Jewish Diasporic Homeland(s)
March 3-4, 2025
Katholische Akademie Berlin
Image: Generated 02.2025, ChatGPT
Jewish Diasporic Homeland(s)
March 3-4, 2025
Katholische Akademie Berlin
This workshop focuses on diaspora and homelands in Jewish settings through the works of Jewish philosophers such as Hermann Cohen, Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber, Hannah Arendt, Gershom Scholem and others. Contributors are coming from various disciplines and will think broadly about the theme, including non-geographical homelands such as language, literature, theatre and art as well as memorial culture and ritual practices.
During the workshop, Dana Hollander (Department of Religious Studies, McMasters University) will lead a reading of relevant texts by Hermann Cohen on whose work she has recently published a monograph (Ethics Out of Law).
The workshop takes place as part of a research program entitled Experimenting with tradition: The Life and Afterlife of 20th Century Jewish Intellectual Culture in the Baltic Sea Region. The program is a collaboration between Philosophy and the Study of Religions at the Södertörn University, in cooperation with The Berlin Center for Intellectual Diaspora and The Polish Academy of Sciences. For a short summary of the project see:
Experimenting with tradition – early 20th century East-European Jewish and German dialogues as a source of philosophical modernity – Östersjöstiftelsen (ostersjostiftelsen.se)
Organization
Lena Roos (Södertörn University)
Elad Lapidot (Katholische Akademie Berlin/University of Lille)
Cooperation
Katholische Akademie Berlin in cooperation with Södertörn University and Östersjöstiftelsen, The Foundation for Baltic and East European Studies
Participants
Ulrika Björk (b. 1970) is a senior lecturer in philosophy at Södertörn University in Stockholm. She received her doctorate at Helsinki University in 2009 with a dissertation on Simone de Beauvoir’s philosophical and literary investigations of subjectivity.
Her research interests include phenomenology, existential philosophy, early 20th century Jewish thought, and feminist philosophy. Since 2024 is the head of the research project Experimenting with traditions: The Life and Afterlife of 20th Century Jewish Intellectual Culture in the Baltic Sea Region, funded by The Foundation for Baltic and East European Studies. Her current research within this project engages with Hannah Arendt’s problematization of tradition from the perspective of her Jewish writings.
Joshua Edelman is reader in drama and contemporary performance at the Manchester School of Theatre at the Manchester Metropolitan University. He writes on the intersections between theatre, religious practice, and political activity in the contemporary West. Since the pandemic, he led the pan-European project Religious Communities in the Virtual Age (Recovira) and the UK project British Ritual Innovation under Covid-19 (BRIC-19). He received his PhD in theatre from Trinity College, Dublin in 2010, and has taught at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama and Birkbeck, University of London. He is a member of the Project on European Theatre Systems and is founding co-convener of Performance and Religion Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research. His book Studying European Theatre Audiences will be published by Routledge in 2025, he is the co-editor of Performing Religion in Public (Palgrave, 2013), and his articles have appeared in journals including Performance Research, Amfiteater, Nordic Theatre Studies, Ecumenica and Liturgy.
Amir Engel is a professor at the German department at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is currently also a visiting professor at the Faculty of Theology at Humboldt University in Berlin. He studied philosophy, literature, and culture studies at Hebrew University and completed his Ph.D. in the German studies department at Stanford University. He specializes in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’ German, Jewish, and Christian cultural and intellectual history. His scholarship concerns the relation between aesthetics, modern Western spirituality, and politics. His first book Gershom Scholem: an Intellectual Biography came out in 2017. He also published essays about Hannah Arendt, Paul Celan, Martin Buber, Jacob Taubes, Salomon Maimon, and others. His second book manuscript, temporarily titled The Politics of Spirituality: Jewish Mysticism, Christian Spirit, and the German Nation will be published next year.
Anoush Ganjipour is a permanent researcher on philosophy at the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique (Centre Jean Pépin-École Normale Supérieure, Paris). He is a specialist in Islamic thought and comparative philosophy.
Among his books are Israël, la Palestine et nous (co-authored with Jean-Claude Milner, Cerf, 2025 [forthcoming]), Monothéismes et politique: modernité, sécularisation, émancipation (CNRS Éditions, 2022) and L’ambivalence politique de l’islam: pasteur ou Léviathan? (Seuil, 2021).
Dana Hollander is Associate Professor at the Department of Religious Studies at McMaster University (Hamilton, Ontario, Canada).
She is currently in Berlin while on a research leave from McMaster, and will be a Humboldt Research Fellow at the Humboldt-Universität (Department of Cultural History and Theory) in April–June 2025.
