LBI London

Prof Yfaat Weiss
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel

German Historical Institute

6.30pm, 11th February 2016

The UN Partition Plan for Palestine known as UN Resolution 181 envisioned Jerusalem as a Corpus Separatum, an international city open and accessible to believers of the three monotheistic religions. This did not materialize. While the city was divided as a result of the 1948 War, Mount Scopus in its northern part acquired an exceptional status. Until 1967 it existed as an enclave amid Jordanian territory, divided into a Jordanian and an Israeli part under UN control. This lecture will shed light on the fate of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, a contested space encapsulated and frozen in the midst of national conflict and armed struggle.

Yfaat Weiss is Professor of Jewish History at the Hebrew University of  Jerusalem. She is the Head of the Franz Rosenzweig Minerva Research Center for German-Jewish Literature and Cultural History. Her latest monograph in the field of spatial history is A Confiscated Memory: Wadi Salib and Haifa’s Lost Heritage (2011)

Dr Thabet Abu Rass

German Historical Institute London

In this lecture the state policies toward tens of thousands of the indigenous inhabitants of the Negev region in Israel who live in ‘unrecognized villages’, will be highlighted. Militarizing space to secure land has always been one of the means tocontrol land. The Prawer Plan is the current attempt of displacing the Bedouins to finalize their land claims and urbanize them against their will. The landowners have tried all means of resistance including the legal and political ones, however, they didn’t succeed. Therefore, they returned to their tribal roots in a last, butincredibly effective attempt to challenge the imminent confiscation of the lands of their ancestors.

Abu Rass is a political geographer and an expert in land and planning. He teaches courses at Ben Gurion University. His research interests include minority-majority relations, local governments and land and planning. He has been writing extensively about the Bedouin community in the Negev and he is currently the Executive Director of the Abraham Fund Initiatives (Jerusalem). 

Prof Gunnar Lehmann
Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Israel

German Historical Institute London

The different concepts of the past are an integral part of Israeli politics today. Jewish politics in Israel often seek legitimation through a connection with the physicalremains of the past. As stones do not speak, their presence and their past meanings are explained within the present political discourse of the Israeli society. In some sense, every generation creates its own past. While the national religious and right wing secular sections of the Jewish society have a deep interest in connecting their identities with assumed past collective meanings, other sectors of the society express less interest in this discourse.The Arab sector feels that archaeology leads to a delegitimization of their interests. The secular Jewish sector on the other hand does not feel a need to refer to the past. They consider their Israeli identity as an established fact that does not require legitimation through the past.

Gunnar Lehmann is Professor of Archaeology working today in various projects in Israel and Turkey.

Prof Dan Diner (Hebrew University of Jerusalem)

Dr Daniel Wildmann (Acting Director Leo Baeck Institute London) and Prof Elizabeth Harvey (Chair German History Society) are delighted to invite you to a lecture by Prof Dan Diner (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) as part of the German History Society Annual Conference.

Rites of Reserve: The German-Israeli Encounter in Luxemburg 1952 

The lecture presents, using historical-anthropological 'thick description', the diplomatic scene in Luxemburg on 10 September 1952, at the point when the treaty on restitution was signed between Germany and Israel. It interprets this short scene as an originating act of German-Jewish rapprochement after 1945. At the same time, this public act crystallized a collective transformation of Jews after the Holocaust, involving the exorcising of everything that was German.

Dan Diner is Professor of Modern History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he is Principal Investigator of the ERC-Advanced Grant Project Judging Histories – Experience, Representation, and Judgment of World War II in an Age of Globalization. From 1999 to 2014 he served as well as the Director of the Simon Dubnow Institute for Jewish History and Culture at Leipzig University. He has published numerous books on the history of the twentieth century, the Middle East and German History, especially the history of National Socialism and the Holocaust, as well as Jewish History. Among his numerous publications are Beyond the Conceivable. Studies on Germany, Nazism and the Holocaust(University of California Press, 2000) and Cataclysms. A History of the Twentieth Century from Europe’s Edge (The University of Wisconsin Press, 2008 [1999]). Professor Diner also co-founded and co-edited from 1988-1998 the journal History & Memory: Studies in Representation of the Past. His most recent publication is Rituelle Distanz. Israels deutsche Frage (DVA, 2015).

Thursday, 3 September 2015, 6:00 – 7:00 pm, German Historical Institute, London

Prof. Jay Winter (Yale University, USA)
The Great War and Jewish Memory

The Great War shattered Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi’s celebrated distinction between history and memory in Jewish cultural life.  Jay Winter argues that Jewish history and Jewish memory collided between 1914 and 1918 in ways which transformed both and created a new category he terms ‘historical remembrance’.

The war unleashed both, centripetal forces, moving Jews to the core of their societies and centrifugal forces, dispersing huge populations of Jews in Eastern Europe and Russia, creating terrifying violence, the appearance of which was a precondition for the Holocaust 25 years later.

Jay Winter is the Charles J. Stille Professor of History at YaleUniversity’. His latest monograph René Cassin and the Rights of Man. From the Great War to the Universal Declaration was published in 2013. He is editor-in-chief of the three-volume Cambridge History of the First World War (2014) and a founder of the Historial de la grande guerre at Péronne, Somme, France.

