German-Jewish History in the Now is a ten-day festival of films and panel discussions exploring issues as relevant today as they were a generation ago, including anti-immigration policies, racism, religion and gay rights. Speakers include Dr. Ruth Westheimer and scholars from Yale, Princeton and the University of Munich.
The programs mine the remarkable history of German-speaking Jewry for insight and parallels into present-day social and political concerns, exploring these questions and more.
- How does the Jewish experience in Central Europe of the last century compare to issues today?
- How compatible are religious observance and modern society?
- Could the liberal democracies of the United States and Western Europe again succumb to racist demagoguery?
- Did the world learn anything from the Jewish refugee crisis of the 1930s?
Registration is required for all events.
Programs are at Leo Baeck Institute at the Center for Jewish History, 15 West 16th St.
Tuesday, October 17, 2017, 6:30 PM
Film & Discussion – Germans & Jews—Jewish Life in Contemporary German and the Legacy of the Holocaust
$5 – $10: Register Online
The 2016 film Germans & Jews explores the country’s transformation from silence about the Holocaust to facing it head on. Post-film discussion with Steven Sokol (American Council on Germany), Rabbi Sonja Keren Pilz (Hebrew Union College), and attorney Steve Zehden (Noerr LLP). Co-presented with the American Council on Germany
Wednesday, October 18, 2017, 6:30 PM
Panel Discussion – Germans, Jews, and Sex
$5 – $10: Register Online
Nearly a century ago in Weimar Germany, a group of physicians and psychologists around Magnus Hirschfeld, many of them Jewish, fought to end the criminalization of homosexuality in Germany with arguments based on a study of human sexuality that was empirical and descriptive rather than normative. Legendary author and educator Ruth Westheimer joins historians Atina Grossmann (Cooper Union) and Robert Beachy (Yonsei International University) to explore the legacy of German-Jewish gay rights and sex reform pioneers. Co-presented with the Goethe-Institut New York
Thursday, October 19, 2017, 6:30 PM
Panel Discussion
Why Moses Mendelssohn Matters
$5 – $10: Register Online
How compatible are faith and reason, religious and civic loyalty, religious commitment and cosmopolitanism? These were the questions that shaped the Enlightenment philosopher Moses Mendelssohn’s biography and occupied his mind. Abraham Socher (Oberlin/Editor, Jewish Review of Books), David Sorkin (Yale), and Leora Batnitzky (Princeton) discuss how Mendelssohn’s answers still resonate today.
Co-presented with the Jewish Review of Books
Tuesday, October 24, 2017, 6:30 PM
Panel Discussion – What if the Weimar Republic had Survived?
$5 – $10: Register Online
Historian Michael Brenner (University of Munich/American University) imagines a world in which Walther Rathenau survived to save the republic in the new book What Ifs of Jewish History. He joins the book’s editor, Gavriel Rosenfeld (Fairfield University), to discuss what factors and which actors contributed to the disintegration of a fragile pluralism in the 1920s, and what that means for today’s world.Co-presented with the German Academy in New York
Wednesday, October 25, 2017, 6:30 PM
Panel Discussion – The Frankfurt School Knew Trump was Coming
$5 – $10: Register Online
In a post-election essay for the New Yorker, the critic Alex Ross wrote that the “combination of economic inequality and pop-cultural frivolity” in current American life were precisely the fertile ground for an American catastrophe that the Jewish intellectuals of the Frankfurt School anticipated in their studies of antisemitism, mass culture, and the “authoritarian personality”. Jack Jacobs (CUNY), Jonathon Catlin (Princeton), and Liliane Weissberg (Penn) discuss how the Frankfurt School’s analysis of antisemitism in particular sheds light on the racism undergirding contemporary right-wing populist movements. Anson Rabinbach (Princeton) moderates.Co-presented with Deutsches Haus at NYU
Thursday, October 26, 2017, 6:30 PM
Panel Discussion – The “Pew Jew” Study: American and German-Jewry in Comparison
$5 – $10: Register Online
The Pew Research Center’s study on Jewish Americans in 2013 alarmed some observers by showing rising intermarriage, falling birthrates, and dwindling religious affiliation among the non-Orthodox. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Germany’s increasingly prosperous Jewish minority confronted similar questions about the nature of Jewish identity and the viability of Jewish communal life in a secularizing society. Samuel Norich, president and former publisher of the Forward, will moderate a discussion with Steven Cohen (Hebrew Union College) and Robin Judd (Ohio State University) about the parallels and contrasts between the situations of German Jews a century ago and American Jews today.
Co-presented with Hebrew Union College
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