LBI London

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 online screening to discuss the vision and process of bringing Herzl’s story to the screen.Our heartfelt thanks to Sir Bernard Zissman for meeting us. We hope this interview provides some helpful background on the history and culture that shaped Theodor Herzl.The film is available to view free of charge for one week, from 16th–23rd April 2026 at: https://www.lbilondon.ac.uk/events/film-club/lbi-film-club-theodor-herzl-man-behind-israelFor more resources and events exploring the legacy of German-speaking Jewry, you can find full details on our website. Thank you for watching.

This online roundtable brought together scholars and practitioners to examine the Kindertransport through archival research, personal testimony, and reflective practice. Exploring sources ranged from international archives to refugees’ own words, the discussion considered how the Kindertransport has been remembered, interpreted, and mobilised in British culture, and why it continues to matter today. Speakers: Dr Amy Williams (Association of Jewish Refugees) Using international, national, and local archives to construct a transnational history of the KindertransportDr Monja Stahlberger (University of Reading) Listening to Kindertransport Refugees in Their Own Words: how ego documents of the early years in Britain give us unique insightsHoward Falksohn (Wiener Holocaust Library) Kindertransporte: An archivist’s personal perspective Chair:Dr Joseph Cronin (Leo Baeck Institute London)https://www.lbilondon.ac.uk/kindertransport-26This event was hosted by the Leo Baeck Institute London in collaboration with the British-German Association.19 March 2026, 7:00PM - 08:00 PM

Christine Schmidt, Bea Lewkowicz, Natalia Aleksiun The Wiener Holocaust Library, London6 November 2025, 6:30PM - 08:00 PMThe inaugural Eva Reichmann Lecture, held as part of the LBI 70th Anniversary Celebrations: Eva Reichmann: Witness, Historian, LegacyThis special event celebrates the legacy of Dr. Eva Reichmann, a pioneering historian whose groundbreaking work continues to shape our understanding of Nazi persecution and Holocaust historiography. Welcome & Introduction Dr. Joseph Cronin (Director, Leo Baeck Institute London) and Dr. Toby Simpson (Director, The Wiener Holocaust Library) will open the evening by reflecting on Eva Reichmann’s enduring connection to both institutions and the significance of the new lecture series. Roundtable Discussion An expert panel will explore Reichmann’s life, work, and impact:Christine Schmidt (Wiener Holocaust Library)Bea Lewkowicz (AJR Refugee Voices Testimony Archive)Natalia Aleksiun (University of Florida)Topics will include Reichmann’s efforts to collect eyewitness accounts, her role in shaping Holocaust scholarship, and the contemporary relevance of her work in understanding antisemitism and historical memory. Q&A Session (20–30 minutes) Followed by light refreshments. This event will be live-streamed and recorded. Attendance is free, but registration is required.This event is co-hosted by The Leo Baeck Institute London and The Wiener Holocaust Library and sponsored by the Hans and Berthold Finkelstein Foundation.Image: The Wiener Holocaust Library collectionshttps://www.lbilondon.ac.uk/reichmann

In the early twentieth century, German-Jewish thinkers converged upon Daoism as a means to criticise state power and the dominance of economic productivity in modern society. Figures like Moses Mendelssohn, Franz Rosenzweig, and Walter Benjamin explored how Daoist ideas could inspire alternative ways of organising social and economic life, thereby challenging stereotypes of ‘China’ as passive or non-productive. This talk examines how their engagement with Daoism offered a vision of religion’s role in everyday life that moved beyond racialised notions of activity and inactivity, and the mercantilist-salvational paradigm then dominant in Western societies.Julia Ng is Reader in Critical Theory and founding Director of the Centre for Philosophy and Critical Thought at Goldsmiths, University of London. A specialist in the work of Walter Benjamin, whose essay ‘Toward the Critique of Violence’ she recently translated for a critical edition she co-edited for Stanford University Press (2021), she is currently completing a book on Daoism and Capitalism with support from a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship. Does belonging always require exclusion? This lecture series explores this universal question through the lens of the German-Jewish experience, a community deeply shaped by its complex relationship to inclusion and exclusion. Spanning key moments in modern history, these talks examine German-Jewish thinkers’ responses to the dominant ‘Protestant ethic’, debates over nationalism in interwar Germany and Austria, the warped ideology of Adolf Hitler, and the long struggle of German Jews to reclaim citizenship after the Holocaust. Join us as we situate these experiences within today’s urgent debates about identity and belonging.Lecture recorded at Senate House, London on Thursday, November 27, 2025Images from the lecture, and other streaming links, are available on the Leo Baeck Institute London website: https://www.lbilondon.ac.uk/ng-25

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 großdeutsch idea, the notion that Austria should be part of a German nation-state, to create a democratic nationalism. Unlike their conservative and right-wing opponents, these republicans did not view democracy and Germany, socialism and nationalism, or Jew and German as mutually exclusive categories. As such, the triumph of Nazi ideas about nationalism was far from inevitable.Erin Hochman is Associate Professor of History at Southern Methodist University. She is the author of Imagining a Greater Germany: Republican Nationalism and the Idea of Anschluss (Cornell University Press, 2016). Her current book project examines how various political groups in the Weimar Republic used the concept of a German diaspora to support or challenge democracy, as well as the involvement of so-called Germans abroad in Germany’s political struggles.Does belonging always require exclusion? This lecture series explores this universal question through the lens of the German-Jewish experience, a community deeply shaped by its complex relationship to inclusion and exclusion. Spanning key moments in modern history, these talks examine German-Jewish thinkers’ responses to the dominant ‘Protestant ethic’, debates over nationalism in interwar Germany and Austria, the warped ideology of Adolf Hitler, and the long struggle of German Jews to reclaim citizenship after the Holocaust. Join us as we situate these experiences within today’s urgent debates about identity and belonging.Lecture recorded on Zoom on Thursday, October 9, 2025Images from the lecture, and other streaming links, are available on the Leo Baeck Institute London website: https://www.lbilondon.ac.uk/hochman-25

