9 June 2010
9:30 – Gathering
10:00-10:35 – Greetings:
Moshe Sluhovsky, Chair of the History Department (Hebrew University)
Ezra Mendelsohn (Hebrew University)
Adi Gordon (University of Cincinnati)

10:45-12:45 – Beyond the Border, Part I: The Transformations of Leo Strauss
Chair: Dan Diner (Hebrew University)

Jerry Muller (The Catholic University of America)
Leo Strauss: A Portrait of the Political Philosopher as a Young Zionist

Adi Armon (Hebrew University)
How to Begin to Study Leo Strauss in the Age of the Cold War

Moshe Halbertal (Hebrew University)
Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss, on Concealment and Transparency

12:45-14:00 – Lunch

14:15 – 16:00 – Historicism, Enlightenment and Myth
Chair: Michael K. Silber (Hebrew University)

Arie M. Dubnov (Stanford University)
What is “Counter-Enlightenment”?

Jeffrey Andrew Barash (University of Picardie)
Ernst Cassirer, Hans Blumenberg and the Politics of Myth

Martin Jay (University of California, Berkeley)
Historicism and the Event

16:30-18:00– Beyond the Border, Part II: Jewish Intellectuals and the European Catastrophes
Chair: Nitzan Lebovic (Lehigh University; Van Leer Jerusalem Institute)

Anson Rabinbach (Princeton University)
The Frankfurt School and "the Jewish Question" after 1945

Vivian Liska (University of Antwerp)
A Glorious Leeway. Walter Benjamin’s Farewell to Europe

10 June 2010
9:00-11:00 – Brothers and Strangers
Chair: Richard I. Cohen (Hebrew University)

Yfaat Weiss (Hebrew University)
Post-Soviet Jews in a Post-German Republic

Hanan Harif (Hebrew University)
Asiatic Brothers, European Strangers: Jewish and Japanese Intellectuals on Pan-Asianism

Pierre Birnbaum (Université Paris 1)
“Brothers” and “Strangers”: the American Example

11:20-13:20 – Catastrophe in Retrospect: Trial, Memory, and Reconciliation
Chair: Moshe Zimmermann (Hebrew University)

Christopher Browning (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) Holocaust History and Survivor Testimony: Challenges, Limitations, and Opportunities

Michael R. Marrus (University of Toronto)
Three Jewish Émigrés at Nuremberg: Robinson, Lauterpacht and Lemkin

Guy Miron (Schechter Institute of Jewish Studies & Leo Baeck Institute Jerusalem)
Bridging the Abyss: Jewish Historiography and Holocaust Historiography

13:20-14:30 – Lunch

14:30-16:30 – Intellectual Biographies, Political Lives
Chair: Atina Grossmann (Cooper Union)

Shulamit Volkov (Tel Aviv University)
Walther Rathenau's Dilemma: Modernity and the Human Soul

Adi Gordon (University of Cincinnati)
Hans Kohn’s Political Ideas: Why Yesterday’s Straw Man Matters Again

Ute Frevert (Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin)
Jewishness and/or Marxism: Intellectual Choices and Feelings of Belonging in the GDR

17:00-19:00 – Gershom Scholem in Turbulent Times
Chair: David Ohana (Ben Gurion University)

David Biale (University of California, Davis)
Gershom Scholem – Einst und Jetzt

Zohar Maor (Bar Ilan University)
Death or Birth: Scholem and Secularization

Marie-Luise Knott (independent author)
The Friendship between Hannah Arendt and Gershom Scholem As Reflected in their Correspondence

Admission is Free
Please confirm your participation until June 7, 2010
email: cultureandcatastrophe@gmail.com
Phone: +972-2-5881909

Organization:
Arie M. Dubnov, Adi Gordon, Udi E. Greenberg, Keren Sagi