Micha Danziger is a Ph.D. candidate at the History Department of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His research is on the philosophical crisis that occurred in reaction to Nazism and the Shoah. The focuses is on the philosophical writings, lectures and debates that were published and recorded during or immediately after WWII, exploring and explaining the intellectual “stimmung” of the postwar period. The object of this research is to shed light on the specific event of Nazism and the Shoah, where philosophers were trying to engage historical events which imbedded in them a metaphysical, ethical, and epistemological rupture. It also expands on the intellectual and conceptual history of crisis.
 He received the President of State Scholarship for Excellence and Scientific Innovation in 2022.

 

. His first book, an intellectual biography of the renowned Kabbalah Jewish German and Israeli scholar Gershom Scholem, is scheduled for publication with university of Chicago Press. Currently he is a research fellow at the Martin Buber Professur für Jüdische Religionsphilosophie, Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main. His current project seeks entails a survey of postwar German-Jewish literature.

Gershom Scholem: an Intellectual Biography, Chicago University press, Forthcoming.
Renewal in the Shadow of the Catastrophe: Martin Buber, Hannah Arendt, and Paul Celan in Germany, German Studies Review, Forthcoming

Jacob Taubes, From Cult to Culture. Eds. Amir Engel and Charlotte Fonrobert, Stanford University Press, 2010, 445 pp.
“Gershom Scholem’s ‘Kabbalah and Myth’ Beyond German Jewish Romanticism,” (in German), Gershom Scholem in Deutschland: Zwischen Seelenverwandtschaft und Sprachlosigkeit, Eds. Matthias Morgenstern and Gerold Necker, Mohr Siebeck, (in press).
“Above the Abyss and Away: Barbara Honigmann, Gershom Scholem and German Jewish Culture after the Holocaust,” (in German), Weimarer Beiträge, (in press).
“Reading Gershom Scholem in Context: Salomon Maimon’s and Gershom Scholem’s German Jewish Discourse on Jewish Mysticism,” New German Critique, 121, Winter 2014.

Nadan Feldman is a Ph.D. candidate at the History Department of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His research deals with the ties between Nazi Germany and American Corporations from the rise of Hitler to the end of WWII, and focuses on the ideological-political stands of American Tycoons, CEOs and other senior figures in a group of powerful, influancial US corporations. Prior to the dissertation Mr. Feldman published an M.A thesis in this subject in 2018, which had received three academic awards.
Since 2019 Feldman is the Editor of Tabur - Yearbook for European History, Society, Culture and Thought, published by The Richard Koebner Minerva Center for German History. Under his hands as editor were published Volume 10: 80 years to the breaking of WWII; and Volume 11: The Angela Merkel Era. These Volumes were the first to be published in a digital version.

Higher Education
PhD in History, Hebrew University, Jerusalem - in the field of American-German relations throughout the Nazi Period
M.A in German Studies and Urban Planning, Hebrew University, Jerusalem
B.A in Political Science and Business Management, Hebrew University, Jerusalem

Awards
2020: Award for Outstanding M.A thesis from the International Center for the Study of Antisemitism at the Hebrew University
2020: Award for Outstanding M.A thesis from the Ghetto Fighters' House Museum
2019: Award for Outstanding M.A thesis paper from the Institute of Contemporary Jewry Research at the Hebrew University

 

Tamar Kojman is a post-doctoral researcher at the DGF project “Between Aliyah and Escape. Jewish Youth Movement and Zionist Education under the Nazi Regime and in pre-State Israel 1933-1945,” a collaboration between the Koebner Minerva Center at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Institut für Erziehungswissenschaften at the Technical University of Braunschweig. She has recently completed her PhD dissertation, From Kultus to Kultur: Debating the Germans’ Mission in the World, 1830–1880, at the Hebrew University.

Tamar was a recipient of the Minerva Fellowship, the Armbruster Fellowship, the President Scholarship for Humanities, and the Mandel Scholion PhD fellowship.

