Special events

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 was unable to complete the novel or see it published, and it was long thought to have been lost. Recently, however, the manuscripts of the first two parts were discovered among papers held by Hermann’s grandson, George Rothschild. After…

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. Dischereit began to search for the family of the rescuer and found them in 2019. Fritz Kittel had not told his own family about his courageous act throughout his life.

The Leo Baeck Institute London is delighted to announce its support of the Pascal Theatre Company’s latest research and workshop programme. Over the next eighteen months, this project will be exploring and documenting, the often hidden history of Sephardi Jews who came to England during the seventeenth century and stayed to enrich our culture and communities. On the 20th, 27th January and 3rd February the company will be running free morning drama workshops at Bevis Marks synagogue, London, exploring three different aspects of Sephardi history and culture…

The workshop sought to analyse the role of private German-Jewish photography between 1933 and 1945. By using visual sources and focussing on the subjective emotional responses of German Jews to political developments during this period, it offered a completely new perspective on Jewish reactions to the Nazi Regime.

Private photographs in particular, frequently collected and arranged in family albums, are a prime medium for documenting a domestic perspective of how individuals situate themselves and their emotions in larger political frameworks and family dynamics. 

On…

A memorial event in honour of the Leo Baeck Institute’s esteemed, longstanding former director Dr Arnold Paucker OBE

Opening Words by Pauline Paucker

Lecture by Peter Pulzer (Oxford):

‘Arno Paucker, A Scholar Who Reached Out’

Panel: ‘Arno Paucker and German-Jewish History’

Peter Alter (Cologne)
Simone Erpel (Berlin)
Raphael Gross (Leipzig)
Chair: Daniel Wildmann…

‘If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere.’ Prime Minister Theresa May, November 2016

Dr Daniel Wildmann (Director, Leo Baeck Institute London and Senior Lecturer in History, Queen Mary University of London)

Spring Term 2016 at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel

Dr Wildmann is a Lady Davis Visiting Professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem

A lecture series organised by the Franz Rosenzweig Minerva Research Center for German-Jewish Literature and Cultural History, the Avraham Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry, the Richard Koebner Minerva Center for German History and the Leo Baeck Institute Jerusalem. 

The personal documentary accompanies film maker Arnon Goldfinger’s family during the process of sorting out the old apartment of their deceased grandmother in Tel Aviv. They discover old letters documenting the grandparents’ friendship to a German couple of high-ranked Nazis. Connecting personal and public history, “The Flat” highlights the importance of a continuous and collective reflection of the past. 

Following the screening there was a special Q&A session with filmmaker Arnon Goldfinger, chaired by Dr Daniel Wildmann, Leo Baeck Institute London/ Queen Mary, University…

Historians read the sixties as the age of student revolts, youth subcultures and generational conflict. But this is only half the story. For there were old people, too, and they responded in their own ways to protests and new values. In West Germany, a country deeply affected by the aftermath of war and Nazism, acrimonious generational conflict allegedly pitted rebellious young men and their Nazi fathers against each other. A closer look at elderly Germans will reveal a different picture. Professor von Hodenberg will be launching her new book ‘Television’s Moment: Sitcom Audiences and the…

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 

We are happy to announce the upcoming public lecture

'To Remember and never Forget': The Story of Holocaust Survivor Hannah Lewis

Chair: Prof Wayne Morrison (School of Law, QMUL)

This event is organised by the Human Rights Collegium, School of Law, Queen Mary University of London, in co-operation with the Leo Baeck Institute London and the Holocaust Educational Trust.

Thursday 4 December 2014, 6:30pm

21-23 February 2014  

As part of the international collaborative Project ESTHER (funded by the Culture Programme of the European Union) and in cooperation with the Leo Baeck Institute, the Royal College of Music is holding a three-day symposium and celebration, exploring the work of émigré musicians in Great Britain and other countries during and after the Second World War. 

