The Leo Baeck Institute London is pleased to announce that Susanne Korbel is the winner of the 2021 Leo Baeck Institute Year Book Essay Prize in German-Jewish Studies for her article Spaces of Gendered Jewish and Non-Jewish Encounters: Bed Lodgers, Domestic Workers, and Sex Workers in Vienna, 1900–1930, featured in the 2020 Leo Baeck Institute Year Book.
Her article presents findings on encounters between Jews and non-Jews in the context of daily life in Vienna between 1900 and 1930. In the early twentieth century, the Habsburg capital underwent tremendous population growth, which increased the opportunities among its inhabitants of interreligious and cultural interactions, but also confronted them with a housing shortage. Up to twenty per cent of the population had to share housing or even beds with their fellow citizens. Those who could afford more comfortable living conditions, such as private apartments, also shared them with non-family members. The middle and upper classes employed domestics who lived with the families they worked for and had rooms within the family apartments. Homes thus provided spaces in which Jewish and non-Jewish relations thrived. This article sheds light on the range of encounters that took place in homes, how Jewishness and gender were negotiated in such encounters, whether relations were formed as a consequence, and, if so, what they looked like. Based on a close examination of memoirs, novels, and court records, I argue that the range of Jewish and non-Jewish relations was much broader than historiography has hitherto suggested, due to the shared experiences triggered by the urban making of Vienna.
Dr Susanne Korbel is principal investigator of the FWF funded project “Entanglements of Jews and non-Jews in private spaces in Budapest and Vienna, 1900–1930” (FWF ESP120) and lecturer at the Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Graz. She specializes in cultural studies, gender studies, migration, and Jewish history. The project she is currently working on investigates encounters between Jews and non-Jews in housing sites in order to develop new, non-exclusive narratives based on everyday life aiming to overcome narratives of particularity. Her first book is entitled Auf die Tour! Jüdinnen und Juden in Singspielhalle, Kabarett und Varieté zwischen Habsburgermonarchie und Amerika um 1900 (Böhlau 2021). She has held fellowships in Jerusalem, New York, Southampton, and Tübingen, and taught as visiting faculty at the Andrássy University Budapest and the University of Haifa. She studied Cultural Studies, History and Cultural Anthropology in Graz, Jerusalem, Budapest, and New York and earned her doctoral degree from the University of Graz