Her research areas are modern Jewish thought, twentieth-century French and German philosophy, and German-Jewish studies. She is the author of Ethics Out of Law: Hermann Cohen on the “Neighbor” (University of Toronto Press, 2021) and Exemplarity and Chosenness. Rosenzweig and Derrida on the Nation of Philosophy (Stanford University Press, 2008) and the translator of Jacob Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul (Stanford University Press, 2004). Website: danahollander.ca
Silvana Kandel Lamdan is a Minerva Postdoctoral Fellow in the Chair of Transcultural History of Judaism at Humboldt University in Berlin. As a historian of ideas, she studies Jewish-Christian intellectual exchange, particularly during the twentieth-century religious renewal in Europe and the Global South. Her doctoral thesis from the University of Haifa examined the Jewish roots of Latin American liberation theology. This exchange served as a crucial site for exploring the boundaries of both Jewish and Christian thought during the turbulent twentieth century, while also providing key insights into the dialogue between Western and postcolonial religious thought.
Malin Norrby a Ph.D. candidate in The Study of Religion at Södertörn university, where she is a participant in the research project Experimenting with Tradition: The Life and Afterlife of 20th Century Jewish Intellectual Culture in the Baltic Sea Region. Her current research interest is Jewish thought as Soviet Jewish Second culture from the Khruschev thaw to the late Soviet era. Malin has previously worked with the research project Traces of Yiddishkeit at Södertörn university.
Libera Pisano is currently an Assistant Researcher at Nova University of Lisbon, supported by the FCT Stimulus of Scientific Employment (Individual Support). She earned her PhD in Theoretical Philosophy from La Sapienza (Rome) in 2014 with a dissertation titled Lo spirito manifesto. Percorsi linguistici nella filosofia hegeliana (ETS, 2016). She has been Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellow at University Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Research Associate at University of Hamburg, and Research Fellow at the Maimonides Centre for Advanced Studies, at the University of Calabria and at the Humboldt University of Berlin.
Her research explores the practical-political role of language, the interplay between exile and identity, and the political-theological dimensions of community in modern German and German-Jewish philosophy. Her forthcoming book, The Exile of Language: German-Jewish Philosophical Challenges to Linguistic Autochthony, will be published by Brill.
Sophie Bäärnhielm Pousette is currently pursuing doctoral studies in philosophy at Södertörns Högskola, Stockholm (Sweden), where she is a participant in the project ‘Experimenting with Tradition: The Life and Afterlife of 20th Century Jewish Intellectual Culture in the Baltic Sea Region’, which examines the encounter between Rabbinic-Hassidic thought and German Enlightenment philosophy. Her research interests include political theology and the interplay between (re)interpretations of Scripture and religious tradition and social and political critique.
Lena Roos is professor of the Study of Religions at Södertörn University, Stockholm. She is one of the scholars in the research project
Experimenting with Traditions. The Life and Afterlife of 20th Century Jewish Intellectual Culture in the Baltic Sea Region.
Her research interests include Jewish history from the Middle Ages to contemporary times but also themes as religion and food, religion and sexuality as well as religion and gardening.
Mati Shemoelof is an Arab-Jewish poet, author, and journalist living in Berlin. His writing includes seven poetry books, theater plays, articles, and a collection of short stories. He received a scholarship from the Berlin Senate to curate a bi-national festival for the Middle East Union: https://middle-east-union.de/en/. His first publication in Germany was the bilingual poetry collection Baghdad | Haifa | Berlin (AphorismA Verlag, 2019), followed by Das kleine Boot in meiner Hand nenn ich Narbe: Gedichte (Parasitenpresse, 2023). In 2024, he was awarded a stipend from the Deutscher Literaturfonds to write his first poetry book in German. His most recent poetry collection, It’s This Happiness, You Wanted Me to Touch, was published in Israel and won the Rabinovitch Grant for the Arts in 2024. In 2025, his first novel will be published in Germany by Palm Art Press Verlag. His artistic site: https://mati-s.com.
Fanny Söderbäck is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Södertörn University and the co-founder and co-director of the Kristeva Circle. She holds a PhD in Philosophy from the New School for Social Research and has held positions at Siena College and DePaul University. She is the author of Revolutionary Time: On Time and Difference in Kristeva and Irigaray (SUNY Press, 2019). She has edited Feminist Readings of Antigone (SUNY Press, 2010) and is a co-editor of the volume Undutiful Daughters: New Directions in Feminist Thought and Practice (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). She is currently working on a project that examines Jewish and Black women’s narratives in the wake of violence, titled Between the Jewish Baltic and the Black Atlantic
.
