Sunday, 5 June 2011
Maiersdorf Faculty Club, The Hebrew University Jerusalem, Mt. Scopus Campus, Jerusalem

Nazism severely shaped the conditions under which many Central-European Jewish intellectuals pursued research. These ruptures often left their imprint on their theories and teaching. For some, academic research became a possibility or even a necessity in order to process specific, often extreme individual experiences of persecution as well as contemporary violent events in mid-20th century Europe. As the history of intellectual emigration has shown, those who not only managed to escape and survive but were also able to establish themselves academically in foreign countries were often confronted with numerous hurdles in their career. Adapting to new scientific communities with different academic standards, scholars were often compelled to re-evaluate and sometimes to reformulate their own work. A central task of the workshop will be to trace the development of scholarly work from its origins in very specific contexts to the ways in which it transformed in the process of migration, historically contextualizing how research was conducted and knowledge transferred under (sometimes) troublesome circumstances.

Workshop Program

9:45 Opening Remarks

Reuven Amitai, Dean of the Faculty of Humanities, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Yfaat Weiss, Director of The Rosenzweig Minerva Research Center, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

10:00-11:30 From Weimar to America: Intellectual Migration of German-Jewish Thinkers to the United States Chair: Ashraf Noor, Jerusalem

Ruchama Johnston-Bloom, Chicago/Jerusalem
“The Omens of History:" German-Jewish Orientalists in America Respondent: Reuven Amitai, Jerusalem

Adi Armon, Jerusalem
How to Begin to Study Leo Strauss during the Age of the Cold War? Respondent: Paul Mendes-Flohr, Chicago/Jerusalem

11:30-12:00 Coffee Break

12¬:00-13:30 Analyzing Terror: Theories and Diagnoses of the Extreme Situation advanced by Émigré Scientists
Chair: Eran Rolnik, Tel Aviv

Sigal Gooldin, Jerusalem
Is the Holocaust Part of the Genealogy Anorexia? Reading Hilde Bruch’s Concept of the “Hunger Disease”

Kim Wünschmann, London/Jerusalem
The “Scientification” of the Nazi Camps: The Writings of Bruno Bettelheim, Curt W. Bondy, and Paul M. Neurath and their Reception in the New World

Respondent: José Brunner, Tel Aviv

13:30-15:00 Lunch

15:00-16:30 Writing History in the Face of Persecution Chair: Iris Idelson-Shein, Jerusalem

Irene Aue, Jerusalem
The Making of a “Classic” of German-Jewish Historiography – Selma Stern’s “Der preußische Staat und die Juden”

Laura Jockusch, Jerusalem
“Khurbn-forshers”: Jewish Survivor Historians and the Writing of Holocaust History

Respondent: Moshe Zimmermann, Jerusalem

Concluding Remarks: Yfaat Weiss, Jerusalem

Reception

Organized by Irene Aue, Ruchama Johnston-Bloom and Kim Wünschmann (Rosenzweig Minerva Research Center, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In Cooperation with the Faculty of Humanities of the Hebrew University