at the Cohen Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas at Tel Aviv University in 2018. His doctoral dissertation, conducted at Ben-Gurion University as part of the ERC project “Jewish Translation and…
Hochschule für Musik, Theater und Medien
Episteme als verflechtungsgeschichtlicher Prozess. Ost-West-Paradigmen im Schaffen der Musikwissenschaftlerin Edith Gerson-Kiwi (1908–1992)
Luisa Klaus is a musician and musicologist, currently PhD candidate at the Hochschule für Musik, Theater und Medien Hannover. In her research she is dealing with the works of German-…
University of Frankfurt
Reading Gillian Rose in Constellation: Talmudic Hegel, Hegelian Talmud, and the Limits of Universal Ethics
Rachel Pafe is a writer and researcher based in Berlin. Her PhD project at Goethe University of Frankfurt and University of Lille deals with Gillian Rose, a sociologist and philosopher who had a fraught relationship with…
Freie Universität Berlin
Geographies in Transition: Negotiating National Belonging in Tel Aviv-Jaffa, 1908-1948
Sitting at the intersection of Urban History and Global Intellectual History, Felicitas’ project focuses on the history of Tel Aviv-Jaffa in the first half of the twentieth century. Between 1908 and 1948, Tel Aviv grew from a small suburb into a…
Columbia University
Jewish Non-Territorial Politics: Historical Insights for Contemporary Contestations of Space, Territory, and Environment
Isaac Stethem’s dissertation, entitled Planetary Peoples: Historical Continuity and Contemporary Spaces, offers normative proposals for the governance of planetary resources in an age of climate transformation,…
Freie Universität Berlin
Lurianic Kabbalah between East-Central Europe and the Ottoman Empire, 1640-1740
Avinoam Joseph Stillman is a historian with particular interests in kabbalah, Hebrew manuscripts and printed books, and the Ashkenazi diaspora. His doctoral dissertation, completed at Freie Universität Berlin, is an intellectual biography of…
Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich
Zuwanderung als Wiedergutmachung? Die politische Aushandlung der sowjetisch-jüdischen Zuwanderung und ihre praktische Umsetzung
Marguerite Bertheau’s PhD project examines the immigration of so-called Jewish quota refugees, who mainly immigrated to Germany between 1990 and 2005. It examines in detail the…
Northwestern University
Prostitutes, Converts, and Jews: Defining Boundaries Between Jews and Christians in the Middle Ages
Savoy Curry specializes in the history of marginalized people living in 11th-14th century Europe. With her current research, Savoy studies communal reactions to and regulations imposed upon female converts and sex workers in order to…
Columbia University
Disability in Ashkenazic Society, 1200-1500
This dissertation addresses the experience of and communal responses to bodily and mental disability in medieval European Jewish society. By examining a diverse range of historical sources, including Hebrew responsa, legal commentaries, moralistic literature, and exempla, as well as Latin and…
Freie Universität Berlin
Geschlecht, Sexualität und Körper in der Jüdischen Sportbewegung 1918-1933
David Gasparjan studierte Geschichte und Biologie an der Freien Universität Berlin. Von 2019 bis 2022 war David Gasparjan als wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter an der Freien Universität Berlin tätig. Dort forschte er zu Gender in der Lehramtsbildung. Im…
Princeton University
Beyond Political Theology: Hannah Arendt’s Jewish Theology of Givenness
Judah’s dissertation reads Arendt’s Jewish writings against the grain of their dominant interpretation, arguing that Arendt’s Jewishness is inseparable from her Jewish theology. Givenness, Arendt’s core theological concept, marks her break from the tradition of…
Stanford University
Diasporic Mysticism: Land and Knowledge in Early Modern Kabbalah from the Middle East to Central Europe
University of California
After the Holocaust: Contemporary German-Jewish Poetics and the Persistence of the Past
Molly Krueger is a PhD candidate in the Department of German with a Designated Emphasis in Jewish Studies. She received her MA from UC Berkeley in 2019 and her BA in German from Bowdoin College in 2013. She is currently at work on a dissertation that focuses…
Universität Bamberg
Identifikation und Identifizierung im jüdischen Sakralbau - “maurische Synagogen” in Südwestdeutschland und Bayern
University of California
Nazis after Hitler: An Experiential History of SS Members in the Postwar World, 1950-2010
This study is a social and cultural history of former SS members in postwar West Germany and Austria. Rather than assessing how they evaded justice or probing whether they felt guilty in retrospect for their activities during the Nazi era, it…
Tel Aviv University
Prophetic Politics: Political Theology in early 20th Century Jewish Thought and the Question of the Legitimacy of the State - Landauer, Buber, A.D. Gordon
Yotam Yzraely is a researcher of religions and lecturer on issues of Judaism and culture. He is a doctoral student at the School of Jewish Studies at Tel Aviv University.
…
University of Munich
Teil der Stadtgesellschaft? Beziehungen zwischen Juden und Christen im spätmittelalterlichen Regensburg
Die Geschichte der Juden in ihren diversen Verflechtungen mit der städtischen Gesellschaft während der größten Wirtschaftskrise des Mittelalters in Regensburg zu erforschen, ist Ziel dieses Dissertationsprojekts. Besonders zwischen den…
University of Michigan
Safeguarding Civil Records, Protecting German Blood: The Implementation and Administration of a Nazi Racial Legal Order at the Registry Office in Berlin
Émilie Duranceau-Lapointe is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Fritz Bauer Institute (2026). She is preparing the publication of her dissertation on the Berlin registry…
Yale University
The Shape of Things: Reading Culture through Form in the Weimar Republic
Sophie Duvernoy is a scholar and translator focusing on the literature and aesthetic theory of the Weimar Republic. Sophie received her PhD in German Literature at Yale University in 2023 with a dissertation entitled “The Shape of Things: Reading Culture through Form in…
University of Frankfurt
Die Konstruktion jüdisch kollektiver Identität am Beispiel des Rabbiners Dr. Ludwig Philippson
University of Salzburg
Jüdische Psychatriepatient*innen in Österreich im Nationalsozialismus 1938 – 1945
Alexander Kleiß is a historian with a Master’s degree from the University of Salzburg. His research focuses on the history of Jewish victims of the Nazi “Aktion T4” euthanasia program in Austria, as well as the persecution of Jewish psychiatric patients…
University of Münster
Ashkenazi Illuminated Mahzorim as Generators of an Affective Experience
Meyrav Levy is a historian and art historian specializing in the experiential reception of rituals and objects by their users. She studied History and Art History at Tel Aviv University, and the History of Jewish Cultures in Heidelberg and Graz. From 2019 to 2024, she…
Princeton University
Large Print, Small Forms: The Birth of German Modernism from the Newspaper.