We are pleased to announce the following event organised by Prof Sander Gilman (Chairman of the LBI London) and Dr Cathy Gelbin (Executive Board Member of the LBI London):

20 January 2014, 6.30-9.30 pm at Rich Mix Cinema and Arts Centre, London

This ‘town-meeting’ type event explores the complex stories of migration to London’s East End from the 1800s to the present. The event is co-organized by Cathy Gelbin (Universityof Manchester) and Sander Gilman (EmoryUniversity) as part of their AHRC-funded research project Cosmopolitanism and the Jews. 

On the anniversary of the November Pogroms please listen to our Kristallnacht Remembrance Lecture recording from 2013. Speakers are Professor Raphael Gross and Professor Peter Pulzer, with an introduction by Sir Nicholas Montagu KCB.

Opening words by Sir Nicholas Montagu KCB

A one-off special lecture organized by the Leo Baeck Institute. 

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.

Prof. Sander L Gilman; Former Chairman of the LBI London; Distinguished Professor of the Liberal Arts and Sciences; Professor…

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…

As the Olympics come to London in 2012, the Wiener Library’s temporary exhibition ‘The Nazi Games: Politics, the Media and the Body’ looks back to 1930s Berlin. Open from 14 June until 3 October 2012, the exhibition showcases fascinating items form the Wiener Library’s unique collection of material relating to the Berlin Games of 1936. One of the themes highlighted in the exhibition is the Nazi appropriation of images of sporting bodies as a tool of propaganda, most particularly in the film and photography work of Leni Riefenstahl. 

Prof Michael Brenner, member of the LBI Year Book Advisory Board, gave a lecture in the Jewish Studies Public Lecture Series. His mother Henny, born in 1924 in Dresden, spoke about her childhood in Weimar Germany, her adolescence under the Nazis and the subsequent period of Soviet domination. 

University College London, Institute of Jewish Studies: Public Lecture Series

Monday, 21 May 2012, 6.45pm in the Gustave Tuck lecture theatre

Please find more information here.  

March 9th marked the occasion of HRH Princess Anne’s visit to the LBI. 

It was a great honour to welcome the Princess to the Institute’s new premises as a part of the official opening ceremony for the ArtsTwo building of Queen Mary, University of London. 

The Princess was introduced to the work of the LBI by Prof Dr Peter Pulzer, Chairman of the LBI. 

Dana Smith, who is funded by the LBI's John A.S. Grenville PhD studentship, was excited to meet HRH: “Presenting HRH an outline of my research after being a part of the LBI since January was one of the…

To mark the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa, Dr Daniel Wildmann and Ben Barkow have pleasure in inviting you to a special lecture organized by the Leo Baeck Institute and the Wiener Library

Reszö Kasztner (1906-1957) was a Labour Zionist activist born in Cluj, Transsylvania. He believed that the best way to save Hungarian Jewry was to negotiate with German authorities and, in late June 1944, convinced Eichmann to release nearly 1700 Jews, many of whom were wealthy and prominent individuals and their families. After the war, Kasztner moved to Palestine and in 1954 brought a criminal libel case against Malkiel Grunwald who accused him of collaborating with the Nazis. 

Thursday, 8 June 2006, 7 pm at Wiener Library

Special Screening and Lecture -the evening of Germany's hosting of the World Cup-

Daniel Wildmann: Desired Bodies:Leni Riefenstahl, the Berlin Olympics 1936 and Aryan Masculinity

Fiftieth Anniversary Lecture

This event was co-sponsored by the Institute of Jewish Studies at University College London. 

Chair:  Prof Peter Pulzer 

Tutzing, 23-26 February 2004

Leo Baeck Institute Jerusalem 

Organised by Prof Christhard Hoffmann (University of Bergen, Norway) 

In his lecture, Jonathan Hess examined visions of large-scale Jewish economic and cultural domination around 1800, offering a profile of public perceptions of the Berlin Jewish elite in this period. In his lecture, Jonathan Hess examined visions of large-scale Jewish economic and cultural domination around 1800, offering a profile of public perceptions of the Berlin Jewish elite in this period.

His lecture focused on reactions to David Friedländer's notorious proposals of mass baptism in 1799, showing the connections between Friedländer's contemporaries' perception of the threat of…