Conference "Jewish History and the History of Emotion"
Conference at the Martin Buber Institute for Jewish Studies,
University of Cologne, June 16-17, 2025
Hauptgebäude (main building), Neuer Senatssaal
Program
Monday, 16 June 2025
9.00 - 9.15 Welcome
Francesca Bregoli (Queens College and CUNY Graduate Center) and Matthias B. Lehmann (University of Cologne)
9.15 - 10.45 Lachrymose History
Chair: Anke Hilbrenner (Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf)
Adam Sutcliffe (King’s College London), “The Meaning of Jewish Suffering in German Jewish Historical Thought”
Avinoam Stillman (FU Berlin), “Collective Trauma in the Historiography of Kabbalah”
Jonathan Elukin (Trinity College), “Antisemitism, Jewish Historiography, Periodization and the Perils of Emotion”
11.00 - 13.00 Of Love and Shame
Chair: Sabine von Heusinger (University of Cologne)
Michela Andreatta (University of Rochester), “Letters of Affection: Letter-Writing and Emotions in Early Modern Jewish Italy”
Silvana Greco (FU Berlin), “The Kaleidoscope of Emotions in the Work Philosophie sociale dédiée au peuple françois (1793) by Moses Dobruska (1753-1794)”
Yaron Ben-Naeh (Hebrew University), “‘It was a very difficult day’: The Sufferings of a Jewish Rabbi”
Asher Salah (Bezalel Academy), “The Role of Shame in Two 18th Century Jewish Reform Projects in Italy”
14.00 - 16.00 Emotional Regimes in Early Modern Religion
Chair: Nina Verheyen (University of Cologne)
Lawrence Fine (Mt. Holoyoke College), “Humility and Hubris, Love and Anger, in Sixteenth-Century Kabbalah”
Agata Paluch (FU Berlin), “Philological Doubt and Fear: Emotions and Editing Practical Kabbalah in Seventeenth-Century Ashkenaz”
Ilaria Briata (University of Hamburg), “Cultures of Horror and Awe. Early Modern Musar and the Construction of Religious Psyche”
Leore Sachs Shmueli (Bar Ilan University), “Religious Emotional Labor in Jewish Mysticism: Emotional Turn in Divine Worship in Early Hasidism”
16.30 - 18.00 Keynote Lecture
Derek Penslar (Harvard), “Jews, Universities, and the Discourse of Betrayal”
Tuesday, 17 June 2025
9.30 -11.00 Feelings of Belonging
Chair: Nicole Kramer (University of Cologne)
Emma Zohar (Tel Aviv University), “Emotional Bridging and the Making of Jewish Diasporic Emotional Community”
Andrea Schatz (King’s College London), “Feeling at Home in Exile? Local Attachment and Detachment in Early Modern Jewish Historical Writing”
Cornelia Aust (Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf), „Objects of Daily Life: Emotions and Materiality in Early Modern Jewish History”
11.15 - 13.15 Emotional Encounters, Mixed Feelings
Chair: Matthias Lehmann (University of Cologne)
Tamir Karkason (University of Halle), “The Sense of Longing to the Precolonial Past: The Case of Shalom Flah of Tunis, 1881-1897”
Susanne Korbel (Central European University and University of Graz), “Jewish/non-Jewish Intimacies: Emotional (Non)Communities in the Habsburg Metropolises post 1867”
Stefan Hofmann (University of Leipzig), „German Jews and the Theater in the 19th Century: An Emotional Relationship”
Alicja Maslak-Maciejewska (Jagiellonian University), “Everyday Frustration and Remembered Joy. Jewish Experience of Public School in Galicia”
14.15 - 16.15 Discourses of Family and Childhood
Chair: Ursula Reuter (Germania Judaica, Cologne)
Ekaterina Oleshkevich (Hebrew University), “Parenting and Changing Expressions of Love in East-European Jewish Family in the Modern Period”
Maja Hultman (University of Gothenburg), “‘Best wishes and ... (You can imagine whatever You like)’: Love, Femininity and Power in Women’s Letter-Writing”
Hizky Shoham (Bar Ilan University), “Emotional Scripts as Class Differentiation in Domestic Ceremonies of Jewish Urban Middle-Class Families in Mandatory Palestine”
Orit Rozin (Tel Aviv University), “Children as the Victims of Terror in the 1970s”
16.30 - 18.00 Patriotic Feelings
Chair: Francesca Bregoli (CUNY)
Ofer Dynes (Columbia University), “Sentimental Subjects: Romantic Love and Patriotic Love in Maskilic Hebrew (1807-1861)”
Ofer Idels (University of Munich), “From Words to Feelings: Emotions, Experience and Language in the Modernization of Hebrew”
Tsiona Lida (Harvard University), “Adjudicating Moral Sentiment in 1930s Zionism”