Germany extensively celebrated 1,700 years of Jewish history. This does not, however, indicate a sense of continuous existence, but rather a history with fractures and cracks. Some Jewish communities were expelled from Germany; others sought refuge there.
In this panel discussion, scholars from different countries and different generations will address the expulsion of Jews from Germany during the Nazi era and the development of a German-Jewish Diaspora that spans all five continents.
Did this involve gaining a new homeland or remaining in exile?
Past event
Where
W. M. Blumenthal Academy,
Klaus Mangold Auditorium
Fromet-und-Moses-Mendelssohn-Platz 1, 10969 Berlin
(Opposite the Museum)
Annemarie Fleck (top, 2nd from left) on her arrival in England, 5 May 1939; Jewish Museum Berlin, accession 2018/125/35, gift of Diane Shavelson
Annemarie Fleck (top, 2nd from left) on her arrival in England, 5 May 1939; Jewish Museum Berlin, accession 2018/125/35, gift of Diane Shavelson
Greeting
- Hetty Berg, Director of the Jewish Museum Berlin
- Juliane Seifert, State Secretary in the Federal Ministry of the Interior and Community
- Paul Nemitz, Board Member of the Friends and Sponsors of the Leo Baeck Institute
- Michael Brenner, International President of the Leo Baeck Institute
Panelists
Michael A. Meyer (Cincinnati), Miriam Rürup (Potsdam), Atina Grossmann (New York) and Shira Miron (Yale). Moderator: Shelly Kupferberg
- Michael A. Meyer was born in Berlin and emigrated to the USA as a child. He was a professor of Jewish History at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati and the International President of the Leo Baeck Institute, as well as the editor of the four-volume standard work German-Jewish History in Modern Times.
- Miriam Rürup is the Director of the Moses Mendelssohn Center for European-Jewish Studies and a professor at the University of Potsdam. She leads the academic working group of the Leo Baeck Institute in Germany and is the editor of Geschichte der deutsch-jüdischen Diaspora (History of German-Jewish Diaspora), a project of the Leo Baeck Institute.
- Atina Grossmann, daughter of German-Jewish émigrés, grew up in New York and is a professor of Modern European History and Gender Studies in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at New York’s Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. She is working on a study of Jewish refugees in the Soviet Union, Iran, and India.
- Shira Miron is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Yale University. She studied German at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Freie Universität Berlin and works as a literary translator from German into Hebrew. Her published works include translations of Joseph Roth's novellas and Gertrud Kolmar's poems.
In cooperation with the Leo Baeck Institute