University of California
Cinematic Loss: Missing Pieces of German Film, 1929–1933
Dr. Andréas-Benjamin Seyfert is a multilingual film historian, digital humanist, and Lecturer in Germanic & Slavic Studies at UC Santa Barbara. Specializing in Weimar cinema, German-Jewish exile, and feminist media archaeology, his work resides at the intersection of film…
University of Oxford
A Homeland in the Home: Age, Gender, and Religion in German Cultural Zionism, 1897-1905
Rose Stair is DPhil student in the Theology and Religion faculty at the University of Oxford, and previously studied at the University of Chicago Divinity School. Her doctoral research looks at age and gender in German-language cultural Zionism, and…
Leibniz Institute for Jewish History and Culture – Simon Dubnow
Demokratisches Denken in der frühen Bundesrepublik Deutschland. Der Staats- und Verwaltungsrechtler Walter Jellinek
Philip Emanuel Bockelmann is a doctoral candidate at the Leibniz Institute for Jewish History and Culture – Simon Dubnow in Leipzig. He studied History and German Philology at Georg…
Hebrew University of Jerusalem
An Intellectual Biography of Meir of Rothenburg
Moshe D. Chechik holds a BA and MA from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he is currently completing his PhD in the Department of Talmud and Halakha in the Jack, Joseph & Morton Mandel School for Advanced Studies in the Humanities. His work examines the cultural…
Hebrew University of Jerusalem
The German origins of Hebrew typography in the 20th century: Rafael Frank and Henri Friedlaender
Nitzan Chelouche (she/her) is a PhD candidate at the DAAD Center for German Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her research examines the emergence of modern Hebrew type design in Germany in the first half of the twentieth…
Universität Trier
Organisationsformen ländlicher Judensiedlungen zwischen Zentralität und Dispersion. Ein Vergleich regionaler Netzwerke im Elsass und in der Wetterau im ausgehenden Mittelalter
Tel Aviv University
Paul Celan and the Verjudung of Poetry
Ohad Kohn is a PhD student at the Porter School for Cultural Studies of the Tel Aviv University, writing his doctoral dissertation on the poetic language of Paul Celan from the vantage point of the poet’s use of the term Verjudung. He graduated from the German Department and the…
City University of New York
Hebrew Language Reading Communities in Central Europe , 1845-1870
Publishing the Pan-Jewish emerges from a question about sites of synthesis between claims of sacred continuity and novel forms of communication. It centers on the first ten years of Hamagid (1856-1866), acknowledged within the historiography as history’s first Hebrew-…
Johns Hopkins University
Yeshivot and their Students in Moravia, 1650-1726: A Window to Early Modern Learning Culture
Columbia University
Missed Encounter: Paul Celan at the Edge of Philosophy
This dissertation examines the writings of three seminal twentieth century thinkers, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Theodor W. Adorno, and Jacques Derrida, through the lens of their encounter with the post-Shoah poetry of Paul Celan. These thinkers are associated with influential, competing…
Yale University
I will sing of love and justice: Jewish Responses to the Theological Roots of Contemporary Virtue Ethics
This dissertation puts Jewish philosophy into conversation with contemporary ethical theory in order to develop a novel account of the relationship between moral rules and character development. I begin by showing that anti-Jewish rhetoric…
University of Michigan
Refugees in Empire: Jewish Refugees in British India (1921-1951)
Assumptions of the sovereign equality of nation-states has determined how scholars define refugees (as a consequence of the emergence of nation-states), where this definition and understanding of refugees is built (in the interaction of states in an international or regional…
Philipps University of Marburg
Schrift als Schutz. Jüdische Amulette im Spannungsfeld sprachlicher und nicht sprachlicher Elemente
This dissertation examines Jewish amulets from the German-speaking areas in the 18th and 19th centuries. The study focuses in particular on the manifestations of printed birth amulets, the forms of their use, and on Jewish…
Dubnow Institute
From Frankfurt to Babylon. A History of Jewish Intellectuals in the Federal Republic of Germany
Working as a Doctoral Candidate at the Dubnow Institute since 2016, Zarin Aschrafi studied History and German Language at the universities of Munich, Freiburg im Breisgau, and Tübingen, and completed her M. A. degree in 2014.
Her…
Birkbeck, University of London
Inventing a modern diaspora: Balkan Sephardim 1890–1940
Željka Oparnica’s doctoral thesis explores the Sephardi Jews in the context of European Jewish politics and examines why and how the idea of diaspora became a political vehicle in the twentieth century. It centres around Esperanza, a student society for the…
University of Southern California
Photobooks as Jewish History: German-speaking Jews, Images, and the Transatlantic Construction of a Common Past
Steven Weiss Samols is a Ph.D. candidate in History at the University of Southern California. His research explores the intersection of Visual Studies and Cultural History. Steven holds a MSc. in European Studies from…
Ben Gurion University of the Negev
The Reception History of the Shulhan Arukh in Europe and the Formation of its Communities of Readers, 1589-1726
Elad Schlesinger is a Ph.D. candidate at the Jewish Thought department, Ben Gurion University of the Negev. He earned his MA at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, writing his thesis in the Jewish…
Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Synagogue Architecture in Israel’s First Two Decades of Statehood: Religious Architecture in a Secular Age
My dissertation examines synagogues designed by prominent architects in the State of Israel in the first two decades following its establishment. To date, Israeli synagogue design has received relatively little…
Hebrew University of Jerusalem
The Purchasing Mission to Cologne between Israel and Germany, 1953-1965
This study focuses on the Purchasing Mission to Cologne, the official and exclusive representative of the Government of Israel in the Federal Republic of Germany – West Germany (hereinafter: Germany) before the establishment of diplomatic relations…
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Duke University
Writing a Future State: Spatial Imaginiaries of German Jewish Literature, 1847–1932
Joshua Shelly is a doctoral candidate in the Carolina-Duke German Studies Program, a joint program of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Duke University. He holds a BA in German…
Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Trust thy Neighbor? Risk and Trust in Economic Interactions between Jews and Christians in the German Empire c. 1280-1420
Aviya Doron is a PhD student at the Department of Jewish History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem under the supervision of Prof. Elisheva Baumgarten, and a member of the ERC research group “Beyond the…
University of Chicago
“At Home in My Room”: Jewish Spaces of Longing and Belonging in World War I and Weimar Berlin
During and following the First World War, Berlin was a major metropolitan center that absorbed tens of thousands of Jews seeking new homes. The city’s pervasive housing shortage meant that many locals and nearly all newcomers—Jewish or not—…New York University
Close Encounters: Shanghai”s German Jewish Refugees and Chinese, 1937 - 1948
During World War II, approximately 18,000-20,000 Central European Jewish refugees fled Nazi-occupied Europe for China. While scholarship on this historical moment has centered around questions of state policy and global aid, Cheng’s dissertation focuses on Jewish…
University of Oxford
When Climate Takes Command: Jewish-Zionist Scientific Approaches to Climate in Palestine, 1900 - 1967
Netta Cohen is a Dphil candidate at the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine in the University of Oxford. She is currently a doctoral fellow at the Center for Jewish History in New York City and a research affiliate at the Taub Center…
University of Potsdam
History of Forgetfulness: Theopolitics and Hasidism in Martin Buber´s Writings
Yemima Hadad’s study concentrates on Buber’s specific sense of historicism and the narrative of forgetfulness in Jewish history. Her thesis, forgetfulness of dialogue, explains Buber’s stance with regard to Hasidism, Zionism, Shoah, political activism,…
Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg
Horror vacui und materiale Ästhetik – Das Spätwerk Siegfried Kracauers im amerikanischen Exil
Tel Aviv University
Athletes and Pioneers: The Ascent of Modern Sport and the Zionist Body in Interwar Palestine