Lisa PineInstitute of Historical Research, School of Advanced Study, University of LondonHitler and the history of the Nazis remain extremely popular topics and ones that never cease to attract people’s interest, even fascination. It is crucial to comprehend the nature of Mein Kampf, the mindset of its author, Adolf Hitler, and the ideology he espoused that brought untold tragedy to millions of people – death, destruction, genocide and war. The book presents a dangerous set of ideas, regrettably ones that still have followers today, one hundred years after Mein Kampf was originally penned. This lecture focusses on some key themes of the text, as well as examining the work in its historical context.Lisa Pine is Fellow of the Institute of Historical Research, School of Advanced Study, University of London. Her main research interests are the history of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. She is the author or editor of nine books, the most recent of which is a co-authored book (with Kees Boterbloem), Soviet and Nazi Posters: Propaganda and Policies (Bloomsbury, 2025).This event is also the LBI Summer Lecture 2025Does belonging always require exclusion? This lecture series explores this universal question through the lens of the German-Jewish experience, a community deeply shaped by its complex relationship to inclusion and exclusion. Spanning key moments in modern history, these talks examine German-Jewish thinkers’ responses to the dominant ‘Protestant ethic’, debates over nationalism in interwar Germany and Austria, the warped ideology of Adolf Hitler, and the long struggle of German Jews to reclaim citizenship after the Holocaust. Join us as we situate these experiences within today’s urgent debates about identity and belonging.Lecture recorded at Senate House, University of London on Thursday, July 10, 2025Images from the lecture, and other streaming links, are available on the Leo Baeck Institute London website: https://www.lbilondon.ac.uk/pine-25

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 Jews – and which descendants – can enjoy that right. This talk tracks those developments, from the restrictive, often antisemitic decisions made in the 1950s, to attempts to uphold those regulations in the following decades, through to the 2021 reform of the German Nationality Act that finally redressed such exclusions.Nicholas Courtman is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in History and Languages at King’s College London, working on the Alfred Landecker-funded project ‘Citizenship after Hitler: Continuity and Change in German Citizenship Law’. He completed his PhD in German Studies at the University of Cambridge and previously worked at The Expert Council on Integration and Migration in Berlin, authoring a report on naturalisation practices for the German government. He has also served as an expert witness in two Bundestag hearings on reparative justice in citizenship law.Does belonging always require exclusion? This lecture series explores this universal question through the lens of the German-Jewish experience, a community deeply shaped by its complex relationship to inclusion and exclusion. Spanning key moments in modern history, these talks examine German-Jewish thinkers’ responses to the dominant ‘Protestant ethic’, debates over nationalism in interwar Germany and Austria, the warped ideology of Adolf Hitler, and the long struggle of German Jews to reclaim citizenship after the Holocaust. Join us as we situate these experiences within today’s urgent debates about identity and belonging.Lecture recorded at Senate House, University of London on Thursday, March 27, 2025Organised by the Leo Baeck Institute London in cooperation with the German Historical Institute London.Images from the lecture, and other streaming links, are available on the Leo Baeck Institute London website: https://www.lbilondon.ac.uk/courtman-25

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 German Elites and Institutions during the Nazi Takeover.Historians have traditionally argued that antisemitic violence in Nazi Germany rose gradually, from low levels during the first years of Hitler's rule to a high point in the Reich-wide pogrom of November 1938. Before the Holocaust, based on research in more than twenty German archives, demonstrates that this long-held assumption is wrong. During the months-long Nazi takeover of power, beginning a mere five weeks after Hitler became Chancellor, waves of antisemitic violence engulfed large parts of Germany. Before the Holocaust examines the multitude of these hitherto unrecognized antisemitic attacks in the late winter and spring of 1933, as well as the reaction of German elites and institutions to this violence. Individual protests against violent attacks were already hazardous in March and April 1933, but established German elites were still able to voice their concerns and raise objections. By doing so, they could have stopped a radicalization that eventually led to the Kristallnacht pogrom and the Holocaust. But the elites chose to remain silent and even became complicit, if only passively, in the outrages perpetrated against German and foreign Jews in Germany. This online talk thus revises standard assumptions about antisemitic violence and it throws a powerful and revealing light on the reaction of the German elites.Hermann Beck is Professor of History at the University of Miami. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles after studying History and Literature at German universities (Mannheim, Freiburg, and Berlin), the London School of Economics, and the Sorbonne. He has been a Fulbright Scholar and a member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. His publications include books on nineteenth-century Germany, The Origins of the Authoritarian Welfare State in Prussia, and the late Weimar and Nazi periods, The Fateful Alliance: German Conservatives and Nazis in 1933, and (co-editor), From Weimar to Hitler: Studies on the Dissolution of Weimar Democracy and the Establishment of the Third Reich, 1932-34 (with Larry Jones), as well as articles on conservatism, socialism, the Prussian bureaucracy, antisemitism, and the early Nazi period. These were published in British, German, and American journals and in edited collections.More information: https://www.lbilondon.ac.uk/beck-25This online talk was hosted in cooperation with the Wiener Holocaust Library and the British-German Association, and was recorded on Zoom on 20 February 2025#HermannBeck #universityofmiami #LeoBaeckInstituteLondon #GermanStudies #JewishStudies #GermanHistory #JewishHistory #LondonEvents #AcademicLondon #LondonLectures #UniversityOfLondon #Birkbeck

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 shape a more ethical present and future. In the case of Grzegorz Kwiatkowski, art is also mixed with activism and active efforts to preserve the memory of the victims and their cultural heritage. Kwiatkowski, whose grandfather was a prisoner of the Stutthof concentration camp, and whose wife’s Jewish family hid during the war in a forest near Rzeszów, has been leading an artistic and activist battle to fight antisemitism, denialism and violence for years. He does this through poetry, music (as a member of the psychedelic band Trupa Trupa), and as a guest lecturer at many universities. Grzegorz Kwiatkowski will talk about effective ways to fight violence, oblivion and denial, using the example of his work and his family history and the history of the city of Gdańsk. Grzegorz Kwiatkowski (b. 1984) is a Polish poet and musician. He is the author of several books of poetry revolving around the subjects of history, remembrance, and ethics. He is a member of PEN America and the European literature platform Versopolis. He is a member of the psychedelic rock band Trupa Trupa. Kwiatkowski co-hosts the workshop ‘Virus of Hate’ at the University of Oxford. Together with UCLA professor Vinay Lal, he created the series ‘Sangam and Agora: A Forum of Poets, Philosophers, Scholars, and Autodidacts’. Together with University of Oxford professor Paul Lodge, he launched the series ‘It Sings Therefore We Are: Philosophy and Music in Conversation’. He is taking part in ‘The Surviving Memory in Postwar El Salvador’ collaborative research initiative. This season’s lecture series Outsiders in German-Jewish History seeks to uncover the shared experiences of individuals and communities who found themselves on the margins of society. Transcending both time and geography, talks will offer different perspectives on the resilience and tenacity of those who have grappled with the challenges of being outsiders. How have they found identity and a sense of belonging in societies that have not understood or even accepted them? Organised by the Leo Baeck Institute London in cooperation with the German Historical Institute London. Recorded at Senate House, London on Thursday, November 28, 2024. Images from the lecture, and other streaming links, are available on the Leo Baeck Institute London website: https://www.lbilondon.ac.uk/kwiatkowski-24

