Leo Baeck Institute London
Salary: £38,422 per annum pro rata (£19,211 actual)
Hours: 0.5 FTE (approximately 2.5 days per week)
Contract: 12 months in the first instance, with possibility of renewal
Location: Senate House, London, with some remote working as appropriate
Closing date: 18th October
Interviews: w/c 9th November
About the role
We are pleased to share the publication of a new title in our German Jewish Cultures series, published by Indiana University Press: German-Jewish Libraries After the Holocaust: A History of Disappearance, by Anna Hołzer-Kawałko.
We are pleased to share that an article by former LBI London intern Katharina Hadassah Wendl has been published in the latest issue of the AJR Journal. The piece is adapted from her original LBI Snapshot, for the AJR readership, on the 1938/9 calendar of the Jüdischer Frauenbund (League of Jewish Women).
Snapshots of German-Jewish History and Culture is our regular online feature highlighting rare books, pamphlets and other items from the LBI London collection, paired with academic commentary that sets them within their wider historical and cultural context.
On 5 September 1791, Jakob Liebmann Meyer Beer was born near Berlin into one of the wealthiest Jewish families in Prussia. In 1817 he changed his first name to Giacomo during his period of study in Italy and the world would come to know him as Giacomo Meyerbeer. For several decades in the mid-19th century he was quite simply the most popular opera composer in Europe.
His grand operas, among them Robert le diable, Les Huguenots and Le Prophète, dominated the stages of Paris, London and beyond, and shaped the work of composers from Verdi to Wagner. The irony is not lost on history: Wagner, who owed a considerable debt to Meyerbeer’s innovations, later attacked him viciously in his notorious antisemitic essay Das Judenthum in der Musik.
We note the passing of Gloria Steinem, the pioneering feminist writer and activist who died this week at 92.
Steinem’s father, Leo Steinem, was the son of Jewish immigrants from Germany and Poland, and her grandmother, Pauline Perlmutter Steinem, was a significant figure in her own right: an educator and suffragist who came to the United States from a Reform Jewish family, and who in 1904 became the first woman elected to the Toledo Board of Education.
On the night of 31 August 1928, a new work by Bertolt Brecht, with music by a young Jewish composer from Dessau opened at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm in Berlin. Nobody quite knew what to make of it. By morning, Bertolt Brecht and his collaborator Kurt Weil were famous.
The Threepenny Opera was unlike anything Berlin had heard before. It blended jazz, cabaret and classical music with savage political satire, and it captured something true and uncomfortable about Weimar Germany. It ran for 400 performances and was translated into 18 languages within a year.
The Institute of Classical Studies Library, our neighbours in Senate House, has mounted a small exhibition on Dr Victor Ehrenberg on the third-floor landing. ‘Catalogue of My Antiques: the Story of Victor Ehrenberg’s Collection’ offers a fascinating opportunity to explore the life and work of a German-Jewish refugee scholar.
Last week, the Channel 4 documentary series ‘Dictator: The Hitler Interviews’ featured historical testimony from the late Dr Edgar Feuchtwanger OBE (1924–2025), historian and long-standing member of the Board of LBI London.
The series examines the rise and exercise of power of Adolf Hitler through the perspectives, testimonies and archival accounts of those who lived alongside his regime, including associates, contemporaries and eye-witnesses.
The latest feature in the Leo Baeck Institute’s Meet the Fellows series introduces Daniel Hershkowitz, whose research examines modern German-Jewish thought and its intersection with wider philosophical trends.
