Leo Baeck Institute London

English Heritage has unveiled a new blue plaque at 49 Hallam Street in Marylebone, marking Stefan Zweig’s former London home. The plaque recognises the Austrian Jewish writer’s years in exile in London, where he lived from 1936 to 1939 after fleeing Nazi Austria.

The Leo Baeck Institute London will be well represented at the British Association for Jewish Studies (BIAJS) 2026 conference, which takes place 13 - 15 July at Birkbeck, University of London. The programme brings together papers on Jewish space, history, memory and identity.

On 7 July 1860, Gustav Mahler was born in Kalischt, Bohemia, into a Jewish family. He went on to become one of the greatest composers and conductors in the history of Western music, a figure whose nine completed symphonies pushed the Romantic tradition to its outer limits.

Yet Mahler spent much of his life navigating the deep tensions of German-Jewish identity. In 1897, he converted to Catholicism, in large part to secure the directorship of the Vienna Court Opera. It was a compromise that haunted him. Even after his conversion, antisemitic critics dismissed his music as rootless and un-German. His own late works, above all Das Lied von der Erde and the unfinished Tenth Symphony, carry a profound sense of longing and of not quite belonging.

Senate House Library has written about the arrival of the LBI London library collection in Bloomsbury, and it is worth a read. The collection, over 4,500 books, 30 metres of journals and 2,400 pamphlets documenting German-Jewish history and culture, is now open to researchers. No institutional affiliation required.

Read the full piece here: https://www.london.ac.uk/senate-house-library/news/leo-baeck-institute-london-library-collection-arrives-senate-house-library#where-is-the-collection-located-38548

At the end of June, the 2025-26 Leo Baeck Fellows gathered at the Leibniz Institute for Jewish History and Culture, the Simon Dubnow Institute in Leipzig, for their summer workshop.

Over two days, ten doctoral researchers presented their work to each other and to senior scholars, covering an extraordinary range of subjects: early Zionist thought, citizen responses to antisemitic violence in post-war Germany, the economic networks of Joseph Süss Oppenheimer, Ashkenazi Hebrew script in the thirteenth century, Yekkes in Israel after 1945, Salomon Maimon, third-generation Jewish poetry and film, Adorno’s reflections on antisemitism, and the pre-1948 idea of a Jewish state.

With the Wimbledon Championships underway, we look back at the remarkable legacy of British-Jewish tennis pioneer Angela Buxton (1934–2020), whose historic triumph 70 years ago this year remains a powerful story of excellence and solidarity.

Born in Liverpool to Jewish parents who fled the Russian pogroms, Buxton faced considerable antisemitic exclusion from prominent clubs during her rise in the tennis world. Undeterred, she became one of the top players in the world, reaching the Wimbledon Singles Final in 1956.

Congratulations to Jordan Katz, from LBI’s 2016/17 fellowship cohort, on the publication of his monograph Delivering Knowledge, which appeared in April 2026 with Stanford University Press. The book is based on her doctoral research on Jewish midwives in Early Modern Europe.

The study looks at the work of Jewish midwives and their place in early modern society. It brings together Jewish history, the history of medicine and gender history, and offers a clear account of an important but often overlooked subject.

Two former Leo Baeck Institute London fellows, Stefanie Fischer (2009/10 cohort) and Kim Wünschmann (2007/8 cohort), have been awarded Silver in the International Creative Media Award (ICMA) in the category of Concept and Innovation for their recent publication Oberbrechen: A German Village Confronts Its Nazi Past.

The book, published in 2024 by Oxford University Press, has been recognised for its original approach to presenting research on German-Jewish history, the Holocaust, and its aftermath. By combining rigorous historical scholarship with the format of a graphic history, Fischer and Wünschmann offer a compelling and accessible account of how one German community has engaged with its Nazi past.

From the courts of Austria to the grass of Wimbledon, the story of Liesl Herbst nee Westreich (1903-1990) is one of talent, resilience and survival, first recounted in a 2023 biography by her granddaughter. An Austrian-Jewish tennis champion ranked the country’s no.1 in 1930, Herbst competed in more than 70 tournaments across Europe before being forced to flee Nazi persecution with her husband and daughter.