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 pre-war London, as a long-time internee during World War II, as well as a schoolteacher in the Midlands and author and journalist in post-war Britain and West Germany. This lecture will demonstrate how an unusual German Jew was affected by the ‘age of extremes’, making his life story quite typical of the predicaments of the 20th century. Kay Schiller is Professor of Modern European History at the University of Durham. He has published articles and books on German cultural and sports history, including on the history of the Olympics, on football history, on modern German-Jewish history and on the history of the Federal Republic and the GDR. He is currently researching (with Udi Carmi) the influence of German sports models on sports in Palestine and Israel, with a special focus on the activities of the Zionist functionary Emmanuel Ernst Simon (1898–1988). This season’s lecture series Outsiders in German-Jewish History seeks to uncover the shared experiences of individuals and communities who found themselves on the margins of society. Transcending both time and geography, talks will offer different perspectives on the resilience and tenacity of those who have grappled with the challenges of being outsiders. How have they found identity and a sense of belonging in societies that have not understood or even accepted them? Organised by the Leo Baeck Institute London in cooperation with the German Historical Institute London.Lecture recorded at Senate House, University of London on Thursday, October 10, 2024 - 18:00 Images from the lecture, and other streaming links, are available on the Leo Baeck Institute London website: https://www.leobaeck.co.uk/schiller-24

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 contrast to well-known “self-help” theories put forward by Bruno Bettelheim and, especially, Viktor Frankl. This lecture traces the ways in which this theory of survival challenged these simplistic narratives, explains how their work informed the changing field of psychiatry after the war, and considers its relevance for the historiography of the Holocaust today. Dan Stone is Professor of Modern History and Director of the Holocaust Research Institute at Royal Holloway, University of London, where he has taught since 1999. He is the author of numerous articles and books, including, most recently, The Holocaust: An Unfinished History (Penguin, 2023) and Fate Unknown: Tracing the Missing after World War II and the Holocaust (OUP, 2023). He is co-editor, with Mark Roseman, of volume 1 of The Cambridge History of the Holocaust (forthcoming with CUP) and, with Dieter Steinert, of Holocaust Memory in Britain in the 1960s (forthcoming with Bloomsbury). He is currently writing a book on the Holocaust in Romania. Dan chaired the academic advisory board for the Imperial War Museum's revamped Holocaust Galleries, and sits on the UK's Oversight Committee for the Arolsen Archives and the UK government's Spoliation Advisory Group. Recorded Thursday, July 11, 2024 at the German Historical Institute London http://leobaeck.co.uk/events/summer-lecture/lbi-london-summer-lecture-psychologists-auschwitz-accounting-survival

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 Higher Institute who became the first female rabbi in the world in 1935. Prior to her ordination, Jonas answered the question about women’s access to the rabbinate in a halachic treatise that she submitted in 1930 as her final halachic project. Her biographer, Rabbi Prof Dr Elisa Klapheck, will share insights into a life that inspired a new kind of women’s participation in Jewish religious practice. This lecture explores the work of a determined woman who was passionate about Judaism and who was also beloved by the people whom she served in Nazi Germany and after her deportation to Theresienstadt camp in 1942. Regina Jonas was murdered in Auschwitz in 1944; her work still resonates today. Rabbi Prof Dr Elisa Klapheck is a Liberal rabbi in the Jewish community of Frankfurt am Main and a professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Paderborn. Her research engages with women and Judaism, early Jewish feminists like Margarete Susman, Regina Jonas, and Bertha Pappenheim, and religious practice in a political context. Event co-organised by the Wiener Holocaust Library Recorded Monday, July 1, 2024 - 18:00 https://www.leobaeck.co.uk/events/library-lost-books/regina-jonas-first-woman-rabbi

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, which is somewhat counter intuitive. Who are the Jews who live in contemporary Germany? How do they live out their Jewishness? What Jewish cultures did they bring with them, and what kind of Jewish culture is forming in Germany?  Dani Kranz is the incumbent DAAD Humboldt chair at El Colegio de México, Mexico City, and an applied anthropologist and director of Two Foxes Consulting, Germany and Israel. Her expertise covers migration, integration, ethnicity, law, state/stateliness, political life, organisations, memory cultures and politics as well as cultural heritage. This season’s lecture series Outsiders in German-Jewish History seeks to uncover the shared experiences of individuals and communities who found themselves on the margins of society. Transcending both time and geography, talks will offer different perspectives on the resilience and tenacity of those who have grappled with the challenges of being outsiders. How have they found identity and a sense of belonging in societies that have not understood or even accepted them? Organised by the Leo Baeck Institute London in cooperation with the German Historical Institute London and the British-German Association (BGA). Lecture recorded at Senate House, University of London on June 13, 2024 Images from the lecture, and other streaming links, are available on the Leo Baeck Institute London website: https://www.leobaeck.co.uk/kranz-24 #JewishLife #ContemporaryGermany#LectureSeries2024 #JewishCommunity#ProfDaniKranz #JewishCulture #JewishHeritage#Migration #Integration #CulturalAnthropology#DAADHumboldtChair #ElColegiodeMéxico #GermanyIsrael#LeoBaeckInstitute #HistoricalLecture

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 Heidelberg, lost his teaching license in 1938 since his wife Christiane was classified as a Mischling (mixed race) by the Nazi regime. He tried to battle his fate by offering diverse political capital to the Nazi political establishment and by counting on some sympathetic colleagues. Zimmer was able to flee Germany with his family in 1939. Baijayanti Roy is a postdoctoral researcher affiliated to the University of Frankfurt. Her monograph, The Making of a Gentleman Nazi: Albert Speer’s Politics of History in the Federal Republic of Germany was published in 2016. Another monograph, The Nazi Study of India and Indian Anti-Colonialism: Knowledge Providers and Propagandists in the ‘Third Reich’, will be published by Oxford University Press. She has published and spoken on different subjects including Nazi Germany, German Indology and the historical relationship between Germany and India. This season’s lecture series "Outsiders in German-Jewish History" seeks to uncover the shared experiences of individuals and communities who found themselves on the margins of society. Transcending both time and geography, talks will offer different perspectives on the resilience and tenacity of those who have grappled with the challenges of being outsiders. How have they found identity and a sense of belonging in societies that have not understood or even accepted them? Organised by the Leo Baeck Institute London in cooperation with the German Historical Institute London. Lecture recorded at Senate House, University of London on Thursday, May 2, 2024

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 the story of a large, diverse German-Jewish family in Berlin from March 1933 to November 1938. He was unable to complete the novel or see it published, and it was long thought to have been lost. Recently, however, the manuscripts of the first two parts were discovered among papers held by Hermann’s grandson, George Rothschild. After careful editing by Godela Weiss-Sussex, the text was finally published for the first time by Wallstein Verlag (Göttingen) in September 2023. In her talk Godela Weiss-Sussex, Professor of Modern German Literature at the Institute of Languages, Cultures and Societies (University of London), considers the story of the manuscript and its journey to publication, and introduces the novel’s content, characters and contexts. The talk gives a flavour of an extraordinary text that the author himself judged to be the ‘very best Georg Hermann’.This event is jointly organised by the Leo Baeck Institute London, and the Research Centre for German & Austrian Exile Studies at the Institute of Languages, Cultures and Societies, University of London.  Lecture recorded on Thursday, March 21, 2024 Images from the lecture, and other streaming links, are available on the Leo Baeck Institute London website: https://www.leobaeck.co.uk/weiss-sussex-2024

