PODCAST · education
LBI London
by LBI London
LBI London is a research institute dedicated to the study of German-Jewish history and culture.
Episodes
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Sheila Hayman on Fanny: The Other Mendelssohn | LBI Film Club Interview
Join Sheila Hayman, director and writer of Fanny: The Other Mendelssohn, in conversation with the Leo Baeck Institute London about the extraordinary life and music of Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel.In this interview, Sheila discusses the research behind the film, the recovery of Fanny’s work, and the...
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The LBI London meets Sir Bernard Zissman, producer of "Theodor Herzl: The Man Behind Israel"
The Leo Baeck Institute London is delighted to present an exclusive conversation with Sir Bernard Zissman, one of the producers behind the recent British documentary, Theodor Herzl: The Man Behind Israel. As the latest feature for our Film Club, we sat down with Sir Bernard ahead of our free…
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Kindertransport in British Memory and Culture: A Roundtable Discussion
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...
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LBI 70th Anniversary Celebrations - Eva Reichmann Memorial Lecture
Christine Schmidt, Bea Lewkowicz, Natalia Aleksiun The Wiener Holocaust Library, London6 November 2025, 6:30PM - 08:00 PM The inaugural Eva Reichmann Lecture, held as part of the LBI 70th Anniversary Celebrations: Eva Reichmann: Witness, Historian, Legacy This special event celebrates the legacy…
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Dr Julia Ng - A Politics of Inaction: Daoism in German-Jewish Thought
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...
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Rethinking German Nationalism in the Interwar Period
Erin HochmanDue 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...
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Hitler’s Mein Kampf: Reflections 100 Years On
Lisa Pine Institute of Historical Research, School of Advanced Study, University of London 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…
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(Un)Welcome Returns? Re-Naturalisation Rights of German Jews in Germany
Nicholas CourtmanKing’s College LondonSince 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…
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Hermann Beck - Online Book Talk
Before the Holocaust: Antisemitic Violence and the Reaction of German Elites and Institutions during the Nazi TakeoverSpeaker: Hermann BeckHermann Beck has just been announced winner of the Yad Vashem Book Prize 2024 for his book Before the Holocaust: Antisemitic Violence and the Reaction of…
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Grzegorz Kwiatkowski: More Light – Art Against Hate
More Light – Art Against Hate: Fighting Holocaust Denial and The Rise of Right-Wing Nationalism In Poland Grzegorz Kwiatkowski 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…
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A German-Jewish Athlete During The Age of Extremes: Alex Natan (1906–71)
Prof. Kay Schiller University of Durham, UK 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...
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LBI London Summer Lecture: Psychologists in Auschwitz: Accounting for Survival
Prof Dan Stone 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...
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Regina Jonas – The First Woman Rabbi
Rabbi Prof Dr Elisa Klapheck Wiener Holocaust 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...
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Jewish Life In Contemporary Germany
Prof Dani Kranz 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,...
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Heinrich Zimmer, Nazi Racial Politics and The University of Heidelberg, 1933–1938
Dr. Baijayanti Roy University of Frankfurt 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...
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Writing The Lives of Those That Stayed Behind. Georg Hermann’s Long-Lost Exile Novel ‘Die Daheim Blieben’
Godela Weiss-Sussex ILCS (University of London) 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...
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International Women's Day 2024: Pauline Paucker
For International Women's Day 2024, LBI Director Joseph Cronin interviews Pauline Paucker at her home about her memories of the Institute, her work editing the Yearbook, and her husband Arno Paucker, former director of the Institute. Her testimony is a personal reminiscence, and the views…
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Who was Fritz Kittel? A German Railway Worker Decides, 1933–2022
Reading: Esther Dischereit together with Jonny Ball. 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...
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Dressing Eve: Re-drawing Biblical Women through Comics
Dr Sarah Lightman 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...
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The Shoah and the Tragedy of Assimilation: Lessons from one German-Jewish family
Simon May Thursday, October 26, 2023 - 18:30 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...
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What a shayna punim!: Cute Jews, Photography, and Jewish Regeneration
Prof Daniel Magilow 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...
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German Jews, English Gentry: The Messel Family and the Cultural Expression of a Changing Identity
Leo Baeck Institute London Summer Lecture Speaker: John Hilary, honorary professor at the University of Nottingham 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…
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Marked Off in the Eyes of the Public: Anti-Jewish Imagery and the Politics of Prejudice
Sara Lipton Stony Brook University, NY, USA 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...
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The Virtuous Jewess
Nadia Valman Queen Mary University of London, UK 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...
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Gender, Sex and Jewishness in Weimar Cinema’s Monsters
Prof Cathy Gelbin University of Manchester, UK Leo Baeck Institute London Lecture Series 2023 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...
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Images of the Grotesque and Arabesque: The Discovery of Kafka’s drawings
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...
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Marx and the Jewish Question
Prof Etienne Balibar The lecture looks at the ambiguity of the term “Jewish Question”, which refers to both the historical attitude of Marx with respect to the condition of the Jewish communities in 19th century Europe, and to the philosophical developments reflected in the 1844 article for the...
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In our Image: Meeting our Ultraorthodox Other on Netflix
Dr Tobias Ebbrecht-Hartmann Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel In our Image: Meeting our Ultraorthodox Other on Netflix 6.30pm, Thursday, November 17th 2022 In recent years, streaming networks have offered new encounters with the lives and traditions of ultraorthodox Judaism through means of...
