News – Events – Calls
24. April 2024 19:00 BuchpräsentationIngeborg Bachmann, Marie Luise Kaschnitz, Hilde Domin, Nelly Sachs: Über Grenzen sprechend. Briefe. Piper/Suhrkamp, München, Berlin, Zürich 2023Ingeborg Bachmann stand mit zentralen Protagonistinnen der deutschsprachigen Literatur im Austausch, nun werden ihre Briefwechsel mit Marie Luise Kaschnitz, Hilde Domin und Nelly Sachs erstmals zugänglich gemacht. Die Briefe geben Einblick in die Lebensbedingungen, das literarische S...Weiterlesen... |
02. May 2024 18:30 Simon Wiesenthal LectureNever Too Late to Remember, Never Too Late for Justice! Holocaust Research and Commemoration in Contemporary PolandIn 1994, Simon Wiesenthal received a doctorate honoris causa from the Jagiellonian University in Krakow for his lifelong quest for justice – half a century after he had been, for a short time, prisoner of the local Nazi Concentration Camp (KL) Plaszow. The 1990s were the decade when t...Weiterlesen... |
07. May 2024 00:00 - 04. June 2024 00:00 WorkshopDealing with Antisemitism in the Past and Present. Scientific Organisations and the State of Research in AustriaThis series of talks, presented by antisemitism experts from different organisations that research antisemitism using a variety of academic approaches, aims to provide a snapshot of historical evolutions, current events, prevalent perceptions and declared (and undeclared) attitudes. I...Weiterlesen... |
Corry Guttstadt
Senior Fellow (02/2021–07/2021)
Islam-Motivated Antisemitism in and from Turkey. Themes, Patterns of Argumentation, and Dissemination
A vehement discussion is taking place among the European public about the scope and dissemination of Islamic antisemitism, a discussion that is often politically motivated and deeply ideological: While one side accuses ‘the Muslims’ generally of holding antisemitic views, the other side invokes notions of ‘Islamic tolerance’, pointing for example to the secure lives of Jews in the Ottoman Empire. To date, no thorough study has been undertaken on the frequency and argumentative patterns of antisemitic statements made by religious Islamic institutions in Turkey.
This project examines the attitudes of the Turkish Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet İşleri Başkanlığı) as well as of leading Islamic theological faculties towards Jews. Directly subordinated to the President of Turkey, the Diyanet is an institution dedicated to administering religious bodies. Through the compilation of Friday sermons, legal opinions, and independent publications, it exerts a significant impact on the interpretation of Islam in Turkey as well as on the mosques it administers abroad.
In the first stage of the project, a quantitative assessment of statements made by the Diyanet İşleri Başkanlığı and of the publications by Islamic theological faculties on the topic of “Jews” and the proportion of negative representations contained therein will be undertaken. In the second stage, the aim is to qualitatively analyse the findings with regard to the topoi used, focussing especially on what role explicitly religious Islamic motifs play therein. Finally, the reaction to antisemitic statements made by Turkish media and the institutions subordinated to the Diyanet will be examined.
Corry Guttstadt is a Turkologist and historian who completed her PhD at the University of Hamburg. Her dissertation, entitled “Die Türkei, die Juden und der Holocaust”, is regarded internationally as the milestone work in this field. Her research focusses on the situation of minorities in Turkey, antisemitism, and the history of Sephardic Jews. She has published extensively on the politics of the neutral states during the Holocaust, Sephardic Jews, minorities in Turkey, and antisemitism. She is the Managing Director of the Türkei-Europa-Zentrum (TEZ) at the University of Hamburg.
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Lisa Silverman
Senior Fellow (10/2019–03/2020)
The Postwar Antisemite. Culture and Complicity in Austria and Germany 1945–1965
This book project examines the development of the figural antisemite in texts, trials, and visual culture after 1945. It argues that this figure became an indispensable trope in postwar culture, enabling Austrians and Germans to deny complicity in the Holocaust, navigate a radically changed political and cultural landscape, and re-establish lives upended by war. As a readily recognisable and easily adaptable figure of evil, the antisemite often replaced the figural Jew, the ultimate Other of prewar Central European culture. Yet, this replacement signalled neither a desire for the inclusion of Jews in postwar society, nor a destabilization of widespread and systemic antisemitic prejudices. Rather, it highlighted how narratives created after the Holocaust continued to rely upon deeply engrained tropes of ‘Jewish difference’, even as they suppressed explicit antisemitism. The damaging effects of the figural antisemite spread far beyond Europe and continue to this day.
Lisa Silverman is Associate Professor of History and Jewish Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and Contributing Editor of the Leo Baeck Institute Year Book. Her research focusses on Jewish cultural history and antisemitism in modern Central Europe.
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Ari Joskowicz
Senior Fellow (09/2021-02/2022)
Jews and Roma in the Shadow of Genocide
My project traces the entanglement of Jewish and Romani history in the twentieth and early twenty-first century, from the killing fields of Hitler’s Europe to the postwar creation of archives, debates on compensation, and contemporary Holocaust memorials. It seeks to understand how Jewish Holocaust archives became central repositories of Romani narratives of suffering and how Jewish scholarship, networks of Jewish legal and historical professionals, and the model of the Jewish Holocaust has shaped understandings of the Romani Holocaust. Paying equal attention to the relations between Roma and Jews in camps and ghettos of the Second World War and to their complex interactions ever since, the book offers a new relational approach to the Nazi genocides and their aftermath.
Ari Joskowicz is Associate Professor of Jewish Studies and History and director of the Max Kade Center for European and German Studies at Vanderbilt University. He is a historian of Modern European and Jewish history with a special interest in questions of comparative minority politics. His publications include The Modernity of Others: Jewish Anti-Catholicism in Germany and France (Stanford University Press, 2014), and various articles on the history of the archive, religious politics, post-Holocaust memory, and European Roma.