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 expressed therein do not necessarily reflect those of the Institute. https://www.leobaeck.co.uk/events/interviews/international-womens-day-2024-pauline-paucker

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 threatened with death in Germany under National Socialism. They were liberated by U.S. troops in 1945. Dischereit began to search for the family of the rescuer and found them in 2019. Fritz Kittel had not told his own family about his courageous act throughout his life. Esther Dischereit's literary response in 17 text pieces includes other found objects from the lives of her mother, sister, and Fritz Kittel, and they offer a dialogue with those who are now the daughters and sons or grandchildren. False information given at a registration office, illegal names and addresses ... What do we read when we read these documents? What do we see when we look at these photos?  Esther Dischereit lives in Berlin, writes prose, poems, essays, and radio works. She is considered one of the most important voices of Jewish literature in Germany in the second generation after the Shoah. She was honoured with the prestigious Erich Fried Prize for her work in 2009. She was a professor at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna from 2012 to 2017 and held a chair in contemporary poetics at NYU in 2019. Among her most recent publications and projects Hab keine Angst! Erzähl alles. Das Attentat von Halle und die Stimmen der Überlebenden (Ed., 2020); Sometimes a Single Leaf (2020) and Flowers for Otello On the Crimes that Came out of Jena (2022) – both translated by Iain Galbraith, as well as Wer war Fritz Kittel, Exhibition 2023: Berlin / Frankfurt am Main / Chemnitz / Nürnberg. Lecture recorded at Senate House, London Tuesday, February 6, 2024 - 18:00 Images from the lecture, and other streaming links, are available on the Leo Baeck Institute London website: https://www.leobaeck.co.uk/events/special-events/who-was-fritz-kittel-german-railway-worker-decides-1933-2022 This lecture is a collaboration between the Leo Baeck Institute London and the Goethe-Institut London. Poster photo credits: ©Abraham Pissarek, ©Katrin Hammer / Deutsche Bahn AG, ©Katrin Hammer / Deutsche Bahn AG 

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 bildungsroman ‘The Star Sapphire’, Miriam Katin in her Holocaust memoir, We Are on Our Own, and her own graphic novel, The Book of Sarah, transform biblical narratives and images to reflect their own, lived, experiences. Sarah Lightman is an artist, writer and Faculty at The Royal Drawing School, London. She attended the Slade School of Art for her BA and MFA, University of Glasgow for her PhD and was an Honorary Research Fellow at Birkbeck, University of London (2018-21). She edited the multi-award-winning Graphic Details: Jewish Women’s Confessional Comics in Essays and Interviews (McFarland, 2014), published her autobiographical graphic novel, The Book of Sarah (Myriad Editions and Penn State UP, 2019) and co-edited Jewish Women in Comics: Bodies and Borders (Syracuse UP, 2023). This season’s lecture series seeks to explore the connection of visual narratives in the context of beauty, ugliness and morality with representations of Jews and Jewishness in the Western world from the Middle Ages to the present day. We aim to examine the subject from different historical, social and artistic perspectives ranging from medieval mythology to Orientalism, Zionism, Feminism or modern aesthetics, and through the lens of a selection of diverse media including painting, photography and comics. Lecture recorded at Senate House, Malet St, London WC1E 7HUThursday, November 30, 2023 - 18:30 More information: https://www.leobaeck.co.uk/events/leo-baeck-institute-london-lecture-series-2023/dressing-eve-re-drawing-biblical-women #Comics #Comic #WomenInComics #WomenInArt #WomensArt #JewishArt #FemaleArtists #Artist #Illustrator#Judaism #JewishHistory #jewishculture #LondonEvent #LondonEvents #AuthorTalk #Author #OnlineLecture #LeoBaeckInstituteLondon #UniversityOfLondon #Bloomsbury #SenateHouse

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 camps. However, this marked the defeat of the hope that such strategies would secure acceptance for Jews in German and European society. It led to a unique vulnerability, as these three women – and many others like them – distanced themselves from their cultural roots, leaving them emotionally defenceless when disaster struck. This self-inflicted psychic violence presents challenges for their descendants, grappling with questions of identity and belonging in a world in which millions of people continue to be forcibly displaced. Simon May is Visiting Professor of Philosophy at King’s College London. His interests lie in ethics, philosophy of the emotions, questions of identity and belonging, and German 19th and 20th Century thought. His books include Nietzsche’s Ethics and His War on ‘Morality’ (1999), Love: A History (2011), Love: A New Understanding of an Ancient Emotion(2019) and The Power of Cute (2019), alongside his widely praised family memoir How To Be A Refugee (2021). May’s work has been translated into ten languages and regularly features in major newspapers worldwide.    This lecture was organised by the Leo Baeck Institute London and was held at the Keynes Library, Birkbeck's School of Arts, 43 Gordon Square, London WC1H 0PD. Images from the lecture, and podcast streaming links, are available on the Leo Baeck Institute London website at https://www.leobaeck.co.uk/biennial-lecture-2023

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 surface superficiality. This talk examines how this photobook creates an allegory of Jewish vulnerability by eliciting responses associated with the minor aesthetic category of ‘cuteness.’ In so doing, it broadens our understanding of how photobooks helped expand the visual lexicon and aesthetic strategies central to Jewish cultural and political regeneration. Daniel H. Magilow is Professor of German at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and Co-Editor-in-Chief of Holocaust and Genocide Studies. His research centers on photography and its intersections with Holocaust Studies, Weimar Germany, and postwar memory. He has authored and edited six books, including The Photography of Crisis: The Photo Essays of Weimar Germany and Holocaust Representations in History: An Introduction. Held as part of the Leo Baeck Institute London Lecture Series 2023 at Senate House, Malet St, London WC1E 7HU on Thursday, October 12, 2023 at 18:30. This season’s lecture series seeks to explore the connection of visual narratives in the context of beauty, ugliness and morality with representations of Jews and Jewishness in the Western world from the Middle Ages to the present day. We aim to examine the subject from different historical, social and artistic perspectives ranging from medieval mythology to Orientalism, Zionism, Feminism or modern aesthetics, and through the lens of a selection of diverse media including painting, photography and comics. #OldPhoto #OldPhotos #OldPhotograph #OldPhotographs #Identity#HistoricalResearch #JewishHistory #JewishCulture #Podcast #VisitingLecturer #LeoBaeckInstituteLondon #UniversityOfLondon #Bloomsbury #LondonEvent #LondonEvents #Lecture #GuestLecturer #SenateHouse #OnlineLecture #InPersonEvent #FreeAdmission #ZoomLecture #AuthorTalk #Author

