Transfer of Knowledge

Through its multifaceted, multilingual publication program, the Dubnow Institute seeks to engage with the public and to make accessible the research conducted and discussed on site. The program includes purely scholarly formats like the bilingual »Jahrbuch des Dubnow-Instituts/Dubnow Institute Yearbook« and the »Studies of the Dubnow Institute,« the latter comprising theses written at or in close collaboration with the institute. By contrast, the essay series »toldot,« the magazine »Jewish History & Culture,” and the institute’s individual publications address the scholarly community and a general audience interested in Jewish issues. Aside from the »Digital Catalogue,« a hybrid publication available online free of charge or orderable as a book, the institute also publishes the blog »Mimeo,« a purely digital format through which early career scholars offer insights into their projects. The realization of these publications is overseen by the editorial team of the Dubnow Institute, which works together closely with external copy editors and translators. With the exception of the magazine, the institute’s publications all appear with Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht in Göttingen.

Every semester, scholars from the Dubnow Institute conduct seminars, tutorials, and a research colloquium on Jewish history and culture at Leipzig University. The courses form a part of the regular semester program of the Historical Seminar and are conducted either in English or German. They are open to students of the Faculty of Social Sciences and Philosophy, the Faculty of Philology, and the Faculty of Law, as well as to students of the interdisciplinary European Studies Masters at the Institute for Cultural Studies. The Dubnow Institute moreover participates in teaching at the University of Halle-Wittenberg and in the Master’s in History and Politics of the Twentieth Century at Jena University.

The Dubnow Institute disseminates the focal points and findings of its research in various analogue and digital event formats, actively seeking a dialogue with the general public alongside an academic exchange. The conferences, workshops, colloquia, the annual Simon Dubnow Lecture, general lecture series, book presentations, and film screenings are mostly organized in cooperation with regional, national, and international partners. The institute also participates in cultural events with a broad public appeal such as the reading festival of the Leipzig Book Fair, the Long Night of Scholarship, and the Jewish Week. At these events, the institute not only opens the doors to its building in the central Graphic Quarter, but invites the public to regular events at various cultural locations in the city, making scholarship accessible to all interested parties.

This is a specialist library that has supported the research activities of the Dubnow Institute since its establishment in the fall of 1995. The collections reflect the institute’s focal points and their ongoing development: The library specializes in Jewish history and culture from the early modern era into the present, but also covers various other fields including literature, philosophy, law, literary scholarship, antisemitism, and more. The collections currently comprise around 23,000 volumes and periodicals in various languages, primarily German, English, and Hebrew, but also Polish, Russian, Yiddish, and others.

The point of departure for this project is the multilingual partial collection on the life and work of the Jewish photographer and visual artist Rita Ostrovska, who was born in Kyiv in 1953 and emigrated to Kassel in 2001. Her archive directs our gaze to developments, transformations, and ruptures since the second half of the twentieth century, specifically: the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, refugee and migration movements in Europe, and the correlating shifts in language and multiple belongings, integration and marginalization, and the omnipresence of antisemitism.