Publications:

Peer-Reviewed Articles:

• Kojman, Tamar. “An Awkward Predicament: ‘The German Man’ and Feminized Modernity in the 1840s.” Central European History 57, 1 (March 2024): 1–24.
• Kojman, Tamar. “Germanness and Religious Universalism in the Aftermath of the 1844 Trier Pilgrimage.” Nations and Nationalism 27, 4 (October 2021).  

Book Chapters:

• Kojman, Tamar. “Between Religion and Politics: Constructing an Apolitical Sphere after the 1848–49 German Revolutions.” In Depoliticisation before Neoliberalism. Contesting the Boundaries of the Political in Modern Europe, edited by Adriejan van Veen and Theo Jung (Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming).
• Kojman, Tamar. “‘How Do You Know German?’ Elderly Interviewees’ Impression of the Interviewer and its Effect on Narrative Construction.” [In Hebrew.] In “I Still Have More to Say,” Theory and Practice in Oral History, edited by Sharon Livne and Sharon Kangisser (Jerusalem: Carmel, 2021).

Miscellaneous:

• “The Persistent Ambivalence of German Nationalism,” review of Die Deutschen und Ihre Nation: Geschichte einer Idee, by Andreas Fahrmeir. [In Hebrew.], in: Tabur – Yearbook for European History, Society, Culture and Thought 10 (2020).

Amit Levy is a research fellow at the Koebner Center’s project “In Europe, In Transit: Daily Life of German-Jewish Refugees in Europe, 1933-1939”, where he studies German-Jewish private photography in the context of migration, transit and knowledge production after 1933. He completed his PhD at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (2021) and held postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Oxford, the University of Wisconsin–Madison, the University of Haifa and the Open University of Israel. 

Amit’s award-winning book, A New Orient (2024), explores the history of Zionist Oriental Studies as migrating knowledge from German universities, and the discipline’s role in shaping Arab-Jewish relations in Mandatory Palestine and Israel. The book was published in Hebrew by Magnes Press/Koebner-Minerva Center; an updated English version will be published in December by Brandeis University Press, with the support of the Israel Science Foundation.

He also serves as the Managing Editor of the Franz Rosenzweig Minerva Research Center’s Naharaim: Journal of German-Jewish Literature and Cultural History, published by De Gruyter.

PUBLICATIONS

BOOKS

• A New Orient: From German Scholarship to Middle Eastern Studies in Israel (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2024) (forthcoming. Revised and updated English edition)
• A New Orient: From German Orientalism to Israeli Mizrahanut (Jerusalem: The Hebrew University Magnes Press, 2024) (Hebrew).

PEER-REVIEWED JOURNAL ARTICLES AND BOOK CHAPTERS

• “’Send my regards to those working on the al-Balādhurī manuscript’: The Study of Arabic and Islam in Interwar Jerusalem as Intellectual Common Ground,” in Rachel Mairs, Sarah Irving, Karene Sanchez and Lucia Admiraal (eds.), Colonial Vocabularies: Teaching and Learning Arabic in Europe (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2024; forthcoming).
• “Visualizing Farewell: A Jewish Soldier’s Return to Postwar Germany through Private Photography,” Jewish Culture and History 25, no. 2 (2024): 233–254.
• (co-authored with Hanan Harif) “‘A Complete, Multifaceted Discipline’: The Debate over the History of Jews in Muslim Lands and its Teaching,” in: Uzi Rebhun and Yfaat Weiss (eds.), The History of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem: The Nation State and Higher Education (Jerusalem: The Hebrew University Magnes Press, 2024), pp. 687–718 (Hebrew).
• “Rediscovering the Goldziher Legacy in Jerusalem: Religion, Language, and History in the Making of a Hebrew University,” in: Hans-Jürgen Becker, Kinga Dévényi, Sebastian Günther and Sabine Schmidtke (eds.), Building Bridges: Ignaz Goldziher and His Correspondents. Islamic and Jewish Studies around the Turn of the Twentieth Century, Islamic History and Civilization, Vol. 212 (Leiden: Brill, 2024), pp. 139–164.
• “Conflicting German Orientalism: Zionist Arabists and Arab Scholars, 1926–1938,” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 50, no. 5 (2023): 1112–1131.
• “The Archive as Storyteller: Refractions of German-Jewish Oriental Studies Migration in Personal Archives,” Jahrbuch des Dubnow-Instituts/Dubnow Institute Yearbook XVII  (2018): 425–446.
• “A Man of Contention: Martin Plessner (1900–1973) and His Encounters with the Orient,” Naharaim: Journal of German-Jewish Literature and Cultural History 10, no. 1  (2016): 79–100.
• “'The Sheik': Understanding American Orientalism through Visual and Narrative Differences in Three Decades of Discussion,” Slil: Online Journal for History, Film and Television 10  (2016): 39–57 (Hebrew).
• “‘Ma’alesh, Nistader’: Arabic in the Folklore of the Palmach during the 1940s,” Hayo Haya: Student History Journal 11 (2015): 46–66 (Hebrew).