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 historical journey of German Jewry towards emancipation. As they established themselves in their new environment, they faced the challenge of being at one and the same time German, Jewish, British and English, and the crisis of having to choose between allegiances in the dark days of the First World War. This lecture explores the diverse ways in which the artistic Messel family chose to express the different facets of their identity as it evolved through the generations. Drawing comparisons with other high-profile German-Jewish migrants to Britain during the same period, it examines the successes and failures of their strategies to assimilate into their host society. John Hilary is an honorary professor at the University of Nottingham and author of From Refugees to Royalty: The Remarkable Story of the Messel Family of Nymans (Peter Owen, 2021). An affiliate of the Jewish Country Houses project run out of the University of Oxford, he co-edited a special issue of the Journal of the History of Collections in 2022 on the theme of ‘Bildung beyond borders: German-Jewish collectors outside Germany, c.1870–1940’. Thursday, June 29, 2023 at 18:30 Held at the German Historical Institute London https://www.leobaeck.co.uk/events/special-events/german-jews-english-gentry-messel-family-and-cultural-expression-changing #EnglishCountryHomes #CountryHouses #BritishHistory #Aristocracy #Identity #HomesAndGardens #Photographs #OldPhotographs #HistoricBuildings #Architecture #Lecture #HistoricalResearch #Gardens #EnglishGardens #Art #Authors #Emancipation #FirstWorldWar #JewishHistory #JewishCulture #BritishCulture #Podcast #VisitingLecturer #LeoBaeckInstituteLondon #UniversityofOxford #NationalTrust #StatelyHome #UniversityOfNottingham

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 religious devotions, made Christians look at Jews with new curiosity and interest, and drew their attention to previously unnoticed aspects of Jewish life and looks. As images of Jews evolved from benign but outdated Hebrews to caricatured usurers and demonic sorcerers, Christian society developed new – and increasingly hostile – ideas about and policies toward Jews, whose effects have endured to this day. Sara Lipton is Professor of History at the State University of New York, Stony Brook and a Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America the Royal Historical Society (UK). She is currently a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. Her most recent book is Dark Mirror: The Medieval Origins of Anti-Jewish Iconography (2014). This season’s lecture series seeks to explore the connection of visual narratives in the context of beauty, ugliness and morality with representations of Jews and Jewishness in the Western world from the Middle Ages to the present day. We aim to examine the subject from different historical, social and artistic perspectives ranging from medieval mythology to Orientalism, Zionism, Feminism or modern aesthetics, and through the lens of a selection of diverse media including painting, photography and comics. Lecture recorded at the German Historical Institute, 17 Bloomsbury Square London WC1A 2NJThursday, June 8, 2023 More information: https://www.leobaeck.co.uk/events/leo-baeck-institute-london-lecture-series-2023/sara-lipton-marked-eyes-public-anti-jewish #MedievalArt #ChristianImages #Christianity #Islam #ReligiousImagery #VisualNarratives #Representation #BritishHistory #Stereotypes #MedievalStudies #ArtHistory  #Judaism #JewishHistory #JewishCulture #JewishImagery #Prejudice #ArtandSociety #GermanHistory #BritishHistory #CulturalRepresentation #ReligiousHistory #Lecture #LectureSeries #AcademicTalk #Art #Religion #ArtandSociety #GermanHistory  #CulturalRepresentation #LeoBaeckInstitute #LeoBaeckInstituteLondon

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 Shylock, the virtuous Jewess was an emblem of the privileged status accorded to both women and Jews in Victorian Protestant culture and demonstrates that Jews could function not simply as an ‘other’ within modern cultures, but also, simultaneously, an ideal self. Nadia Valman is Professor of Urban Literature at Queen Mary, University of London. She is the author of The Jewess in Nineteenth-Century British Literature (2007) and has co-edited several books on Jews and literary culture including Between the East End and East Africa: the ‘Jew’ in Edwardian Culture (2009), Nineteenth-Century Jewish Literature (2013) and British Jewish Women Writers (2014). She is currently Principal Investigator of an AHRC-funded research project, Making and Remaking the Jewish East End. Lecture recorded at the German Historical Institute, 17 Bloomsbury Square London WC1A 2NJ Thursday, May 4, 2023 - 18:30 More information: https://www.leobaeck.co.uk/events/leo-baeck-institute-london-lecture-series-2023/nadia-valman-virtuous-jewess #JewishWomen #Women #Victorians #Theology #Protestants #SarahBernhard #GeorgeEliot #Culture #Film #FilmStudies #Feminism #VisualNarratives #Judaism #JewishHistory #JewishCulture #JewishImagery #Prejudice #ArtandSociety #GermanHistory #BritishHistory #CulturalRepresentation #ReligiousHistory #Lecture #LectureSeries #AcademicTalk #Art #Religion #ArtandSociety #GermanHistory #GuestLecturer #LeoBaeckInstitute #LeoBaeckInstituteLondon

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 their separate and yet related gendered, sexualized and racialized portrayals. The talk explores how spectatorial pleasure can arise from the emerging gaps where the incoherence of these categories, presumed to be absolute in the biologized discourses of modernity, is playfully made visible and ridiculed. Cathy Gelbin is Professor of Film and German Studies at the University of Manchester. Her work on feature film, video testimony, literary texts and live art has focused on Holocaust representations and the dynamics of German-speaking Jewish culture. #Judaism #JewishHistory #JewishCulture #JewishImagery #GermanHistory #BritishHistory #History  #ReligiousHistory  #Prejudice #ArtandSociety #Art #Religion  #LeoBaeckInstitute #LeoBaeckInstituteLondon #Bloomsbury #London #Podcast #Lecture #LectureSeries #AcademicTalk #BlackAndWhiteFilm #BlackAndWhite #FilmHistory #Film #FilmStudies  #VisualNarrative #Representation #RepresentationMatters #CulturalRepresentation #Stereotypes #Weimar #Golem #AntiSemitism #UniversityOfManchester

Over 100 completely unknown drawings by Franz Kafka of fascinating figures, shifting from the realistic to the fantastic, the grotesque, the uncanny and the carnivalesque have been made accessible in Prof Andreas Kilcher’s highly acclaimed book Franz Kafka: The Drawings.  The drawings illuminate a previously unknown side of the quintessential modernist author. Three fascinating stories can be told about Kafka’s drawings: the story of their transmission, the story of Kafka as a draftsman, and the story of his drawing in relation to his writing. Hosted at the German Historical Institute London, 17 Bloomsbury Square, London WC1A 2NJ and online via Zoom 6.30pm, June 16th 2022

