Tuesday, 9. June 2026, 18:30 - 20:00

Jüdisches Museum Wien, Dorotheergasse 11, 1010 Wien

In Anti-Semite and Jew, Jean-Paul Sartre famously wrote, “If the Jew did not exist, the anti-Semite would invent him.” With this claim, Sartre suggested that the Antisemite alone – a figure seemingly separate from both the writer and his audience – is responsible for creating and perpetuating negative stereotypes about Jews. After the Second World War, this constructed figure became a powerful cultural tool, enabling Austrians, East and West Germans, and others to distance themselves from antisemitism and to redefine personal and national self-identification. Long before the Nazi persecution of Jews became a central moral paradigm in popular culture, the figural Antisemite played a pivotal role in the narratives of trials, films, and literature that allowed anti-Jewish biases to endure, even as openly expressing such views became socially unacceptable.

Lisa Silverman is Professor of History and Jewish Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She specialises in modern German and Austrian Jewish cultural history, with a focus on antisemitism, gender, and visual culture. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies (VWI) and the Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften (IFK); in 2022 she served as Michael Hauck Visiting Professor for Interdisciplinary Holocaust Research at the Fritz Bauer Institute for the History and Impact of the Holocaust at the Goethe-Universität in Frankfurt am Main. The Postwar Antisemite: Culture and Complicity after the Holocaust (Oxford University Press, 2025) is her latest monograph. She is also author of Becoming Austrians: Jews and Culture between the World Wars (Oxford University Press, 2012) and co-author of Holocaust Representations in History: an Introduction (Bloomsbury, 2015).

The book presentation will be followed by commentaries from Éva Kovács (VWI) and Michael L. Miller (CEU).

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