“Night under open sky.” With this sentence Hermann Abraham finishes many entries in his diary. He was a German-Jewish teacher, born on July 10th 1887, who lived in Niedenstein, near Kassel. For almost 80 nights, Abraham was part of the German army that invaded France through Luxembourg and Belgium. Now, after more than a century, …
One of the main aims pursued by the founders of the Leo Baeck Institute (LBI) established in Jerusalem in May 1955 was to preserve the cultural and intellectual legacy of German Jewry after its destruction by the Nazi regime in Germany. Over the first few decades of its activity, the LBI received a great variety …
Lecture in the “Between Jewish Languages” Research Group, August 2021 Anat Messing Marcus “Architecture did not fall into the worship of visual images” Hermann Cohen, Religion of Reason, Out of the Sources of Judaism “No human art appears as deeply compromised as the art of building in Kafka. None is more vital and none makes …
Benjamin with Kafka: Babylon, Jewish Language and the Image Ban Read More »
The indigenous Jews are not French, but Arabs of the Jewish faith. Their mother tongue is Arabic, which they speak badly and write in Hebrew letters. Charles du Bouzet, 1871 א שפראך איז א דיאלעקט מיט אן ארמיי און פלוט (Language is a dialect with an army and fleet) Max Weinreich, quoting an anonymous individual, …
“Ta‘ish al-Republique!” On Judeo-Arabic political writing Read More »
In my lecture, I presented the appearance of the Jewish name in Georges Perec’s oeuvre. Perec (1936-1982) was a French-Jewish author, a WWII orphan who had lost his mother in Auschwitz to become an enfant caché (hidden child). He would later become one of the most highly valued authors in 20th-century France. In his work, …
The Jewish Name, Between Tradition and History: The Case of Georges Perec Read More »
The Dance of Death according to the Castilian Tradition in the Parma Manuscript (Ms. Parma 2666) is a documentation of a unique medieval version – one of the earliest textual witnesses of this literary genre. Through it, we are indirectly introduced by a Jewish copier to a Christian dramatic-theatrical version of the Dance of Death …
Hebrew’s status as the Holy Language is supposedly obvious in Jewish tradition. Nevertheless, in the early 20th century, the Orthodoxy in both Europe and Palestine was embarrassed by its modern uses by nationalist and Zionist Jews, particularly as part of the modernization of Jewish education. The meeting presented the Jewish Orthodox press’s dilemma in the …
The response of Jewish Orthodox press to the “Language War” in 1913-14 Read More »
“Barak, the Zionist Propaganda Troupe is a means in the struggle on behalf of Zionism. Barak is one of the methods, not the sole one. Barak is a means for underscoring our movement’s emotional sides, not out of neglect for the rational possibilities, but as a necessary contrast.” Penned by Hans Anton Wolff (1906-1974), the …
Leo Baeck Institute Jerusalem
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