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 Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, “Zur Judenfrage”. Here, in reply to Bruno Bauer’s homonymous brochure, Marx would propose his first analysis of the value and limitations of bourgeois “juridical universality”. The lecture deals with the tension in Marx’s theory between a “secular” theory of the political in terms of radical democratic emancipation and a “messianic” reinterpretation of the function of the Chosen People. The lecture tries to assess the extent to which Marx’s dialectic of community and universality constituted a real alternative to the development of Modern Jewish Nationalism or simply represented its inverted image. Etienne Balibar was born in Avallon, France in 1942; he has taught at the Universities of Algiers, Paris, Leiden, Nanterre and is now Emeritus Professor of Moral and Political Philosophy at the University of Paris 10 Nanterre and Distinguished Professor of Humanities at the University of California, Irvine. He is also teaching at the Centro Franco-Argentino de Altos Estudios, Buenos-Aires, and the Center for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University, New York. His books include Reading Capital (with Louis Althusser, 1965), Race, Nation, Class. Ambiguous Identities (1991, with Immanuel Wallerstein), Masses, Classes, Ideas (1994), The Philosophy of Marx (1995), Spinoza and Politics (1998), Politics and the Other Scene (2002), We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship (2004). Forthcoming are Extreme Violence and the Problem of Civility (The Wellek Library Lectures, 1996), and Citoyen Sujet, Essais d’anthropologie philo­sophique (Presses Universitaires de France). Balibar is a member of Ligue des Droits de l’Homme (Paris), with a particular interest in the rights of migrants and asylum seekers. He is co-founder of Faculty for Israeli-Palestinian Peace and acting chair of Association Jan Hus France. Organised by the LBI London and the Jewish Museum Frankfurt/Main in cooperation with Queen Mary University. We would like to thank our sponsor Bank Sal. Oppenheim jr.&Cie. https://www.leobaeck.co.uk/events/leo-baeck-institute-london-lecture-series-2010/marx-and-jewish-questionhttps://www.leobaeck.co.uk/events/leo-baeck-institute-london-lecture-series-2010/marx-and-jewish-question

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 pop cultural representations. While some praised the accuracy with which series such as Shtisel (2013-2021) or Unorthodox (2020) presented ultraorthodox customs, others identified problematic anti-Semitic stereotypes in those depictions. This lecture examines how far the representations in either series serve as a distancing mirror of our own societies and looks at them in comparison to modes of classical serial storytelling in television as exemplified by series such as Dallas or Dynasty. Tobias Ebbrecht-Hartmann is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Communication and Journalism and the European Forum at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He has published on visual history and memory of the Holocaust and on German and Israeli film history. He is a consortium member in the Horizon 2020 research and innovation action Visual History of the Holocaust: Rethinking Curation in the Digital Age (2019-2022).

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 after Auschwitz is barbaric' one might consider writing humour in the German language after Auschwitz a contradiction in terms. Yet, this was the gap into which the Israeli Author Ephraim Kishon, a Holocaust survivor from Hungary, stepped. The most successful humourist of the Federal Republic, his humour was rooted in the everyday life of Israeli Jews, his writing tradition belonged to Central-Europe, his Hebrew-German translator was a well known Austrian author and his German audience was the generation of the perpetrators and the post-war generation. The lecture will examine explanations for Kishon's success in Germany. Moshe Zimmermann is Professor emeritus for German History. Formerly Director of the Richard-Koebner-Center for German History, Hebrew University, Jerusalem (1986-2012), he held many Visiting Professorships around the world and has won numerous academic prizes for his work. He is the author of several books and involved with curriculum planning at the Ministry of Education.

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 Jewish topics and characters on TV. This talk covers so-called anti-fascist films about the Nazi era; campaign films against the West, e.g. courtroom dramas and crime movies; the aspect of ‘Jewish heritage’; Yiddish music; and Jewish contributions to entertainment shows. Dr des Lisa Schoß is a scholar of film and literature. Her monograph Von verschiedenen Standpunkten. Die Darstellung jüdischer Erfahrungen im Film der DDR (From Differing Perspectives. The Representation of the Jewish Experience in GDR Film) is forthcoming. She is associated with the Selma Stern Centre for Jewish Studies Berlin-Brandenburg and a member of the DFG network ‘German-Jewish Film History of the FRG’.

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 new music industry created a new global culture. Jews were prominently involved in that process on all planes, from the creation of the Shellac record and the Gramophone by Emil Berliner, to the pioneers of the music industry and Tin Pan Alley. They were composers of musicals and popular songs and popularized ‘Jewish culture’ through cantorial music, Yiddish theatre or the invention of the iconic ‘Jewish humour’. All this was often the product of disturbing and painful experiences of migration, uprooting and newly ‘invented identities’. Hanno Loewy, PhD, is a scholar of literature and film, an exhibition curator, and, since 2004, the Director of the Jewish Museum Hohenems, Austria. He is the author and editor of several books on film theory, Holocaust, Jewish history and popular culture.

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 significantly impacted from the 1930s onwards by the artistic influx of the so-called ‘Hitler émigrés’. This lecture examines the conception of Heimat in relation to the lives and work of German-Jewish artists from this cohort, among them Frank Auerbach and Eva Frankfurther, as they navigated their new host culture, touching on notions of national cultural heritage and belonging. Sarah MacDougall is Director of Ben Uri Gallery and Museum, where she has been a curator since 2002 and Head of Collections since 2012. Her research focuses on Jewish and/or immigrant artists in Britain in the 20th century with exhibitions including Forced Journeys: Artists in Exile in Britain (2009–10) and Finchley Strasse (German Embassy, London, 2018). She is a member of the Research Centre for German and Austrian Exile Studies at the University of London.

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 role in the ongoing debate on the various forms of migrant belonging in contemporary German culture. This lecture seeks to grasp the poetics of (non) belonging. Natasha Gordinsky will explore how different artists represent and de-stabilize performatively the meaning of Heimat, and reflect on this highly charged concept, both in German and Soviet contexts, in a dialogue with Kiev born German writer Katja Petrowskaja. Dr Natasha Gordinsky is Senior Lecturer at the Department of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the University of Haifa and currently a visiting scholar at the University of Potsdam. She is an author of two books. Dr Katja Petrowskaja holds a PhD in Literary Studies from the Russian State University in Moscow and works in Berlin as an author and free-lance journalist for press and radio. Her first book Maybe Esther (2014) was translated into 20 languages and has won several prestigious literary prizes.