Ofer Idels is the Belzberg Fellow at the Universty of Calgary. He is the author of Zionism: Emotions, Language, and Experience (Cambridge University Press, 2024) and Embodying the Revolution: The Hebrew Experience and the…
University of Erfurt
Gustav Landauer als jüdischer Intellektueller
Sebastian Kunze studied Middle Eastern Studies and Political Science (B.A.) at Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg; holds a Masters-Degree from the University of Potsdam in Jewish Studies after studying in Berlin, Southampton, Jerusalem and Potsdam. He was Research Associate (…
University of Pennsylvania
Futures’ Past: Commerce, Capital and the Rise and Fall of the Commodity Exchange in German Economic Life, 1870 - 1935
University of Oxford
Producing New Women: Work, Consumer Culture and Jewish Clothing Companies in Wilhelmine Germany
This dissertation investigates the involvement of Jewish commercial clothiers in the making of women’s modernity in turn-of-the century Berlin. Its focus is specifically on expressions of support for and collaboration with the first women’s…
Hebrew University of Jerusalem
A Continental Tradition in Transit: Émigré Historians and German History in the Israeli Academy
Yonatan Shiloh‐Dayan is a doctoral student at the Department for Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His main scholarly interests are situated within the fields of intellectual and political…
Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Everyday Life, Identity, and Communal Relations: A Comparison of Kehilot Shum and Aragon, 1100-1347
Miriam Fenton is writing her PhD in Medieval history, comparing and contrasting the experience of community in the everyday life of Jews in Aragon and Kehilot Shum, 1100-1347. She aims to use social history and social theory…
UC Berkeley
In Scattered Formation: Displacement, Alignment and the German-Jewish Diaspora
Sheer Ganor is a PhD candidate at UC Berkeley’s Department of History. She is currently completing her dissertation, In Scattered Formation: Displacement, Alignment and the German-Jewish Diaspora, which studies the global network of Jewish refugees…
Friedrich Schiller University Jena
Die Shoah und die DDR. Erinnerung und Repräsentation im Antifaschismus
Alexander Walther is a PhD candidate at Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Germany. He is currently completing his dissertation Die Shoah und die DDR. Erinnerung und Repräsentation im Antifaschismus (The Shoah and the GDR. Remembrance and…
Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Envisioning Palestine, Photography and the Creation of a Multi-National Space
In my research project I examine the effects of photography on the transformation of Mandate Palestine from a tourist attraction to a political space. I work with photographs from different political bodies and private photographers who were actively…
Ohio State University
Saving the Unwanted: The International Response to Shanghai’s Jewish Refugees, 1943-1949
This dissertation is a global microhistory of 15,000 Jewish refugees who found refuge in Shanghai from Nazi persecution. The Jewish refugees had chosen Shanghai out of necessity and convenience: It was one of the few places in the world in the late…
University of Oxford
The Jewish Reception of Martin Heidegger’s Thought
In this study, I examine the rich, intense, and persistent Jewish engagement with one of the most important and controversial modern philosophers, Martin Heidegger. Contextualizing this encounter within wider intellectual, cultural, and political contexts, I outline the main patterns…
Hebrew University of Jerusalem
The New Orient: German-Jewish Orientalism in Palestine/Israel
A New Orient explores the German-Jewish roots of Zionist and Israeli Oriental Studies as a history of knowledge transfer between Germany and Palestine/Israel. While German Orientalism is often characterized as a non-colonial, philological discipline, its…
Columbia University
Betrayal and Conversion: Jews, Christians and Cross-Confessional Legal Culture in Reformation Germany
Tamar Menashe is the Jay and Leslie Cohen Assistant Professor of History and Jewish Studies at Emory University. She situates her work within the intersections of the law with gender, culture, and interfaith relations, and music.…
University of Munich
In Iron Chains. The Jewish Community of Regensburg on Trial for Ritual Murder (1476-1480)
Sophia Schmitt is a research associate and lecturer in the department of Jewish studies at Ludwig-Maximilian University of Munich (LMU), Germany. A scholar of medieval Jewish history, she studies the social, legal, cultural, and economic relations…
Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Believing and Belonging: Religious Conversion, Identity, and Community in Medieval Ashkenaz
This dissertation examines religious conversion in medieval Ashkenaz as a complex social, cultural, and legal process shaped by the interaction of individual choices, family ties, and communal boundaries. Drawing on Hebrew, Latin, and…
University of Chicago
Sacramental Existence: Embodiment in Martin Buber’s Philosophical and Hasidic Writings
I am a PhD candidate in History of Judaism at the University of Chicago Divinity School, working primarily with Paul Mendes-Flohr and Michael Fishbane. My writings have appeared in The Journal of Religion, …
Central European University
The Migration of the Numerus Clausus Exiles. Hungarian Jewish Students in Interwar Europe
Agnes’s dissertation (expected defense: 2019), “The Migration of the Numerus Clausus Exiles. Hungarian Jewish Students in Interwar Europe”, investigates the connection between academic antisemitism, social mobility and migration through a…
University of Cambridge
German Politics and the ‘Jewish Question’, 1914-1919
The First World War confronted German politicians with a range of unprecedented, vital questions in the spheres of domestic as well as foreign policy. As the fortunes of war shifted, so did borders, populations and national allegiances. In a period of acute and almost constant…
Hebrew University in Jerusalem
Between Universal and National ‘Social Therapy’: Professional Interventions by Jewish Social Workers in Mandatory Palestine
This PhD dissertation uncovers a hidden chapter in the pre-state era, viewing the birth of Israeli social work through the eyes of pioneering women who shaped its foundations. While traditional history often…
Columbia University
Jews on Trial: Postwar Retribution Against Jews in Germany and Europe
Lotte Houwink ten Cate is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of History at Columbia University. She focuses on intellectual and legal history, western Europe, and the history of sexuality. Her particular interests include criminal law, feminist thought, and the…
Freie Universität Berlin
A Forgotten Visionary: Zionist Ideas for the Future – Between Germany, Palestine, and the USA
In her dissertation, published in the Schriftenreihe wissenschaftlicher Abhandlungen des Leo Baeck Instituts, Lisa Sophie Gebhard examines the lifework of Davis Trietsch (1870–1935), a visionary Zionist from Berlin whose legacy has been…
Columbia University
Jewish Midwives, Medicine, and the Boundaries of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe, 1650-1800
Employed as midwives, wise women, or healers, female medical practitioners of various faiths disseminated medical knowledge and supplied information pertinent to religious and legal rulings in early modern Europe. While scholars have noted this…
Tel Aviv University
“It is time to act for the Lord”: Crisis Discourse and Theological Turns in Moses ben Maimon and Hermann Cohen
University of Munich
Zuhause zwischen Isar und Jordan. Leben und Werk Schalom Ben-Chorins
Das Dissertationsvorhaben widmet sich dem Leben und Werk des in München geborenen Religionsphilosophen und Literaten Schalom Ben-Chorin. Hierbei werden seine schriftstellerischen und religionsphilosophischen Werke, sein Beitrag zum christlich-jüdischen Gespräch und sein…
Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Jews, ‘Gypsies’ and the Volk: Wandering Minorities in the Folk-Narratives and German Mythology of Brothers Grimm and Ludwig Bechstein
Haifa University
“In-Between” — Jewish Studies in Post WWII Germany 1960–2009
Tally Gur writes her dissertation at the Dept. of Jewish History, Haifa University. She’s a research fellow at the Bucerius Institute for Contemporary German History and Society and was a Teaching fellow at the “Nofei Yeda” Humanities program. Her study follows the development…
University of Pennsylvania
The Organisation of Halakhic Knowledge: Early Modern Responsa
Tamara Morsel-Eisenberg is currently a seventh-year PhD Candidate at the History Department of the University of Pennsylvania. She is researching and writing her dissertation, with plans to finish sometime in the next academic year.
