LBI London

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...

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,...

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 a...

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 af...

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; campai...

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...

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 lect...

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. T...

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 ico...

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 physiog...

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 belon...

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 ne...

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...

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 fa...

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...

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 entertain...

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 Centr...

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 d...

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, fulfille...

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...

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 ho...

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...

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...

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 famil...

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, trigg...