ARTICLES IN ACADEMIC PUBLICATIONS

• “A Discipline in a Suitcase: The Scientific Nachlass of Josef Horovitz,” in Elisabeth Gallas, Anna Holzer-Kawalko, Caroline Jessen and Yfaat Weiss (eds.), Contested Heritage: Jewish Cultural Property after 1945, (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2020), pp. 117–127.
• “Der wissenschaftliche Nachlass von Josef Horovitz,” in: Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach, Archives of German–Jewish Scholarship: Wissenstransfer und Staatsbildung im Mandatsgebiet Palästina und in Israel (2018) (limited copies).
• “Israel. Orientalist Collections at the National Library of Israel,” Geschichte der Germanistik 49/50 (2016): 147–148.

ACADEMIC ARTICLES IN CATALOGS, MAGAZINES AND BLOGS

• “German Heritage in Word Cards: The Concordance of Classical Arabic Poetry in Jerusalem”, Mimeo: Blog der Doktorandinnen und Doktoranden am Dubnow-Institut.
• “Envisioning a Hebrew University: Ignác Goldziher on the University in Jerusalem”, Mimeo: Blog der Doktorandinnen und Doktoranden am Dubnow-Institut. 
• (co-authored with Tom Eshed) “Elyakim Gotthold Weil”, Ad Acta: The Hebrew University, Jewish Scholars, and the Exile from Europe (Exhibition pamphlet). The National Library of Israel, November–March 2018–2019. 
• “‘There is a need for a native quality of Arabic speaker’: Isaac Shamosh, the First Oriental Lecturer in the School of Oriental Studies, 1936-1937”, The Historical Archive of the Hebrew University Blog, Franz Rosenzweig Minerva Research Center Website.

BOOK REVIEWS

• Eyal Clyne, Orientalism, Zionism and Academic Practice: Middle East and Islam Studies in Israeli Universities (London and New York: Routledge, 2019), in The New East 59 (2020): 207–210 (Hebrew).

 

 

 

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Lukas Meissel is a historian and post doc research fellow at The Richard Koebner Minerva Center for German History at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem with a post-doctoral grant from the Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah, Paris. His post-doc project is called “Photographic Testimonies. An Integrated Visual History of Survival and Resistance”. He wrote his PhD thesis about SS photography in concentration camps at the University of Haifa, Israel, and earned BA and MA degrees in history and contemporary history at the University of Vienna, Austria.

Prior to his studies in Israel, he worked as an archivist in the Jewish Community of Vienna and in various Holocaust studies and education projects. He received fellowships and grants in Israel, the USA, Germany, Austria and France, as well as the Herbert-Steiner-Anerkennungspreis 2015 and the Theodor-Körner-Preis 2021 awards. His research, lectures and teaching focus on Holocaust and Genocide studies/education, visual history, US-Israeli-Austrian relations, and antisemitism. He has published articles in international peer-reviewed journals, an award-winning monograph about perpetrator photography in the Mauthausen concentration camp and edited volumes about Holocaust studies and education.