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 the endeavour to situate Jewish family members within generic Heimat scenes. In both cases, Heimat iconography alluded to an alternative notion of German identity – and of belonging in the German landscape – which allowed and encouraged the integration of Jews within it. Consequently, in Jewish family albums, Heimat imagery provided an imagined landscape that sheltered Jews from the menace of Nazism. Ofer Ashkenazi is an Associate Professor of History and the Director of the Koebner- Minerva Center for Germany History at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem. He is the author of three monographs on German film (most recently, Anti-Heimat Cinema: The Jewish Invention of the German Landscape, 2020). His current research project considers Jewish photography under Nazism.

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. Aesthetically, Lerski sought to communicate timeless values through the manipulation of light and the physiognomy of the human face in extreme close-ups. His photo project ‘Jewish Heads’ started his search for a distinct Jewish identity. While advocating a Jewish homeland as a Zionist filmmaker, Lerski remained loyal to his artistic vision. This dichotomy between identifying Jewishness in the Diaspora and a national Jewish identity tied to the land of Israel, between biology and environment, eternal art and propaganda, makes Lerski’s work rich and still contemporary. Prof Horak is the former Director of the UCLA Film & Television Archive, the Munich Filmmuseum and Curator at the George Eastman Museum. He teaches at UCLA and is the multi-award-winning author of numerous books on film historical subjects.

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 education, the domesticated ‘wilderness’ of the mountains provided ‘innocence’ of togetherness and belonging beyond confines of class, religion and ethnicity. Jewish climbers, environmentalists and pioneers of tourism were among the first to organize Alpine clubs, while others reinvented folklore dressing. All of them lost faith in the Alpine pastorale after 1933. Memories of innocent moments enshrined in memorabilia and tales live on. Some of this has its afterlife in the Alps, even today. Hanno Loewy, PhD, is a scholar of literature and film, an exhibition curator, and, since 2004, the Director of the Jewish Museum Hohenems, Austria. He is the author and editor of several books on film theory, Holocaust, Jewish history and popular culture.

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 foundation of the Israeli state in 1948 oscillated between their roots and identification with the new Zionist project. This lecture explores how immigrants expressed social, cultural and political belonging through clothing and, focusing on gender and visual materials, offers fresh perspectives on how clothing became fashion, or ‘anti-fashion’, and to what extent a consensual mode of dress emerged. It also explores how clothing habits of Arab people and changing Ottoman and British occupying authorities influenced ‘Jewish’ fashion.   Svenja Bethke is a Lecturer in Modern European History and the former Deputy Director of the Stanley Burton Centre for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Leicester. Her research interests include the Holocaust, legal history, the history of modern Palestine/Israel, visual culture and fashion history. She is currently a visiting Marie Curie Fellow at the Abraham Harman Institute for Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University Jerusalem for her project on ‘Clothing, Fashion and Nation Building in Eretz Israel’.

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 industry. Paul Herzberg is an actor and writer. His most recent appearances as an actor were as John Vorster in Antony Sher’s ID at the Almeida; Shylock in The Merchant of Venice at The Arcola, at the RSC as Vincentio in The Taming of The Shrew; in 2017 Shimon Peres in the award-winning play, Oslo. Recent television includes Daniel Borgoraz in the award-winning serial The Honourable Woman. His screenplay Almost Heaven won the Nashville International Best Feature Award, and his stage play, The Dead Wait, was shortlisted for The Verity Bargate Award, nominated in three categories for the MEN theatre awards, winning best actor. His commissioned screenplay Anna’s Story was selected for the 2018 Brit List.  

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 on social media. Fashion stylist turned blogger, Adi Heyman’s inspiration behind launching a Jewish fashion and lifestyle blog in 2010 stemmed from her personal and professional experience as an Orthodox Jew working in the fashion industry. In her talk, Heyman explores the possibility of being an ‘Orthodox Fashion Influencer’, and reflects on the lack of authentic content highlighting modest fashion and the underrepresentation of women from minority cultures. As one of the leading religion focused Jewish influencers, she promotes conservative silhouettes with a contemporary twist that resonates with the religiously observant consumer. Her work interprets Western identities alongside religious belief in a way that enables women to feel empowered by personal fashion and lifestyle choices. In 2019, Heyman founded the Jewish Fashion Council (JFC) to build a global community of Jewish fashion professionals and to provide funding and support for the Jewish student life at the Fashion Institute of Technology and the Parson’s School of Design.

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 still occasions when it was beneficial to be openly Jewish. This lecture explores the tensions that came with being visible as a Jew – an identity play that often involved appearing simultaneously non-Jewish and Jewish. Drawing on a wide range of images and films, this presentation explores controversial aspects of German Jewish visibility and invisibility, as well as the complex reasons why Jews chose to appear distinctly ‘Jewish’. Kerry Wallach is Associate Professor and Chair of German Studies and an Affiliate of the Judaic Studies Program at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania. She is the author of Passing Illusions: Jewish Visibility in Weimar Germany (2017) and a number of articles on German-Jewish literature, history, film, and visual and consumer culture. She serves as co-editor for the German Jewish Cultures book series published by Indiana University Press and sponsored by the Leo Baeck Institute London.

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 Jews and the rest of society. As Netflix and other streaming services have made more specialized entertainment commercially viable, new ways of acting Jewish on screen have emerged that highlight the quirkier and more contested aspects of Jewish identity. Henry Bial is Professor and Chair of the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University of Kansas, where he has also served as Director of Jewish Studies, Director of the School of the Arts, and Chair of the Department of American Studies. He is the author of Acting Jewish: Negotiating Ethnicity on the American Stage and Screen (2005) and Playing God: The Bible on the Broadway Stage (2015).

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 Professor in Film at Bangor University of Wales where he directs the Film Studies programme and the Centre for Film, Television and Screen Studies. He is the author of Stanley Kubrick: New York Jewish Intellectual (2018) and Eyes Wide Shut: Stanley Kubrick and the Making of His Final Film (2019) and co-founding editor of Jewish Film and New Media: An International Journal.

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 modernity by being represented in a myriad of ways and techniques. Richard I. Cohen is the academic director of the Israel Center of Research Excellence (ICore) for the Study of Cultures of Place in the Modern Jewish World. Formerly the Paulette and Claude Kelman Chair in French Jewry Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, he has published widely on the history of Jews in western and central Europe and on the inter-relationship between art and society in the modern period. Among his publications: The Burden of Conscience. French-Jewish Leadership during the Holocaust; Jewish Icons. Art and Society in Modern Europe; co-curator and co-editor of From Court Jews to the Rothshilds: Art, Patronage, and Power, 1600-1800, and Le Juif Errant: Un témoin de temps. He recently edited and introduced Place in Modern Jewish Culture and Society.

