Modern European Culture and the Jews

Three-day seminar 'Modern European Culture and the Jews'
Prof. dr. em. Steven E. Aschheim (Hebrew University of Jerusalem)

23, 24 and 26 October 2017
From 16h until 18h

Annexe-building Stadscampus University of Antwerp
Lange Winkelstraat 9 - 2000 Antwerp

Participation to this seminar is free of charge.
Registration via online registration form: click here.

In this seminar we will examine some of the many intersections between European culture and the modern Jewish experience. It will seek to analyse some of the complex and creative ways in which Jews sought to internalise, appropriate and re-negotiate aspects of European culture. It will also trace the multiple ways in which Jews were represented and the functions that these portrayals and stereotypes played within the culture. We will examine some of these links as manifested in Karl Marx’s On the Jewish Question, Richard Wagner’s Judaism in Music, Friedrich Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals, Sigmund Freud’s Moses and Monotheism and Franz Kafka’s Letter to his Father. Given time we will also analyse the fateful ways these trends came together in the Viennese fin-de-siècle.

Steven E. Aschheim is Emeritus Professor of History at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, where he taught Cultural and Intellectual History in the Department of History since 1982 and held the Vigevani Chair of European Studies. He has also acted as the Director of the Franz Rosenzweig Research Center for German Literature and Cultural History. He has taught at numerous universities, including the University of Wisconsin, Columbia University, the University of Maryland, the University of Toronto, and the Free University of Berlin. In 2017 (September-October), he will be Visiting Professor at the Universities of Amsterdam and Antwerp. His recent publications include Beyond the Border: The German-Jewish Legacy Abroad (Princeton University Press, 2007), and At the Edges of Liberalism: Junctions of European, German and Jewish History (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). A volume, co-edited with Vivian Liska, entitled The German-Jewish Experience Revisited (Berlin, De Gruyter) appeared in 2015. He is presently preparing a volume entitled Fragile Spaces: Essays on Jewish Memory, European History and Complex Identities. Apart from academic journals, he has written for the Times Literary Supplement, the New York Times, and the Jewish Review of Books.