The Organisation of…
Duke University and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Adapting Arthur - The Transformations and Adaptations of Wirnt of Grafenberg’s Wigalois within a German-Jewish Framework
Annegret Oehme’s dissertation researched the adaptations and transformations of Wigalois, a text describing the adventures of an Arthurian…
University of Toronto
A Garden of Children and the Education of Citizens: The German Kindergarten Movement from 1837-1880
My dissertation follows the German kindergarten movement from 1837 to 1880 in Bad Blankenburg, Berlin, Hamburg, and Leipzig. Within these locations I explore two developments. First, I analyze the major kindergartens opened by activists to…
Ludwg-Maximilians-Universität Munich
Sigmund Neumann – Realist with a View
The historian and political scientist Sigmund Neumann (1904-1962) was German, Jewish, and a democrat. Socialized in the German Empire and the Weimar Republic, he emigrated to escape Nazi persecution. Today, his ideas on democracy and totalitarianism have almost been forgotten. Neumann is…
Princeton University
The Sources of Sociality: Hermann Cohen, German Idealism, and the Science of Judaism
The Jewish philosopher Hermann Cohen (1842-1918) was one of the most influential philosophers in Germany in the late nineteenth century. Cohen was a founder of neo-Kantianism, the intellectual movement that dominated Western scholarship in science, ethics,…
Tel Aviv University
The Reception of the Jerusalem Talmud in the Early Modern Period
Yakov Z. Mayer’s research focuses on the printing of the Palestinian Talmud, and its reception in the German speaking lands during the long 16th century. He writes in Haaretz’ magazine for Culture and Literature and teaches Talmud at Alma – House for Hebrew Culture…
Ben Gurion University of the Negev
Converting to Otherness: the dialectic of differentiation in and from Modern Europe
Ido Harari is a PhD candidate at the Department of Jewish Thought in Ben Gurion University of the Negev (writing under joint supervision of Prof. Boas Huss and Prof. Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin). His research interests include Jewish Orthodoxy in…
University of Zurich
“Plum War”, an anti-Jewish pogrom in Endingen and Lengnau on 21st September 1802
Martin Bürgin studied History, Study of Religions and Political Science at the University of Zurich and at the Center for Security Studies at ETH Zurich from 2005-2013. From 2008-2009 he received an Erasmus stipendiary at the Humboldt-University zu Berlin where…
Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Immigration and Education: Jewish Pedagogues and the Pedagogical Discourse in Palestine 1918-1939
University of Erfurt
Denkwelten, Handlungsräume und Grenzgänge der deutschen Orthodoxie in der ersten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts
Julia Carls’ PhD-project investigates the perception, self-perception, and scope of action of Orthodox German rabbis in the first half of the 20th century. Using a wide base of sources, general discourses as well as their reception…
Hamburg University
Coming Back Home? - Invitation Programs of German Cities for Former Refugees of the Nazi Regime
Only fifteen years after the end of World War Two, some German cities initiated contacts with their former citizens living abroad, who had suffered persecution during the Nazi period. These early local initiatives were met with an enormous…
University of Toronto
Dialogical Apologetics: Leo Baeck and the Task of Jewish Philosophy
Yaniv Feller is a curator at the Jewish Museum Berlin. He received his PhD (2016) from the Department for the Study of Religion and the Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto. Yaniv’s dissertation, entitled “Dialogical Apologetics: Leo Baeck…
University of Tübingen
History and Knowledge. Jews in the Christian Historiography of the 13th Century
The 13th century was a watershed for the Ashkenazi Jews in the Holy Roman Empire. Important social changes took place and anti-Judaism continued its transformation. In particular the anti-Jewish pogrom developed into a regular phenomenon during…
University of Cambridge
The crisis of tradition and the renaissance of history in Weimar Orthodox thought
University of Konstanz and Charles University Prague
Die Wochenschrift Selbstwehr (1907-1938) im deutsch-tschechischen kulturellen Kontext
Olga’s dissertation deals with the literature in the Prague Zionist weekly paper Selbstwehr, which was in circulation 1907—1938, and focuses on the first period until 1921 (with the subtitle Unabhängige…
George Washington University
Émigré Scientists of the Quotidian: Market Research and the American Consumer Unconscious, 1933-1976
My dissertation is a transnational intellectual and cultural history that examines the role played by a cohort of Central European market researchers and designers in the creation of modern American consumer culture. Each of…
Technical University Berlin
Orientalist scholarship and International politics in the Age of German Empire. Life, Career and Oeuvre of Friedrich Rosen, 1856-1935
Amir Theilhaber’s dissertation looks at the relationship of Oriental studies and Orient politics during the German Kaiserreich. The German diplomat, orientalist and later foreign minister…
Harvard University
Genealogies of Survival: Christianity, Judaism, Sovereignty
Adam Y. Stern defended his dissertation at Harvard University in 2016 and is now Lecturer in Jewish Studies at the University of Wisconsin—Madison. He has published articles in The Journal of Religion as well as in the Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook and is…
University of Trier
Judensiegel im mittelalterlichen Reich. Siegelpraxis und Selbstrepräsentation von Juden (“Jewish seals in the medieval German kingdom. Sealing practice and selfrepresentation of Jews”)
My doctoral thesis explores Jewish seals in an interdisciplinary way. When sealing practice reached its peak in the 13th and 14th centuries, Jews began using…
Technical University Berlin
Jewish Identities during the First World War: A Franco-German Family Biography
This dissertation project focuses on the transnational history of the Frank family between Paris and Frankfurt am Main in the period between 1870 and 1920. It analyses the family connections and their cosmopolitan lifestyles against the backdrop of rising…
University of Munich
Plants for Palestine! Science in the Yishuv, 1900-1930
My dissertation seeks to reconstruct the history of theoretic and applied botany in the Yishuv, which emerges around 1900 with the arrival of a group of German (or German-trained) scientists around the well-respected Prussian colonial botanist Otto Warburg (1859-1938). I try to…
University of California
Hebrew Reminiscences: Global Religion, Politics and Aesthetics in the Rise of Hermeneutic Thinking
Almog’s dissertation demonstrates that salient notions of literary interpretation—such as reading through empathy (Einfühlung), translation theory, and textual restoration—emerged with the broad fascination with Hebraism in…
City University of New York
‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife:’ Medieval Jewish Marriage Law in Northern France and Germany in Comparative Perspective, 1100- 1300
Ethan Zadoff is Adjunct Professor at the Department of Classical and Oriental Studies, Division of Hebrew and Hebraic Studies at the Hunter College…
New York University
Home after Fascism? How Italian and German Jews Rebuilt their Lives in their Countries of Origin, 1945-1955
This dissertation compares Italian and German Jews’ relationships with their home countries after the Holocaust. I ask how they dealt with the tremendous loss they experienced under the Nazi and Fascist regimes, and how they regained a…
Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg
The Jews’ Houses in the German Reich since 1939. A Life-World Study on Everyday Life and Neighbourhood
The research focus in my dissertation lies on the enforced “relocation” to and life in the so-called “Jews’ Houses”, which were established in the course of the “Law on Tenancies with Jews” in 1939. Within a very short time…
University of St. Andrews
In the Service of His Majesty’s Government: The British Consular Service in the Third Reich between 1933-1939.
