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Leo Baeck Institute London Lecture Series 2014

Leo Baeck Institute London Lecture Series 2014

A lecture series organised by the Leo Baeck Institute London, the Jewish Museum and the Fritz Bauer Institut, Frankfurt/Main, in cooperation with the German Historical Institute London. 

You can download the leaflet here.   

This season’s topic The Jews and the Great War examines how the experience of World War I reshaped Jewish history and culture and challenged perceptions of Jewish identity in theUK,Palestine,Germany andEastern Europe.  

Roz Currie

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…

Glenda Abramson

In this lecture Glenda Abramson will describe life in the Jewish settlement in Palestine under the autocratic rule ofJemal Pasha. Once the wartook hold, Palestine was in a parlous condition, almost entirely cut off from the rest of the world, short of essential goods, medical supplies and funds to support those in the Jewish settlement who depended on international charity. The lack of supplies led to large-scale starvation and disease. How did the Jewish settlement in Palestine cope with these dramatic political, economic and cultural challenges? 

Micha Brumlik

The lecture explores the German patriotism of the eminentJewish philosophers Hermann Cohen and Franz Rosenzweig. While Cohen thought that his messianic ideas found their realization in the Kaiser’s German Reich, Rosenzweig was more sober and modern. He equally did not see any contradiction between his Jewishness and his Germanness, however, less naive than Cohen, he supported Friedrich Naumann’s idea of a German hegemony in Central Europe. Afterthe Holocaust, this seems almost incredible! However, were theirideas really that wrong and do we not owe justice to them? Was there a Jewish cause…

Jay Winter

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…

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