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 reservations. The discovery of a visual culture in Judaism by the Haskala, the Jewish Enlightenment, fulfilled a double function: it was intended to strengthen a new Jewish self-confidence internally and at the same time to ward off the anti-Semitic prejudice that Jews were incapable of artistic expression. This process will be illustrated by the example of the emergence and development of Jewish museums in Europe. Cilly Kugelmann was the Program Director and Vice Director of the Jewish Museum Berlin from September 2002 until March 2017 and she is currently chief curator on the museum's new permanent exhibition. She had worked for the museum since May 2000, first as head of the Education departments. Previously, Kugelmann directed the education program, ran public relations, and curated historical exhibitions at the Jewish Museum in Frankfurt am Main.

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 landscape' of Israel as it was created in the Zionist photographic narrative. Landscape photography, produced and consumed within the National Zionist Institutions, created a utopian image of the Jewish environment by developing a coherent iconography rooted in the hegemonic ideology of cultivating and 'building' a country for the Jewish nation.   Ruth Oren's academic and artistic work ranges from photography to visual communication. She has been a lecturer at the University of Haifa and other academic colleges and has published widely on the history of Israeli photography and Zionist imagery. Dr Oren has curated numerous exhibitions on photography, such as 'Local memory - Photography in Haifa 1912-1949' (Haifa, 1998) and 'Zoltan Kluger, Chief Photographer 1933-1958' (Tel Aviv, 2008).

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 Cresques, a Jewish scribe, illuminator, and cartographer in the City of Majorca. The talk explores how Elisha, from his delicate position as a Sefardi intellectual in the service of the Court coped with his patron’s agendas while, at the same time, voiced his own views of the politics of his time.    Katrin Kogman-Appel holds an Alexander von Humboldt Professorship (2015–2020), which she assumed in Jewish Studies at the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität in Münster. She has published work on medieval Jewish art and is particularly interested in Hebrew manuscript illumination and its cultural and social contexts. Publications include A Mahzor from Worms (2012). She recently completed a study on Elisha Cresques ben Abraham, a fourteenth-century Jewish scribe, illuminator, and map maker in Majorca.   

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 interwoven. Drawing from his prize-winning book East West Street – part historical detective story, part family history, part legal thriller – he connect his work on ‘crimes against humanity’ and ‘genocide’, the events that overwhelmed his family during the Second World War, and an untold story at the heart of the Nuremberg Trial that pits lawyers Rafael Lemkin and Hersch Lauterpacht against Hans Frank, defendant number 7 and Adolf Hitler’s former lawyer. Philippe Sands QC is Professor of Law at University College London and a barrister and arbitrator at Matrix Chambers. He is the author of several academic books on international law, and contributes to the New York Review of Books, Vanity Fair, the Financial Times and The Guardian. His multiple prize winning latest book East West Street: On the Origins of Crimes Against Humanity and Genocide is accompanied by a BBC Storyville film, My Nazi Legacy: What Our Fathers Did   Katrin Himmler Author Writing about the Himmler Family – Challenges and Chances Katrin Himmler’s short lecture and subsequent conversation with Philippe Sands examines the difficulties of combining scientific interests with personal concerns when writing about her own Nazi family, while also looking at the advantages of such a challenging task. In creating a connection between official history and familial narratives about the past – two entities which to this day have remained largely disconnected – her undertaking aims to lead to a deeper understanding of social, historical and familial backgrounds, in the hope that a public discussion of this specific German family may encourage others to see their own families in a new context. Katrin Himmler is a German author and political scientist. Her great-uncle was Heinrich Himmler, head of Hitler’s SS. She has confronted her family legacy with the book The Himmler Brothers.A German Family History (2007/orig. 2005). She has also edited, together with the historian Dr Michael Wildt, Letters of a Mass Murderer. The Private Heinrich Himmler (2016/orig. 2014).

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, killed in Auschwitz in 1944. Fifty years of silence had followed but now, for the first time, the family was able to talk about Lilli once again. But should the letters be published? Lilli’s grandson Martin Doerry undertook the tasks of both convincing his family that they should and conducting the necessary research, thus finding himself in the dual role of family member and professional historian simultaneously. Martin Doerry is an editor of Der Spiegel in Hamburg, Germany. From 1998 until 2014 he was deputy editor-in-chief of the German news magazine. He studied History and German Literature in Tübingen and Zürich and received his PhD in 1986 with a thesis on the political mentality of the generation of Emperor Wilhelm II. In 2002, he published My Wounded Heart. The Life of Lilli Jahn, 1900-1944, the story of his Jewish grandmother who was killed in Auschwitz. The book was translated into 19 languages.

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 refuge and romance in the ‘Orient’ of Iran and India after 1933. Drawing on an extensive collection of family correspondence and memorabilia from Iran and India (1935-1947), Grossmann probes her own parents’ understanding of their unstable position as well as the perils and pleasures of writing a ‘hybrid’ border-crossing family story folded into a larger historical drama of war, Holocaust, and vulnerable Empires. Atina Grossmann is Professor of History at the Cooper Union in New York City. Publications include Jews, Germans, and Allies: Close Encounters in Occupied Germany (2007), and Wege in der Fremde: Deutsch-jüdische Begegnungsgeschichte zwischen New York, Berlin und Teheran (2012). Her current research focuses on ‘Remapping Survival: Jewish Refugees and Lost Memories of Displacement, Trauma, and Rescue in the Soviet Union, Iran, and India’, as well as the entanglements of family memoir and historical scholarship.

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 that he wanted to work with the locals to save the house they reacted with intense emotion, triggering a debate about memories, the value of history and the possibility of reconciliation.   Thomas Harding is an international bestselling author and journalist who has written for the Financial Times, Sunday Times, Washington Post, Guardian and Der Spiegel, among other publications. His books include Hanns And Rudolf, Kadian Journal, The House By The Lake and Blood On The Page. Thomas Harding is president of www.alexanderhaus.org, an education and reconciliation charity near Berlin. On 24 June 2016, the day of Brexit, Thomas applied for the restoration of his German citizenship.    

Prof Lisa Appignanesi (King's College, London) Losing the Dead – Before and After 6.30pm, 7th December 2017   Lisa Appignanesi teases out some of the hurdles she encountered researching her critically acclaimed family memoir, Losing the Dead. These extended post publication: memoir writing elicits the kinds of responses historical texts rarely do. Please note: A short 15 minute film called: Ex Memoria, directed by Josh Appignanesi and starring Sarah Kestleman, will also be shown.   Lisa Appignanesi OBE is a writer and novelist. She is a Visiting Professor at King’s College, London, Chair of the Royal Society of Literature and Chair of this year’s Man Booker International Prize. Amongst her books are Mad, Bad and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors and The Memory Man.   Ex Memoria (2006) A film about memory, loss and survival; Eva Lipschitz is a survivor, but she is now locked away in the twilight world of Alzheimer’s disease. The film shows the world from Eva’s point of view, at her eye level, and how a chance encounter with a caring young nurse breaks through the barriers. Ex Memoria is directed by Josh Appignanesi and starring Sarah Kestleman.