October 5-6, 2009 | ASU Tempe campus

Revival and New Directions?: Jewish Arts in German-Speaking Countries, an international research conference, focused on the revival of Jewish arts in German- speaking countries, and featured leading art historians, cultural historians, writers and theorists from the United States, Germany and Austria.

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Conference presenters

Andreas P. Bechtold studied Catholic theology in Germany and Spain and film at the Filmakademie in Ludwigsburg. He works as a filmmaker and scriptwriter for television and other commercial endeavors and has written several children’s books.  Since 2004, he has been the professor for Time-based Design at the University of Applied Sciences in Konztanz.

Michael Brenner is Professor of Jewish History and Culture at the University of Munich.  His publications include The Renaissance of Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany (1996), After the Holocaust: Rebuilding Jewish Lives in Post-War Germany (1997) and Zionism: A Brief History (2003).  He is co-author and co-editor (with Michael Meyer) of the four-volume German-Jewish History in Modern Times (1997-98) and editor of several other volumes.  He serves as Chairman of the Wissenschaftliche Arbeitsgemeinschaft des Leo Baeck Institute in Deutschland and is a member of the Academic Advisory Committee of the Jewish Museum in Berlin.

Anat Feinberg is Professor of Hebrew and Jewish Literature at the Hochschule fur Jusische Studient in Heidelberg. She has published numerous articles on a range of topics in Jewish literature and is the author of Wiedergutmachung im Programm: Judisches Schicksal im deutchen Nachkriegsdrama [Making Amends as Programme: Jewish Fate in Post-war German Drama] (1998).  She has also published three novels in Hebrew; one was translated into German in 1997.  Her most recent book is Embodied Memory: The Theater of George Tabori (1999).

Eckhart Gillen is an art historian and curator, born in 1947 in Karlsruhe, Germany, who has lived in Berlin since 1972. He studied art history, German and sociology at the University of Heidelberg from 1966-1972 and received his doctorate from the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Heidelberg.  He is currently the curator at Kulturprojekte Berlin and has organized numerous exhibitions and published widely on Russian, American and German art of the 20th century. Among his exhibition catalogs and books are “Amerika–Traum und Depression 1920/40” at the Akademie der Künste, Berlin 1980; German Art from Beckmann to Richter: Images of a Divided Country (1997); “Art of Two Germanys/Cold War Cultures 1945-1989” in L.A., Nuremberg, Berlin (together with Stephanie Barron); “Feindliche Brüder? Der Kalte Krieg und die deutsche Kunst 1945-1989” in Berlin 2009.

Timothy Jackson’s primary interests center on the music of the 19th and 20th centuries, and Schenkerian theory. He is well-known for his work on the music of Richard Strauss, on which he wrote his doctoral dissertation in Music Theory in 1988, at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Since then his interests have branched out from German music to encompass the Russian, Estonian, and Finnish traditions. He authored Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony (Pathétique) for the Cambridge Handbooks Series (1999) and co-edited Bruckner Studies (1997), Sibelius Studies (2001) and Perspectives on Anton Bruckner (2001). With Paul Hawkshaw (Yale), he wrote the composer article on Bruckner for the Revised New Groves Dictionary of Music and Musicians (2001/2004). Currently, he is editing a volume of Richard Strauss Studies, also for Cambridge. Jackson co-edited Sibelius in the Old and New World: Aspects of His Music, Its Interpretaton, and Reception (forthcoming, 2009) with Veijo Murtomäki, Colin Davis and Tomi Mäkela. His research on 20th-century composers such as Schoenberg and Shostakovich, has been published in a wide range of journals and books. Since 2000, Jackson has been actively directing the “Lost Composers” Project, which seeks to revive the music of composers whose work was eclipsed or lost as a result of the Nazi-era cultural policies and the Holocaust.

Marion Kant is a musicologist and dance historian who teaches at the University of Pennsylvania. She holds a doctorate from Humboldt University (1986) and has taught at the Regieinstitut Berlin; Hochschule fuer Musik/Theater Leipzig; the University of Surrey in Guildford; Cambridge University and King’s College London.  She has written extensively on romantic ballet in the 19th century, education through dance in the 19th and 20th centuries, concepts of modern dance in the early 20th century and dance in exile.  Her research project focuses on dance ideologies from 1800-2000. Her publications include: Auf der Frossen Strass: Jean Weidts Erinnerungen (1984); Tanz unterm Hakenkreuz (1996; 2nd ed. 1999), English edition, Hitler’s Dancers: German Modern Dance and the Third Reich (2003); The Cambridge Companion to Ballet (2007) and Giselle, commissioned by the State Opera, Berlin (2001).