Roz Currie
Jewish Military Museum, London

The First World War was a pivotal time of change forthe Jewish community in Britain and indeed throughout Europe and the Middle East. Roz Currie has curated the Jewish Military Museum and Jewish Museum London joint exhibition on this subject. This lecture will discuss the challenges behind telling this story, it will touch on newly uncovered narratives of those at war and also question what it meant to be a British Jew at the outbreak of war. 

Roz Currie earned an MA in Japanese and Chinese archaeology at School of Oriental and African Studies. After having completed an MA in museum studies at UCL, she started at the Jewish Military Museum in January 2012 as its first professional museum curator.

For more information about the Jewish Museum London please click here.

Prof David Nirenberg (University of Chicago)

Presented by the Leo Baeck Institute London, in cooperation with QMUL, School of History

In his recent book "Anti-Judaism: The History of a Way of Thinking," David Nirenberg argued that Anti-Judaism should not be thought of as some archaic or irrational closet in the vast edifices of Western thought.  Instead, he suggested, it was a powerful conceptual tool, one that played an important role in helping many people make sense of the complex world they lived in.  In this lecture he will explain how Anti-Judaism became so central, and describe some of the work it has done in shaping the ways in which past peoples interpreted the worlds they lived in.

David Nirenberg is Deborah R. and Edgar D. Jannotta Professor of Medieval History and Social Thought at the Universityof Chicago, and the director of the university’s Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society.  His research focuses on the ways in which Jewish, Christian, and Islamic societies have interacted with and thought about each other over the ages.  

His books on the subject include Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages, as well as Judaism and Christian Art.  His recent book Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition (2013) traces the multiple ways in which thinking about Jews and Judaism has shaped Christian, Islamic, and modern secular thought.  His Neighboring Faiths: Christianity, Islam, and Judaism Medieval and Modern, will appear in 2014.  

David Nirenberg is also a contributor to publications such as The Nation, The New Republic, and The London Review of Books. 

https://www.leobaeck.co.uk/events/special-events/kristallnacht-remembrance-lecture

Opening words by Sir Nicholas Montagu KCB

November 1938: The Story of Herschel Grynszpan

Raphael Gross's talk focuses on Herschel Grynszpan and the diverse reactions to his assassination of the German diplomat Ernst vom Rath. It tells the story of Grynszpan’s background and examine the various responses to and consequences of his action which was used by the Nazis as an excuse for the most significant pogrom against German Jews in history. 

The Night of Broken Glass: Looking back on the November Pogrom of 1938

Professor Peter Pulzer traces the evolution of the Nazi regime’s policies from initial uncertainties and hesitations through escalating discrimination and plunder to a determined decision to humiliate the remaining Jews on German territory, but also to isolate the rest of the German population from any identification with their Jewish neighbours. 

Postcards from Europe – A Musical Interlude

Marianne Olyver - violin

Michael Freyhan - piano 

Exploring the lost traditions of the music of Hans Gal, Peter Gellhorn, Alexander von Zemlinsky, Erwin Schulhoff and Robert Dauber, whose lives were profoundly affected by the rise of the Third Reich.

Professor Raphael Gross is former Director of the LBI London and also affiliated with the Fritz Bauer Institute Frankfurt and the Jewish Museum Frankfurt.

Professor Peter Pulzer (All Souls’ College, Oxford University, LBI London)

Sir Nicholas Montagu KCB 

Prof. Sander L Gilman Chairman, LBI London 

Distinguished Professor of the Liberal Arts and Sciences; Professor of Psychiatry Emory University

A lecture organized by the Leo Baeck Institute. 

Cosmopolitanism and the Jews

The newest buzzword for globalization is cosmopolitanism. As with many such reuses of older concepts, cosmopolitanism has a complex history, specifically in the German-speaking lands. It is this history and its relationship to the history of German Jewry from the Enlightenment to the Holocaust that will be examined – in a global and perhaps even cosmopolitan manner.

Wednesday, 2nd October 2013, 6.30 p.m. At the German Historical Institute 

Prof Richard Wolin (City University of New York) 

CCLS Lecture Theatre (Queen Mary, University of London, Lincoln’s Inn Fields Campus)

How can one explain the fact that Walter Benjamin’s youthful essay on political violence, “The Critique of Violence” (1921), has, among representatives of the post-political “academic left” (Derrida, Zizek, Agamben), acquired canonical status? What did Benjamin mean when, referring to the Old Testament (Numbers 16, 1-32), he praised the expiatory powers of “divine violence,” which, as he puts it, “strikes privileged Levites, strikes them without warning . . . and does not stop short of annihilation”? Lastly, how might one explain the uncanny fact that, some fifty years later, Benjamin’s political Messianism became a significant intellectual point of reference among left-wing terrorists, such as the leaders of Germany's Baader-Meinhof Group?

 
Richard Wolin is Distinguished Professor of History and Political Science at the GraduateCenter of the City University of New York. Among his books, which have been translated into ten languages, are: Heidegger’s Children: Hannah Arendt, Karl Löwith, Hans Jonas, and Herbert Marcuse, The Seduction of Unreason: the Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism and The Wind From the East: French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution and the Legacy of the 1960s which was recently named by the Financial Times as one of the ten best History Books of 2012. He frequently writes on intellectual and political topics for the New Republic, the Nation, and Dissent.