This doctoral project will analyse local and regional reports on anti-Semitic persecution from the British consular network in the Third Reich during the interwar period. The information…
University of Chicago
Modeling the Temple: The Politics of German-Jewish Scriptural Hermeneutics
Jews and Christians hotly debated the political, historical and philosophical significance of the ancient Israelite Temple throughout nineteenth-century Germany. Although many German Jews regularly articulated yearning for the Temple to be rebuilt and sacrifices…
Freie Universität Berlin
A ticket from Brody via Berlin to New York. The organized solidarity of German Jews for European Jewish Transmigrants in the Crisis year 1881/82
The dissertation thematizes the transit of Jewish-Russian transmigrants through the German Empire during the “crisis year” 1881/82. The focus of the dissertation is on the transnational…
Technical University Berlin
Jews in Stettin, 1946-1950
Between April and June 1946 about 28,500 Polish Jews were settled in the former German port Stettin (Polish: Szczecin) at the estuary of the Oder river. These Jews were mainly so called repatriates from Soviet Russia but also former partisans and soldiers of Polish or Soviet armies. The reasons of the…
Rice University
Out of the In-Between: Moses Mendelssohn and Martin Buber’s German Jewish Philosophy of Encounter, Singularity, and Aesthetics
This dissertation articulates a trajectory in Germanic Jewish thought, beginning with the work of Moses Mendelssohn and ending with Martin Buber; this trajectory maps two concepts: the in-between and singularity .…
University College London
Groups of Ashkenazi Bibles with Micrographic Ornaments
Her doctoral research involves several disciplines, combining art history with codicology and palaeography, and Old Testament theology and linguistics with intellectual and social history of German Jewish communities in the Middle Ages. In her thesis, she examines the…
University of California
Absolute Relativity: Weimar Cinema and the Crisis of Historicism
Nicholas Baer’s dissertation focuses on the intersection between film and the philosophy of history in interwar Germany.
Nicholas Baer is Collegiate Assistant Professor in the Humanities and Harper-Schmidt Fellow in the Society of Fellows at the…
University of Pennsylvania
Professor Matthew Handelman is Assistant Professor of German and a member of the Core Faculty in the Digital Humanities Specialization at MSU. His research interests include German-Jewish literature and philosophy in the early twentieth century, the intersections of science, mathematics and culture in German-speaking countries, as well as the digital…
University of Toronto
For the Love of Metaphysics: From the Revolution in Thinking towards the Renewal of Thinking
One of Kant’s most original insights is the notion that we can construct a philosophical argument—a transcendental argument—whose central premise makes a first-personal appeal to our conception of ourselves as moral agents. The epistemic…
Palacký University Olomouc
Jewish Pioneer Youth in Interwar Czechoslovakia between Zionism and Communism - the Building of the Chosen Body
Daniela Bartáková is a researcher at the Department of Modern Social and Cultural History of Masaryk Institute and Archives of the Czech Academy of Sciences. She works on the Project “Felix Weltsch, Jindřich Kohn, and the…
Tel Aviv University/University of Warsaw
Between Individual and Political Emancipation: Zionism and Feminism in the Lives of Puah Rakovsky and Rahel Straus
This dissertation is a comparative biographical study that delves into the individual and political emancipation efforts of two feminist-oriented activists of the Zionist movement: Puah Rakovsky, a teacher…
University of Chicago
The Reconstruction of Walter Benjamin in Development of Critical Theory
Brown University
Healing and Harmony between War and Genocide: Dr. Kurt Singer’s Musical Healing and The Doctors’ Chorus of Berlin,1913-1938
The problem considered by this dissertation is whether aesthetic experience may reshape and reform social, political and medical behavior. Utilizing the case study of the Berlin Doctors Chorus, this investigation considers…
Humboldt University of Berlin
Orakelnde Musik. Schönberg, der Fortschritt und die Avantgarde
His dissertation project deals with the Jewish composer Arnold Schoenberg and avant-garde notions of musical progress. The study asks when and why modern composers, especially those influenced by Schoenberg, thought of their music in terms of progress and how this is…
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Intimate Strangers: Intermarriage among Protestants, Catholics, and Jews in Germany, 1875-1935
In this dissertation, I examine intermarriage in Germany from 1875, when the Second Reich implemented obligatory civil marriage, to 1935, the year the Third Reich implemented the Nuremberg Laws. At its core are common mixed…
TU Darmstadt and the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) Paris
„Does Jewishness matter? Jews in Frankfurt Penal Justice 1780-1814“
In my PhD project, I analyze the treatment of Jewish women and men in the Christian-governmental authorities’ dispensation of penal justice at the turn of the 18th to the 19th century. I thereby look at the…
University of California, San Diego
“Germany on Their Minds”? German Jewish Refugees in the United States and Relationships to Germany, 1938-1988
In the 1930s and early 1940s, approximately 90,000 Jews from Germany came to the United States as refugees fleeing the Nazis. Though these refugees were hurt by and driven from their homeland, many of them, in spite…
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Von verschiedenen Standpunkten. Die Darstellung jüdischer Erfahrung im Film der DDR.
