Conferences

International Conference at Warburg-Haus Hamburg, 27–29 March 2023

The international conference “Experiences of Violence and Notions of Temporality in Jewish History“ took place from 27 to 29 March 2023 at Warburg-Haus Hamburg and was organized by Monica Rüthers, Ilay Halpern (both Universität Hamburg) and Kim Wünschmann (IGdJ). Over 30 scholars from different academic disciplines discussed practices and experiences of anti-Jewish violence with a special focus on the analytical category of temporality. The key note lecture entitled „A Time to Live and a Time to Die, A Time to Remember and a Time to Forget: Temporality and Violence in the Modern Jewish Experience“ was delivered by Elissa Bemporad (City University New York).

Timing and escalation of violent acts such as pogroms were highly ritualized. Religious holidays or the state of war were predictable time frames for the perpetration of violent acts, which Jewish communities anticipated and remembered in specific ways. Conference delegates discussed various modes of anticipating anti-Jewish violence and actions that resulted from these anticipation. The processing, interpretation and narration of experiences of violence were another key theme. The conference fruitfully explored synergies and intersection between new research on anti-Jewish pogroms, Holocaust studies, Eastern European history and Jewish studies. 

The conference was based on the work of the organizers as members of the research unit “GewaltZeiten / Times of Violence: Temporality in Violent Undertakings”, funded by the State Research Program of the City of Hamburg (LFF), in which scholars from Universität Hamburg, the Institute for the History of the German Jews and the Helmut Schmidt University of the Bundeswehr cooperate.

The conference report, composed by Katja Grosse-Sommer, has been published on HSozKult. The programme can be found here.