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Déjà-vu? A New Search for Old Answers

Online Lecture and Discussion with Ofer Waldman and Liliane Weissberg (video recording available, in German)

In the fifth and final event in the series Déjà vu? A New Search for Old Answers, Ofer Waldman talks to American literary scholar Liliane Weissberg about Moses Mendelssohn, Hannah Arendt, and the question of Jewish assimilation. For Moses Mendelssohn, at least a certain degree of Jewish assimilation into mainstream society offered hope for political emancipation and social acceptance.

For Hannah Arendt, 150 years later, this hope had not been fulfilled and Jewish assimilation had failed: the philosopher questioned the assimilation movement itself and insisted on the independence of the Jewish experience as that of conscious outsiders (conscious pariahs). How can Hannah Arendt's judgments be applied to contemporary society?  

recording available

Where

online

Where, when, what?

The Digital Lecture Series examines the thinking of Jewish intellectuals of the 19th and early 20th centuries and asks what answers these authors, now forgotten, can provide to the current challenges facing Jewish existence in Germany.

We have invited five intellectuals from the fields of science and literature to address these questions: Which historical texts do they return to in order to find answers to pressing questions of the present? And how do they read the texts they have chosen?

Liliane Weissberg 

Liliane Weissberg is Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor in Arts and Sciences and Professor of German and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. She is also a Mercator Fellow at the Interdisciplinary Center for Enlightenment Studies at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg. She researches and teaches German, American, and French literature in the fields of cultural studies and literary theory.

Her numerous publications include a critical edition of Hannah Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen: Lebensgeschichte einer deutschen Jüdin aus der Romantik (2021), the anthology Affinität wider Willen? Hannah Arendt, Theodor W. Adorno und die Frankfurter Schule (2011), and Psychoanalysis, Fatherhood, and the Modern Family (2021). She curated the exhibition Jews. Money. An Idea (2013) at the Jewish Museum Frankfurt and the exhibition What is Enlightenment? Questions for the Eighteenth Century (2024-25) at the German Historical Museum Berlin.

Liliane Weissberg; photo:  Annette Hornischer 

The picture shows a woman from head to hips looking directly into the camera. She is wearing black clothing. In the background, there is a wall with bookshelves filled with books.

Liliane Weissberg; photo:  Annette Hornischer 

Ofer Waldman

Since summer 2025 Ofer Waldman is head of the Heinrich Böll Foundation’s office in Tel Aviv. Born in Jerusalem, he moved to Berlin in 1999 as a member of Daniel Barenboim’s West-Eastern Divan Orchestra and  played among others in the German Symphony Orchestra Berlin, the Nuremberg Philharmonic Orchestra and the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra. Waldman received his doctorate from the Free University of Berlin (German Studies) and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Jewish History). He is a freelance author and journalist. In 2021, he and Noam Brusilovsky won the ARD German Radio Play Award for the radio play Adolf Eichmann: Ein Hörprozess (roughly: Adolf Eichmann: An Audio Trial) (RBB/DLF). His literary debut, Singularkollektiv. Erzählungen (Singular Collective: Stories), was published by Wallstein Verlag in 2023, and in 2024 Suhrkamp published his correspondence with Sasha Marianna Salzmann about the world after 7 October under the title Gleichzeit (roughly: Sametime). His new book Verkämpftes Land. Beobachtungen (roughly: A country torn apart. Observations) was just published with Wallstein.

Ofer Waldman; photo: Bernd Brundert

A man with dark hair looks friendly into the camera.

Ofer Waldman; photo: Bernd Brundert

Video recording from 11 November 2025; Jewish Museum Berlin 2025

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Digital Lecture Series
Déjà-vu? A New Search for Old Answers

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We would like to thank the Berthold Leibinger Stiftung for supporting the Digital Lecture Series.

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