The portrayal of the Jewish experience in East German cinema is one of contradictions and ambivalence. On the one hand, the GDR has been criticised for the failure to come to terms with the Shoah – even though, or perhaps precisely because, anti-…
TU Berlin
Behind the scenes: Visits of German politicians to Israel in the years 1957-1984
After studying Sociology, History and Religious Sciences at the University of Bremen, I was a PhD-Student at the „Centre for Research on Antisemitism“ at the TU Berlin between 2010-2015. My recently finished PhD-thesis deals with State visits and Symbolic Politics…
University of Florida
Orientalism for the Nation: Jews and Oriental Scholarship in Modern Hungary
Katalin Franciska Rac earned her doctorate from the University of Florida in 2014. Her dissertation studies the mutual influence between Orientalism and Jewish integration in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Hungary. During her doctoral research in 2011–2012, she…
University College London
Sarah Schenirer and the Formation of Bais Ya’akov. Gender and Religious Identity Constructions in Orthodox Judaism
Bais Ya’akov was established in 1917 in Krakow by Sarah Schenirer, who was particularly impressed with the teachings and writings of the German neo-Orthodox thinkers. It was the first religious school for…
University of Marburg
Die Juden im politischen System des Alten Reichs. Jüdische Politik und ihre Organisation im 16. Jahrhundert
My dissertation examined Jewish political activity in the sixteenth-century Holy Roman Empire. Focusing on forms of organization, long-term strategies, political maneuvering, and interactions between German Jewry and local,…
Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Habent sua fata libelli: Hebrew Books from the Collection of Hartmann Schedel
This study investigates the practice of Christian collecting of Hebrew books within the pre-Reformation German milieu. It focuses on a group of biblical and liturgical Hebrew codices from the library of the Nuremberg physician and humanist Hartmann…
New York University
Between Court Jew and Jewish Court: David Oppenheim,
the Prague rabbinate, and eighteenth-century Jewish politics
Joshua Teplitsky is the Joseph Meyerhoff Associate Professor of Modern Jewish History. He studies the history of Jewish life in early modern Central Europe, with an eye both to the particularities of Jewish experience and the…
Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Claiming Credibility: The Makings and Meanings of Gender in the Legal Literature of Medieval Ashkenaz
My dissertation is a study of medieval Jewish legal discourse, in general, and of the ways in which this literature appropriated, constructed, and employed gender, in particular. It focuses on discussions of halakhic credibility…
University of Munich
Jiskorbücher/-literatur als Medien des Erinnerns/Gedenkens an Heldentod, Selbstopfer und Märtyrertod im Zionismus, 1897-1948
Seit der Gründung von landwirtschaftlichen Siedlungen in Palästina durch Chalutzim, besonders aber ab dem Beginn der Zweiten Aliya, kam es zu gewalttätigen Auseinandersetzungen zwischen den Bewohnern dieser Siedlungen…
Hamburg University
Gender Perspectives on the German-Jewish Immigration to Palestine in the 1930s
In my PhD project I use the category of gender to analyze the German-Jewish immigration toPalestine in the 1930s. Within the Fifth Alyiah some 50,000 German Jews reached pre-stateIsrael. Their life’s where turned upside down: climate, mentality, political…
Hebrew University of Jerusalem
The Epic Poems in old-Yiddish on the Book of Joshua and the Book of Judges
The field of my research is the history and culture of the Jews who lived in Germany and spoke German. The texts I study date back to the time before the existence of Standard German, when Jews living in the German-speaking area spoke their own dialect,…
University of Oxford
God as Dionysus: Martin Buber’s Reception of Friedrich Nietzsche
‹Neu erwacht der Stolz, jüdisch zu sein!› Such was Ernst Bloch’s reaction to Martin Buber, who became a beacon of Jewish culture to a generation of German-speaking, virtually assimilated Jews. Buber captivated his young audience because his version of cultural…
Columbia University
Orthodoxy in the Age of Nationalism: Agudat Yisrael and the Mizrahi Movement in Germany, Poland and Palestine 1912-1948
During the first half of the twentieth century, nationalizing processes in Europe and Palestine reshaped observant Jewry into two distinct societies, ultra-Orthodoxy and national-religious Judaism. Tracing the dynamics…
University of Munich
The Jewish Stigma: Intermarriage and Family Life in Germany, 1933-1949.
Maximilian Strnad is a PhD candidate at LMU, University of Munich. He received his MA from the University of Munich (2007). Maximilian Strnad was a Fellow of the Leo-Baeck-Fellowship-Programme (2010). Until 2012 he was assistant at the NS-Documentation Center in Munich…
Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Deserted Women and Disappearing Men in Ashkenaz 1648-1850
Acdemic Affiliation
Adjunct lecturer at the Department of Culture, Creation and Production
Sapir Academic College, Sderot (2011 – Current)
Post Doctoral Fellow, Ben-Gurion University, Beer-Sheba (2012-2013)…
Hebrew University of Jerusalem
From Weimar to America. The political thought of Leo Strauss
During the Weimar years, Strauss was intellectually and spiritually close to streams of thought that were averse to liberalism, enlightenment, and democracy. Specifically, he was mostly influenced by Nietzsche, Schmitt, and Heidegger. However, with the rise of Nazism,…
New School for Social Research, New York
Moral Pathology: A philosophical study of Jean Améry
My dissertation offers a reconstructive, philosophical interpretation of the work of Jewish Austrian essayist and Holocaust survivor Jean Améry (born Hans Mayer), which brings it into dialogue with relevant philosophers, among them, Spinoza, Kant, Nietzsche, and…
University of Regensburg
The German People’s Party and the Jews in the Weimar Republic
German Jews who were politically liberal-oriented were well known to have favored the German Democratic Party (Deutsche Demokratische Partei, DDP). Ranking among the party’s Jewish members and supporters were some prominent personalities such as the Reich Ministers Walther…
Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Facing the Challenge of Jewish education in the Metropolis – A Comparative Study of the Jewish Communal Organizations of Budapest and Vienna, from 1867 until World War II
This study seeks to investigate how Jewish communities responded to the challenges posed to their Jewish identity and to their institutional coherence by the…
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich
Assimilation. Poetics and Semantics of a German-Jewish Narrative, 1800–1939
Modern German-Jewish literature has produced a variety of different, very often divergent, narratives of assimilation that disclose and negotiate the transgression of Jewish tradition, the loss of identity, and the hope to participate in the…
University of Ulm
Life and Work of the Psychoanalyst Paula Heimann (1899-1982)
The research project focuses on life and work of a famous psychoanalyst, who, furthermore, had a substantial influence on the Federal German post-war context. In particular, Paula Heimann became internationally known for her method developed concerning an understanding of the…
Heinrich-Heine University of Düsseldorf
Juden und ländliche Gesellschaft im Rheinland 1871–1942 (working title)
