LBI London

Join Sheila Hayman, director and writer of Fanny: The Other Mendelssohn, in conversation with the Leo Baeck Institute London about the extraordinary life and music of Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel. In this interview, Sheila discusses the research behind the film, the recovery of Fanny’s work, and the wider questions the story raises about Jewish history, women’s creativity, family, and cultural memory....

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 t...

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 toda...

Christine Schmidt, Bea Lewkowicz, Natalia Aleksiun  The Wiener Holocaust Library, London 6 November 2025, 6:30PM - 08:00 PM The inaugural Eva Reichmann Lecture, held as part of the LBI 70th Anniversary Celebrations:  Eva Reichmann: Witness, Historian, Legacy This special event celebrates the legacy of Dr. Eva Reichmann, a pioneering historian whose groundbreaking work continues to shape our unders...

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 n...

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 n...

Lisa Pine Institute of Historical Research, School of Advanced Study, University of London Hitler and the history of the Nazis remain extremely popular topics and ones that never cease to attract people’s interest, even fascination. It is crucial to comprehend the nature of Mein Kampf, the mindset of its author, Adolf Hitler, and the ideology he espoused that brought untold tragedy to millions of...

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 restric...

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 antisemi...

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 activi...

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...

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 Fran...

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, Jona...

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 li...

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 r...

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 wa...

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/int...

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. Dische...

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 n...

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 Je...

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...

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 environme...

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 attentio...

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 Vict...

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 sp...