Jews in Polish and German Lands: Encounters, Interactions, Inspirations

An international conference launching 
Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry Volume 37

Organized by the Institute for Polish-Jewish Studies, the UCL Institute of Jewish Studies and the Polin Museum of History of Polish Jews in Warsaw in co-operation with the Embassy of the Republic of Poland and the Weidenfeld Institute of Jewish Studies at the University of Sussex. With thanks to Sandra and Nathan Kahn for their support. 

International contributors to the volume will be presenting papers at the conference. The two online panels will be organized chronologically: 1) Polish, German, Jewish Cultural Encounters in War and Peace and 2) The Holocaust and its Aftermath (see programme below). You can join for any part - please make sure you use the direct zoom link which will be with your ticket

ABOUT THE CONFERENCE VOLUME.  Historians have largely tended to regard Polish Jewish history and German Jewish history, from the Middle Ages to the present, as playing out solely within national boundaries, thereby ignoring the interactions that have shaped Jewish cultural life. Geographical proximity has meant that Jews from both countries have been linked through kinship ties as well as shared economic, cultural, and linguistic realities. The complexity of this relationship and its consequences have been only partially reflected in scholarship. This volume takes a different approach, shifting the focus away from the nationally distinct to investigate instead mutual influences and interactions. Moving beyond the traditional paradigms that characterize Polish Jewry as ‘authentic’ and German Jewry as ‘modernizing’, it challenges the sharp historiographic division between these two communities and opens up a nuanced understanding of modern European Jewish history. Contributors to the volume will present papers at the conference. 

12 – 1:45 pm GMT

Welcome

Panel One: Polish, German, Jewish Cultural Encounters in War and Peace

Markus NESSELRODT (European University Viadrina, Frankfurt [Oder]): Encounters between Jews and Non-Jews in Prussian Warsaw (1796-1806)

Sonia GOLLANCE (UCL): Friedrich Schiller in the East European Jewish Imagination

Delphine BECHTEL (Sorbonne University,Paris): The Jews of Lemberg between the Viennese Kaffeehaus and the Polish Kawiarnia 

 2:00 – 3:45 pm GMT

Panel Two: The Holocaust and its Aftermath

Kataryzna PERSON (Warsaw Ghetto Museum): Between us and them there still stands a wall... German-speaking Jews resettled to the Warsaw ghetto in the spring of 1942

Joseph CRONIN (Leo Baeck Institute, London/ Birkbeck, University of London): Writing the History of Jews in Germany after 1945

Michael MENG (Clemson University, South Carolina): Celan and Gradowski’s Poetic Responses to the Holocaust