The research project deals with the social relationships between Jewish and non-Jewish ruralists in the Prussian Rhine province between 1871 and 1942. It focuses on the situation in the rural counties of Kleve, Rheinbach, Trier, and Simmern…
University of Toronto
The Inmate of Theresienstadt: A Laboratory of the Middle Class? Social History of the Theresienstadt Ghetto
Terezín, as it was known in Czech, or Theresienstadt as it was known in German, was operated by the Nazis between November 1941 and May 1945 as a transit ghetto for Central and Western European Jews before their deportation for…
Tel Aviv University
Blessed is the Changer of Beings: Uses and Representations of Exoticism in the Jewish Enlightenment
The dissertation explores Jewish representations of otherness during a formative period in the history of racial thought. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including philosophical and scientific works, halakhic literature, and…University of Potsdam and Sorbonne Paris IV University
The Jewish Revival in Berlin since 1989: Cultural and Religious Aspects
Sophie Zimmer studied German and Jewish Studies at the Sorbonne Paris IV University, the Ruprecht-Karls University of Heidelberg, and the University of Potsdam. She earned her PhD in German and Jewish studies at the…
Hebrew University of Jerusalem
The ‘Revival of the East,’ Pan-Semitism and Pan-Asianism within Zionist Discourse
Hanan Harif’s dissertation explores the varied ways in which Zionist thinkers and writers viewed the Orient and its inhabitants. The work (written under the supervision of Prof. Steven Aschheim and Prof. Israel Bartal) studies Zionism against…
Technical University Berlin
Ökonomisches Vertrauen und antisemitische Gewalt: Jüdische Viehhändler in Mittelfranken (1919 – 1939)
Stefanie Fischer currently holds a PostDoc position at the Center for Jewish Studies/Potsdam University. In 2012 Fischer earned a PhD from the Center for Research on Antisemitism/Technical University Berlin. In her PhD…
Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Collecting the Pieces of Exile: A Critical View of Folklore Research in Israel in the 1940s-1950s
Folk-culture is typically associated with continuity; how can one engage folk-culture in situations of destruction and extermination - the reality Zionist folklorists confronted facing the Shoah? With the first bits of information…
Stanford University
Rewriting the Myth: Gershom Scholem, Zionism and Kabbalah
Amir Engel received his PhD from Stanford University in 2011. His dissertation is a intellectual biography of the renowned Kabbalah Jewish German and Israeli scholar Gershom Scholem. Currently he is a research fellow at the Martin Buber Professur für Jüdische Religionsphilosophie,…
University of Vienna
Reform und Tradition - Der Wiener Stadttempel im Kontext des aschkenasischen Synagogenbaus des Klassizismus
The dissertation is aiming at a first monograph on the so called City Temple that was accomplished in 1826 by the design of Joseph Kornhäusel and came along with a liturgical reform. Central questions of the dissertation concern: -…
University of Köln
Topographien jüdischer Selbstverortungen im lokalen Raum Rigas, 1842 - 1915
Die (bisher praktisch unerforschte) jüdische Geschichte Rigas um 1900 eignet sich dazu, eher nebeneinander laufende Argumentationsstränge miteinander zu verschränken, etwa die entlang der Fragen nach der Reichweite unterschiedlicher Wissensbestände und kultureller…
Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Children and Childhood in Early Modern Ashkenaz
The history of children and childhood has been a subject of major interest among historians of all periods and cultures ever since the publication of Philippe Aries’ controversial book «Centuries of Childhood» in 1960. Aries’ thesis situated the development of the notion of childhood…
University of Passau
Jewish Organizations in Transatlantic Perspective: Three Patterns of Contemporary Jewish Politics in Germany, France, and the United States
This is a dissertation about the origins and effects of three basic patterns in contemporary Jewish politics. It is also about the role that Jewish organizations have played in the political…
University of Heidelberg
Jews, Music, and Society. A Study in the Social and Cultural History of Music (1750–1900)
My dissertation is an attempt to offer a fuller understanding and, to some extent, a reinterpretation of modern Jewish history through the lens of music history. By studying the practice and notion of music among Jews in Central Europe, especially…
Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Cold War Weimar: German Emigres and the Intellectual Origins of the Cold War
By examining the works and activities of influential yet often overlooked Cold War-era thinkers - Carl J. Friedrich, Ernst Fraenkel, Hans Morgenthau, Walter Laqueur, and Peter Gay - who emigrated from Germany and became members of the U.S. establishment,…
University of Toronto
Walter Benjamin’s Monadology
My dissertation interprets Walter Benjamin’s corpus through the lens of a previously unexplored theme: namely, his appropriation of Leibniz’s monadic metaphysics. Against the grain of mainstream Benjamin scholarship, which tends to regard Benjamin’s work as fragmentary, I argue that Benjamin ought to be…
Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Uri Zvi Greenberg’s Poetry and its Relation with German Literature and Culture
Karin Neuburger studied Comparative Literature, Philosophy, and French at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum and at the Freie Universität Berlin, Germany and Hebrew Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem,…
Martin Luther University of Halle
Facetten des Menschen. Zur Anthropologie Moses Mendelssohns“ – Facets of Humankind. On Moses Mendelssohn’s Anthropology
This study portrays Moses Mendelssohn’s oeuvre as a unique approach to the just emerging science of rational anthropology. The overarching concern of his ‘Science of Humankind’ is the explanation and…
University of Pennsylvania
Observable Type: Jewish Women and the Jewish Press in Weimar Germany
Through an examination of German and Yiddish-language Jewish periodicals in Weimar Germany (1919-1933), this dissertation investigates the problematics of Jewish visibility, and the ways women approached modernity and embodied markers of Jewish and gender difference…
Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Hidden Resistance: Jewish Responses to Christianity in Medieval and Earl Modern Europe
Yaacov Deutsch works on Christian-Jewish relations and especially on the knowledge the two groups had about each other’s practices and theology in early modern Germany. His project discusses the ways Jews attacked Christianity and…
University of Kassel
Jüdische Wohlfahrt in der Weimarer Republik und im Nationalsozialismus
This project shall make a contribution to an as yet scarcely noticed field of Jewish social history, the welfare services. During the Weimar Republic the welfare is at the height of modernization, by creating a specific legal constitution and by building load-bearing…
University of Heidelberg
Jewish-non-Jewish Relations in the City of Temesvár in Hungary (1850-1915)
1997-2002: Studies of Medieval and Modern History as well as Philosophy in Heidelberg
2006: Doctorate in Eastern European History in Heidelberg
2007: Fritz and Helga Exner Dissertation Prize of the Southeast Europe …
Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Forging Israeli Ashkenazi Identity through Synagogue Music - Ohel Nehama in Jerusalem as a Case-Study