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Post-Holocaust German-Jewish Symbiosis: Ephraim Kishon and the Germans
Prof Moshe Zimmermann Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel Post-Holocaust German-Jewish Symbiosis: Ephraim Kishon and the Germans 6.30pm, Thursday, October 13th 2022 The bon mot 'A German joke is no laughing matter' is attributed to Mark Twain. Improvising on Adorno's dictum 'writing poetry…
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A Story of Ambivalences. Jewish Topics and Characters in East German Television
Dr Lisa Schoß (Selma Stern Centre for Jewish Studies, Berlin, Germany) 6.30pm, May 5th 2022 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…
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Jukebox? Jewkbox!
Hanno Loewy - Jüdisches Museum Hohenems, Austria 6.30pm, 17 March 2022 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…
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From Heartland to Homeland? – German-Jewish Émigré Artists in Britain, ca. 1933-45
Sarah MacDougall (Ben Uri Gallery and Museum, London, UK) From Heartland to Homeland? – German-Jewish Émigré Artists in Britain, ca. 1933-45 6.30pm, November 11th 2021 Founded as an arts society in 1915 in London’s East End, Ben Uri’s collection, exhibition history and programming were...
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‘Your Heimat is our Nightmare?’: Post-Soviet Poetic Interventions in German Culture
Dr Natasha Gordinsky Haifa, Israel Dr Katja Petrowskaja Berlin, Germany ‘Your Heimat is our Nightmare?’: Post-Soviet Poetic Interventions in German Culture 6.30pm, October 14th 2021 In the past decade post-Soviet Jewish writers, poets and artists who live and work in Germany have played a crucial...
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Heimat as a Shelter from Nazism
Ofer Ashkenazi (Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel) 6.30pm, 22 April 2021 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...
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Helmar Lerski between the Diaspora and a Jewish Homeland
Jan-Christopher Horak (UCLA, Los Angeles, USA) 6.30pm, 18 March 2021 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....
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Unrewarded Love: Alpine Clubs, Ski-Tourism, Folklore and the Jews
Hanno Loewy (Jüdisches Museum Hohenems, Austria) 6.30pm, 11 February 2021 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...
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How to dress in Eretz Israel? Clothing, Fashion and Nation Building, 1880s – 1948
Svenja Bethke Lecturer in Modern European History University of Leicester, UK How to dress in Eretz Israel? Clothing, Fashion and Nation Building, 1880s–1948 6.30pm, 19th November 2020 The identities of many Eastern European and German Jews who immigrated to Eretz Israel between the 1880s and the...
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Acting Jewish: Perception and Reality
Paul Herzberg 6.30pm, 8 October 2020 (Online event) What does ‘acting Jewish’ really mean? Is it a style of performance drawing on the alleged traits of global Jewry? Or is it perhaps about ancient perceptions? Paul Herzberg offers a view, drawing on his four decades in the entertainment…
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The Big Cover-Up: Modest Fashion
Adi Heyman ‘Modest Fashion’ blogger and founder of the ‘Jewish Fashion Council’, USA The Big Cover-Up: Modest Fashion 6.30pm, 4th March 2020 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...
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‘Coming Out’ as Jewish in Weimar Germany
Prof Kerry Wallach (Gettysburg College, USA) 6.30pm, 23 January 2020 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...
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Jewish on Demand: Representation and Difference in the Streaming Era
Prof Henry Bial (University of Kansas, USA) 6.30pm, 5 December 2019 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…
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Treyf Jews?: Jewish Gangsters in McMafia and Peaky Blinders
Prof Nathan Abrams (Bangor University, UK) 6.30pm, 4 April 2019 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…
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Moses Mendelssohn – The German-Jewish Icon of Modernity (1780s-2019)
Prof Richard I. Cohen (Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel) 6.30pm, 14 February 2019 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...
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Jewish Museums between Self-Assertion and Self-Defence
Cilly Kugelmann (Jewish Museum Berlin, Germany) 6.30pm, 24 January 2019 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...
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‘Coming back to History’ –The Jewish Image in Landscape Photographs of ‘Eretz-Israel’, 1898-1961
Dr Ruth Oren (University of Haifa, Israel) 6.30pm, 6 December 2018 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...
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A Jewish Look on World Politics: The Catalan Mappamundi (1375)
Prof Katrin Kogman-Appel (University of Münster, Germany) 6.30pm, 1 November 2018 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...
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In conversation: Philippe Sands and Katrin Himmler
Thursday, May 17, 2018 - 18:30 Prof. Philippe Sands, QC (University College London, UK) 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...
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Lifting a Taboo: The Story of a Holocaust victim which has never been told before
Martin Doerry (Der Spiegel, Germany) 6.30pm, 12 April 2018 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,...
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Trauma, Privilege and Adventure in the “Orient”: A Refugee Family Archive
Prof Atina Grossmann (The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art) 6.30pm, 8 March 2018 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…
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You’re doing what?” - My family’s response to my trying to save the house stolen by the Nazis
Thomas Harding 6.30pm, 1 March 2018 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...
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
LBI London is a research institute dedicated to the study of German-Jewish history and culture.
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