Passing Through Hands: Objects in Jewish Everyday Lives

This research colloquium examines how everyday objects shape, mediate, and preserve Jewish lived experience across time, space, and generations. It approaches material culture as a site where history, memory, affect, and identity intersect, focusing on ordinary domestic, personal, inherited, and mobile objects as carriers of layered histories.

Speakers explore how everyday objects contain multiple histories and how the »everyday« is produced through material practices. Central is the entanglement of subjects and objects: how things shape human experience and enable individual and collective, transgenerational forms of attachment and memory.

Drawing on Jewish Studies, Material Culture Studies, Anthropology, History, Memory Studies, and curatorial and literary perspectives, the lectures highlight objects as active participants in social life. Special attention is given to materiality’s affective qualities, the way how objects evoke longing, loss, comfort, belonging, and ambivalence, as well as to the temporalities and spaces objects create, particularly in contexts of migration, displacement, and diaspora.

By foregrounding the everyday, the colloquium expands approaches to Jewish history beyond textual and institutional frameworks, emphasizing ordinary objects as archives of lived experience. Organized by the Dubnow Institute, Leipzig University, and the International Research Training Group »Belongings,« the series invites scholars, students, and the public to reconsider how Jewish life is remembered and imagined through material worlds.

Program with speakers, topics, and dates

Literature: Leora Auslander: "Jews and Material Culture", in: Michell Hart, Toni Mitchells (eds.): The Cambridge History of Judaism. Cambridge University Press, 2017, 804–830; Jodi Eichler-Levine, Rachel B. Gross, Laura A. Leibman, and Laura S. Levitt: "Jewish Objects and Jewish Affects: A Conversation”, in: CrossCurrents, Vol. 71, No. 1 (MARCH 2021), 82–94; Ruth von Bernuth, Gabrielle Anna Berlinger (eds.): The Lives of Jewish Things. Collecting and Curating Material Culture. Wayne State University Press, 2025.