Amalia Kedem’s ethnomusicological work concentrates around the music found in Israeli Ashkenazi synagogues and the social and ideological motivations behind the choice of that music. She taught Jewish music in various…
Freie Universität Berlin
Jüdische Konversionen im 18. Jahrhundert im Herzogtum Mecklenburg-Schwerin
The thesis explores the complexity of conversions from Judaism to Christianity during the 18th century, emphasizing Jewish lower classes in the duchy of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, which is located in the area of today’s Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. The main…
Columbia University
The Museum of the Jews: Literature and Ethnography in Germany and Eastern Europe
This dissertation attempts to reconstruct the history of Jewish ethnography and folklore studies in Germany, in order to locate Jewish anthropology within the broader historiography of anthropology, and also to uncover the links between the discipline in…
University of London, Birkbeck College
Jewish Prisoners in Nazi Concentration Camps, 1933-1939
Focussing on the pre-war period, the study analyzes the function of camp-imprisonment for the development of the regime’s antisemitic policies and the camps’ important role as instruments of terror and exclusion in the making of the Nazi Volksgemeinschaft. It…
Freie Universität Berlin
Dimensionen des Witzes um Heinrich Heine. Zur Säkularisation der poetischen Sprache
Der “Witz” gilt als Signum der poetischen Sprache Heinrich Heines. Gleichwohl wurde dieser Witz von der zeitgenössischen und späteren Literaturkritik zum Anlass genommen, das Oeuvre Heines als “Notzüchtigung”, als “frivol” und endlich als “jüdisch”…
Bar Ilan University
Night in the Middle Ages in Ashkenaz
The project attempts to describe the various historical aspects of the night in the Jewish society in late medieval Ashkenaz (14–16 cent.). These include, but are not limited to, social, halachic-ritual, and artistic-literary aspects. From a methodological point of view, this study will attempt to examine…
University of Sussex/University of Erfurt
Hebräischer Humanismus - Hans Kohns (1891 - 1971) Konzept eines ethischen Nationalismus im Kontext des deutschen Kulturzionismus
At the beginning of the 20th century in Prague, a group of Jewish nationalists committed themselves to the moral and politically positive strength of nationalism. Amongst others Robert Weltsch…
Humboldt University Berlin
Abwehr- und Überlebensstrategien jüdischer Unternehmer in Breslau und Schlesien 1925 - 1939
Das Projekt verfolgt das Ziel, auf der Basis der Grunddaten mittlerer und kleiner jüdischer Unternehmen in Breslau und seinem schlesischen Einzugsgebiet eine monographische Studie zuerstellen, die diese Daten wirtschafts- und…
Freie Universität Berlin
David Wolffsohn. Aufsteiger, Grenzgänger, Mediator. Eine biographische Annäherung an die Geschichte der frühen Zionistischen Organisation (1897–1914).
David Wolffsohn (1850s – 1914) was Theodor Herzl’s closest assistant and succeeded him as president of the World Zionist Organization in 1905. Using Wolffsohn as an example, this study…
University of Pittsburgh
Austrian Jews and the Idea of Europe: Reformulating Multinationalism as a Response to the Disintegration of the Habsburg Empire, 1880-1939
The process of European political unification that began in the mid-twentieth century has taken for granted a certain idea. This is that Europe is composed of ethnonational units. My research…
University of Göttingen
Landnahme und Landphantasie. Territoriale Imagination des politischen Zionismus vor 1948
In der «Bindung an den Boden Palästinas» (Michael Brenner) bzw. an das Land (Eretz) Israel und im Ziel seiner «Erlösung» fanden die verschiedenen Strömungen des Zionismus zusammen. Mit diesem Konzept wurde auch die jüdische Diaspora in das…
University of Southampton
Jews in the metropolis: Urban Jewish cultures in London, Berlin and Paris c.1880-1940
Karl Kautsky war nicht der einzige, der Anfang des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts erklärte, der Jude sei zum «Stadtbewohner par excellence» geworden. Immer wieder ist das Bild des Juden als Städter in Debatten um die Jahrhundertwende bemüht worden. Meist…
University of Erfurt
Modernisierungsdiskurse in der Publizistik der Wissenschaft des Judentums
Kerstin von der Krone is a research fellow at the German Historical Institute Washington. Her fields of research include Jewish history in Central Europe in the modern era and the history of Jewish thought; she focuses in particular on communication practices related…
Hebrew University of Jerusalem
New Politics in an Old Key: Arnold Zweig, Hans Kohn and the Central-European Jewish ‘Generation of 1914’.
Adi Gordon is a Professor of History at Amherst College. He is the author of In Palestine, in A Foreign Land: The Orient, A German-Language Weekly Between German Exile and Aliya (The Hebrew University Magnes Press,…
Freie Universität Berlin
Berliner Konfektion und Mode – Jüdische Unternehmerfamilien in einer Modemetropole des 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhunderts
Im 19. Jahrhundert entwickelte sich in Berlin ein neuer Zweig der Textilwirtschaft: die Konfektion. Im Gegensatz zur bis dahin üblichen Maßschneiderei stellte die Konfektion einen Zugang zur Mode für ein breites…
University of Munich
Intellektuelles Leben und deutsch-jüdisches Milieu im Jerusalemer Stadtviertel Rechavia
My PhD-thesis „Aschkenas in Jerusalem – die religiösen Institutionen der Einwanderer aus Deutschland im Jerusalemer Stadtviertel Rechavia 1933-2004“ deals with strategies of Geman-Jewish immigrants in Jerusalem in the 1930s to rebuild their…
Brandeis University
Border Jews: Jewish Life on Medieval Frontier. German Ashkenazim in the Late Medieval and Early Modern Ruthenia
Ruhr Universität Bochum
Deutschsprachige Autoren aus der Bukowina: Die kulturelle Herkunft als bleibendes Motiv in der Identitätssuche deutschsprachiger Autoren aus der Bukowina
PD Dr. Natalia Blum-Barth (formerly Shchyhlevska) is Privatdozentin in German and Comparative Literature at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz and currently Project Coordinator at the…
Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich
Die Israelitische Allianz zu Wien 1873-1938
Die Israelitische Allianz zu Wien, gegründet 1873 in Wien, spiegelte den zeitgenössischen Geist der Aufklärung, Emanzipation und Assimilation wider. Nach dem Vorbild der Alliance Israélite Universelle (Paris) arbeitete die IAzW für eine Durchsetzung und Absicherung der jüdischen…
University of Munich
Gericht und Gedächtnis: Der Holocaust-Diskurs der sechziger Jahre (Memory and Judgment: Holocaust discourse in Germany during the 1960s)
Bereits das antike Theater verstand die juristische Praxis als eine Matrix der Darstellung. Auch die deutschsprachigen Streitschriften, Essays, Dramen und Filme der 1960er Jahre, die im Kontext der…
University of California, Los Angeles
Nitzan Lebovic is an assistant professor of history and the Apter Chair of Holocaust Studies and Ethical Values at Lehigh University.
Nitzan is the author of The Philosophy of Life and Death: Ludwig Klages and the Rise of a Nazi Biopolitics (Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History, Palgrave Macmillan,…
Technische Universität Braunschweig
Jüdischer Adel. Nobilitierungen von Juden im Europa des 19. Jahrhunderts
Born in 1976 in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania; historian, librarian, and archivist; since 2013 head of the Scientific Collections, Leibniz Institute for Regional Development and Structural Planning (IRS), Erkner near Berlin(www.irs-net.de/profil/…
