Focal Projects

The International Research Training Group »Belongings: Jewish Material Culture in Twentieth-Century Europe and Beyond«, conducted by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Leipzig University and the Dubnow Institute, funded by the German Research Foundation and the Landecker Foundation, offers a multifaceted qualification program for outstanding international doctoral candidates.

This research project of the Leibniz Institute for Jewish History and Culture – Simon Dubnow will investigate the Schocken Archive in Jerusalem, one of the most significant archival collections concerning Saxony’s Jewish history, as a transnational repository of knowledge. This research will open up new approaches to the activities of the businessman, publisher, and patron of the arts Salman Schocken (1877–1959). The results will be presented to the public in the form of a publication and an exhibition in the »Tacheles«-themed year 2026. Until 1938, the ads of the Schocken department stores were adorned with an »S«; from the late 1930s, a »ש« served as the publisher’s mark of the Schocken publishing house in Tel Aviv; and after 1945, the »S« once again became the emblem of Schocken Books in New York. As early as 1932, a journalist remarked that this »S« stood for »‘Schocken’ as a company and an idea,« thus pointing the way to the search for a guiding principle in Schocken’s manifold activities. Beginning with a store in Zwickau, Salman Schocken developed one of the most modern department store chains in the Weimar Republic. He supported cultural institutions and authors, acquired books, artworks, and autographed works, helped fund the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and, in 1931/32, established the Schocken publishing house in Berlin, one of the most important Jewish publishing houses during the Nazi era. In 1938, his life in Germany was terminated with the forced sale of his company and the dissolution of the publishing house – but he continued his activities in Jerusalem and New York, henceforth under totally new conditions. Schocken’s activities were characterized by a fusion of economics, social concerns, art, and literature. Tracing the history of the translocated archive and its ordering of knowledge, the DI will investigate these interconnections in collaboration with the Forschungsstelle Judentum at Leipzig University.

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.

The project »German-Jewish Cultural Heritage Abroad,« which is being funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) in the framework of its priority program »Jewish Cultural Heritage,« focuses on the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums, the Higher Institute for Jewish Studies, established in Berlin in 1872 and shut down by the Nazis in 1942. In the framework of a cooperation with the Leo Baeck Institute Jerusalem, the project explores the fate and significance of the institute’s library, the whereabouts of its books, and the initiatives of the postwar era to preserve both its intellectual and cultural heritage.

»Turning Object into Subject. Communicating Jewish Everyday 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.

The project »Networking Digitized Cultural Data in Saxony – The Development of a Technical Infrastructure for Research on Mobility, Migration, and the Transformation of Places, People, and Artefacts (in Temporal and Spatial Perspective) – DIKUSA« is coordinated by KompetenzwerkD, the Department for Digital Competence at the Saxon Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Leipzig. Research on this project is being conducted by six humanities research institutes, each of which runs its own sub-project dedicated to the cultural and social history of Saxony. The results and tools developed in this cooperative project funded by the Free State of Saxony will eventually be made available to the public.

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.