Leslie Morris is Associate Professor of German at the University of Minnesota. There she founded the Center for Jewish Studies and served as its director from 2002-2009. She is the author of a book on history and memory in Ingeborg Bachmann’s poetry and co-editor of Contemporary Jewish Writing in Germany with Karen Remmler. She also co-edited Unlikely History: The Changing German-Jewish Symbiosis with Jack Zipes. She has written numerous articles on the poetics of memory; diaspora; Czernowitz; German-Jewish Studies; translation and Jewish text; Jewish body art; sound and acoustic memory. She is currently completing a book titled The Translated Jew: Jewish Writing Beyond the Nation. 

Doron Rabinovici, born in Tel Aviv, has lived in Vienna, Austria since 1964. He studied at the University of Vienna, where he completed his doctorate in 2000 with a dissertation in history on the Viennese Jewish community leadership during the period of National Socialist persecution and extermination. During the time of the Waldheim-Affair his commitment to political issues intensified and he published numerous political essays and articles. In 1999, as a government presence of the extreme right FPÖ party emerged, Rabinovici became a spokesperson for the anti-racist protest movement in Austria. In 1994 he made is literary debut with the short story volume Papirnik. In 2004 Rabinovici was “writer in residence” in Oberlin, Ohio and in 2007 Max Kade writer an Washington University in St. Louis. He works as a writer, essayist and historian. His publications include: Papirnik: Stories (1994); Suche nach M. Roman in zwölf Episoden (1997); Instanzen der Ohnmacht. Wien 1938-1945. Der Weg zum Judenrat (2000); Credo und Credit: Einmischungen. Essays (2001); and Ohnehin. Roman. (2004).

Gavriel Rosenfeld received his doctorate in History from the University of California, Los Angeles and is Associate Professor of History in the Program in Judaic Studies at Fairfield University. His scholarly focuses on 20th century Germany, especially the history and memory of the Third Reich and the Holocaust. He is the author of Munich and Memory: Architecture, Monuments, and the Legacy of the Third Reich (2000); Architektur und Gedächtnis: München und Nationalsozialismus, Strategien des Vergessens (2004); The World Hitler Never Made: Alternate History and the Memory of Nazism (2005) and most recently, Beyond Berlin: Twelve German Cities Confront the Nazi Past (2008).

Lisa Saltzman is Professor of History of Art and Director of the Center for Visual Culture at Bryn Mawr College. She teaches courses in modern and contemporary art and theory. She is the author of Anselm Kiefer and Art after Auschwitz (1999), and Making Memory Matter: Strategies of Remembrance in Contemporary Art. She is also the co-editor, with Eric Rosenberg, of Trauma and Visuality in Modernity.

Israel Yinon is an Israeli born, award-winning conductor who devotes much of his career to rediscovering lost works of composers who died in World War II, or who were forced to flee Nazi Germany. He studied conducting and composition at the Rubin Academy of Music in Tel Aviv (1981-1984) and Jerusalem (1985-1988) and expanded his musical education when he became an assistant to the Israeli conductor and composer Noam Sheriff. Yinon has had an illustrious conducting and recording career with many leading orchestras. His debut CD, the world-premiere recording of the symphonic works of Viktor Ullmann, with the Czech Brno Philharmonic Orchestra, won the coveted German Reviewers’ Recording Prize in 1993. In December 2004, Yinon conducted the concert commemorating the 50th anniversary of Yad Vashem in the Deutsche Oper in Berlin. In February 2009 he conducted the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in the United Kingdom, premiering “Cello Concerto: No. 1” by the late German composer Tilo Medek. The same concert also marked the anniversary of the birthday of Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy whose music was banned by the Nazis.

Conference organizers

  • Volker Benkert, School of Historical, Philosophical & Religious Studies
  • Daniel Gilfillan, School of International Letters & Cultures
  • Naomi Jackson, Herberger Institute for Design & the Arts
  • Claudia Mesch, Herberger Institute for Design & the Arts
  • Hava Tirosh-Samuelson, Director, Center for Jewish Studies

Sponsorship and support

This conference was made free and publicly accessible, thanks to the following: 

sponsors