Selected publications:

Monographs

PhD thesis (publication in preparation)
Beyond the Perpetrators’ Gaze. An Integrated Visual History of Nazi Concentration Camps, p. 401.

Mauthausen im Bild. Fotografien der Lager-SS. Entstehung – Motive – Deutungen (Vienna: edition Mauthausen, 2019), p. 132.
[Mauthausen in Images. Photographs of the Camp-SS. Origin - Motives – Interpretations]

Peer-reviewed articles

Capturing Bolshevism: SS Photographs of Soviet POWs at Concentration Camps. A Case Study, in: S:I.M.O.N. SHOAH: INTERVENTION. METHODS. DOCUMENTATION, vol. 9/2022/No.1, 58-70.

The Innocent Perpetrators: The Portrayal of ‘German Victimhood’ in: Unsere Mütter, Unsere Väter (Generation War) (2013), in: The Journal of Holocaust Research, formerly Dapim, 36:2-3, 2022, 146-163.

Igraszki z symboliką Zagłady. Seria gier komputerowych „Wolfenstein” jako studium przypadku cyfrowych reprezentacji Zagłady, in: Studia i Materialy / Holocaust Studies and Materials vol 17, 2021, 329-357 (with Johannes Breit)
[Playing with Holocaust symbols. The video game franchise Wolfenstein as a case study for digital Holocaust representations.]

The Visual Memory of Mauthausen, in: Contemporary Austrian Studies, vol. 30/2021, A Visual History of Austria (Günter Bischof, ed., Martin Kofler, Hans Petschar, guest ed.), 161-181.

Not “How Was It Possible,” but “Who Made It Possible”: The Topic of Perpetrators in Holocaust Education in Austria, in: Wendy Lower, Lauren Faulkner Rossi (ed.), Lessons and Legacies of the Holocaust XII. New Directions in Holocaust Research and Education (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2017), 406-428.

Peer-reviewed journal volume

zeitgeschichte, volume 49, issue 2 (2022), Fotoalben als Quellen der Zeitgeschichte (ed. with Vida Bakondy, Eva Tropper, Adina Seeger),
therein: SS-Fotoalben als visuelle Leistungsnachweise und Legitimationsberichte, 185-207.
[Volume: Photo Albums as Historical Sources in Contemporary History, article: SS photo albums as visual performance records and legitimizing reports]

Edited volumes

Aufregende Forschung. Zeitgeschichtliche Interventionen von Hans Safrian (Vienna: new academic press, 2022) (with Jutta Fuchshuber).
[Unsettling Research. Contemporary Historical Interventions by Hans Safrian]

Orientierungen, Irritationen. Studienfahrten an Erinnerungsorte der NS-Verbrechen (Vienna: LIT, 2021) (ed. by Verein GEDENKDIENST with Till Hilmar, Olivia Kaiser, Lena Krainz, Laurin Neidhart and Magdalena Rest).
[Orientations, Irritations. Study Trips to Places of Remembrance for National Socialist Crimes]

 

Ohad is interested in the interface between classical Hebrew and Halacha literature and German culture. He studied for his first degree in the Department of German Literature and Talmud at the Hebrew University and his second degree in the Department of the History of Israel at the Hebrew University. He writes his research work on the Halachic Responsa literature in the Weimar Republic - focuses on the appearance of the new woman figure in this literature and its relation to the German literature of the time.

Ohad is a fellow of the MA HONORS PROGRAM 2022/23 of the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel School for Advanced Studies at the Humanities of the Hebrew University. 

He particpated in the Annual Workshop for German Studies in 2022 and 2023 lecturing on 

- “'The Messiah does not come': On Hebrew and German Sources of the Messianic Image in the Work of Heinrich Heine" (2022)

- "Pride and Early Halacha: Gender, Sex and Sexuality in Halachic Literature of the Weimar Republic" (2023;  https://youtu.be/EDnkSXOILuc?si=Moy4vqabgmdEXtmO )