LBI London

LBI London

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LBI London episodes

  • 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 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

    1 hr 10 min
  • 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 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

    1 hr 30 min
  • 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 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 2NJ
    Thursday, 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


    1 hr 26 min
  • 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 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


    1 hr 26 min
  • 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 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

    1 hr 27 min
  • 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 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

    1 hr 38 min
  • 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 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

    2 hr 40 min
  • 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 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).

    1 hr 41 min
  • 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 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.

    1 hr 25 min
  • 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 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’.

    1 hr 24 min

About LBI London

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LBI London is a research institute dedicated to the study of German-Jewish history and culture.