Focal Projects

This interdisciplinary cooperation »The Short Life of Soviet Yiddish Literature« researches Yiddish literature in the Soviet Union between 1917 and the 1970s. The focus lies on poets and writers who were engaged both personally and artistically in the tensions between tradition and modernity, Jewish belonging and the affirmation of the creation of a »new« Soviet human. Their life stories and works are here explored against the backdrop of revolution, civil war, and emigration, as well as the experience of Stalinism and the Holocaust. Questions of belonging, attempts at social homogenization, and the relationship between universalism and particularism promise new insights not just into Eastern European history and its Jewries, but also into present-day challenges regarding globalized diaspora and migratory experiences.

»Turning Object into Subject. Communicating Everyday Jewish Culture in Germany« is a cooperative project that combines foundational research in cultural studies with applied research of textbooks and aims to make its findings applicable for teaching staff. It is not oriented towards the study of antisemitism in the traditional sense. Rather, it aims to educate and disseminate knowledge about Jewish history, culture, and religion. The base assumption is that the process of coming to terms with National Socialism in Germany has led to a reduction of Jewish history to an ostensibly exclusive experiential framework of persecution, antisemitism, and the Holocaust, and thus to an obfuscation of the pluralism of Jewish life in Europe. This has engendered a fragmented or diminished knowledge about the religious and everyday practices of Jews – a deficit that is compounded by a lack of direct experience. The project aims to counter these isolating perspectives and stereotypical perceptions through a well-founded and easily accessible knowledge concerning Jewish history and culture.

This research group »A New History of the Labor and Union Movement« aims to open up a new perspective on the history of the labor and union movement as well as the intellectual and academic cultures related to it. This is being achieved through closely aligned case studies, a cooperative working approach that provides young scholars the opportunity to research the project topic as independently as possible while simultaneously remaining in constant dialogue with one another. The project is structured as a scholarly network in which the epistemological focus lies on significant individuals in the worker and union movement – both prominent and hitherto largely unknown individuals. The biographical approaches to these individuals do not, however, aim to create traditional biographies of scholars, functionaries, or oeuvres, nor to concentrate on the history of organizational processes. Rather, the case studies focus on the intellectual and lifeworld experiences of the respective actors. Their biographical paths, which function as a historical source and a historical medium at once, serve the illumination of the historical validity of concepts, categories, and imaginations within the worker and union movement.

The Ignaz Goldziher Program is geared toward scholars from Muslim contexts whose research centers on questions of Jewish history, reform and confessionalization, as well as the mutual experiences of Jews and Muslims. The fellows examine issues highlighting the remarkable similarity of Jewish and Muslim historical experiences: monotheism, abstract textual scholarship, and similarities in patterns of enlightenment and the demands of confessionalization. The one-year fellowship at the Dubnow Institute can be used to work on or complete a research project or to develop a new project and, with the help of the institute, bring it to a level suitable for funding applications.

The project »Material Traces of Jewish German Lifeworlds in Eastern Europe. Book Collections and Libraries after World War Two« is dedicated to Jewish material cultures in the twentieth century, especially their history of destruction, dispersal, and restitution in Central and Eastern Europe. It reconstructs agents and organizations as well as the processes of salvation and transfer of objects that they initiated, focusing on the question of how the stocks of tradition they managed to preserve endured, changed, and were reinterpreted in new places, new contexts, and new conditions.

This project »Shifting Knowledge. The Impact and Repercussion of Emigration from Eastern Europe on Jewish Studies since the 1960s« is dedicated to Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union and other East Central and Eastern European countries between the 1960s and the 1990s and the impact and repercussion these waves of migration had on Jewish studies in the USA, Israel, and Germany.