Borns Jewish Studies Program

Call for Papers

We invite proposals for papers to be presented at the Eighth Junior Scholars Conference in Jewish History to take place at the Indiana University Europe Gateway in Berlin, May 2025 on the theme of “The Place of the Holocaust in German-Jewish History and Memory.” We seek proposals specifically from postdoctoral scholars, recent PhDs as well as those in the final stages of their dissertations.

The aim of the two-day workshop is to bring together a small transatlantic group of junior scholars to explore new research and questions in Jewish history. Via pre-circulated papers and brief presentations at the workshop itself, participants will offer insights in their respective individual research projects and at the same time engage in a broader discussion on sources, methodology, and theory in order to assess current and possible future trends in the modern history of Jews in Europe, the Americas, and beyond.

For some time, historians have sought to bring the history of German Jews out of the shadow of the Holocaust. Especially for the period before 1933, and particularly before 1914, scholars have been at pains to show that the history of German Jewry was not simply characterized by antisemitism, exclusion, and delusions of acceptance. And while the theme of studies on Jews in postwar Germany was for a long time a community “living with packed suitcases”, German reunification and the Jewish immigration waves of the 1990s have evoked new questions and themes to complement or supersede the concern with the aftershocks of the Holocaust.

So, what is the place now of National Socialism and the Holocaust in our current understanding of German Jewry? Does it remain the critical vanishing point for the history of German Jews before 1933? Questions that might be raised include:

• To what extent was pre-1933 German Jewish history destined for disaster? What kind of alternative histories and trends can be/ have been offered about the place and experience of Jewry in pre-Nazi German society?
• How far did Jewish responses to National Socialism and the Holocaust draw on Jewish practices and traditions that predated the catastrophe?
• How far is Jewish life in Germany, and are German Jewish diasporas elsewhere in the world, still shaped – in identity, aspirations, and memory by the experience of the Holocaust? How did the Nazi-Past influence the perception of Judaism/Jewish presence – e.g. the role of the Zentralrat der Juden in Postwar West-Germany, the preservation and or neglect of Jewish heritage sites in East and West Germany?
• How did this specific lens of looking at Jewish history through Holocaust history also shape and affect the historiography on Germany Jewry in the postwar period? How far did it determine what was visible in Jewish heritage and what remained invisible? And how did it influence public representations of Jewish history in Germany – in museums, memorials, or schools and teaching curricula?
• What role did Jewish perspectives and actors play in memorialization processes in the Post-Holocaust era? How distinctive is the relationship of Jewry in Germany, or of German-Jewish diasporas to the Holocaust compared with other elements of the postwar Jewish world?

We invite:

• Historical research that raises questions about the place and significance of the Holocaust in the history of pre-1945 German Jewry broadly understood, and of Jewry in the postwar Germanies;
• Historiographical research that explores the way in which history writing has juxtaposed (or not) the history of German Jewry, and the Holocaust;
• Memory studies tackling questions of trauma, commemoration, restitution, identity and more.

The workshop language will be English. The organizers will cover basic expenses for travel and accommodation. Please submit short proposals (750 words max.) and a one-page CV by September 30, 2024 here. Successful applicants will be notified by October 15, 2024.

The 8th Junior Scholars Conference in Jewish History in Berlin | Jointly organized by the Borns Jewish Studies Program, the German Historical Institute-Washington, the Mendelssohn Centre for European-Jewish Studies, Potsdam) and the Wissenschaftliche Arbeitsgemeinschaft des Leo Baeck Instituts, with additional support from the Indiana University Europe Gateway in Berlin